Forty Years On My Side Of It

Ray Hollis worked the Dunmore place for forty years, and in forty years he was never once late.

He hung the gate the first spring he took it on and rehung it twice after, because a gate that drags tells you exactly what a man thinks of the ground behind it. He kept the fence line clear. When the well went bad he trucked water for eleven weeks rather than knock on a door and ask.

The agreement lived in a manila envelope in the bottom drawer of the kitchen desk, under the seed catalogs and a box of fuses.

He never opened it. Not once in forty years.

He would have told you it was respect. Old Man Dunmore had shaken his hand out in that yard with the dust still hanging, and a fellow who goes home and reads the paper after a handshake like that is calling the other man a liar.

The truth sat lower down. Ray grew up watching his father get to the end of a thing and find out there was a page nobody had ever read to him. So he decided early, the way a boy decides, that the safest way to hold an agreement is to keep your own half so clean nobody ever has cause to bring the other half out.

Then one evening in October, Dunmore's boy Web drove out and leaned on the gate beside him. The dogs were working the last of the ewes across the yard, and the two of them stood there laughing about the heifer that had gotten into the corn, the light coming low and gold across the stubble.

Then Web said, "Dad always wondered whether you ever read what he put in there for you."

Ray said he never had.

So Web told him. In that envelope the owner had bound himself to carry the taxes, to rebuild the barn if fire ever took it, and to see the place change hands with the Hollis family named in it and their standing on that ground untouched.

Ray stood with his hand flat on the top rail and did the arithmetic he did not want to do. The barn roof had let water since the year his daughter started school. He had patched it eleven times with his own tin on his own Saturdays, and it had never been his to patch. It had sat in the other man's column the whole time, four feet from the coffee pot, in a drawer he could have opened any morning of any one of those forty years.

He was not in default. He never had been. He had simply never read the other side.

And you know that drawer. Maybe not that one, but you know one like it.

You have kept your half of something for years, careful the way a person is careful who has never quite believed anybody is careful back. But if somebody stopped you at the gate this evening and asked you to name one thing God actually committed Himself to, in His own words, you would reach for a warm general feeling that He is good and come up holding air.

Not because you were told not to look. Because nobody ever laid it open in front of you, and after enough years a closed envelope starts to feel like good manners.

Come stand at the gate a minute. Somebody is going to read you the other column.

The column you never read

A covenant has two columns. That is not a technicality, it is the shape of the thing itself. One column holds what God bound Himself to. The other holds what is asked of the people He bound Himself to. Both columns have writing on them. Anybody who tells you your side of the page is blank has not read it, and anybody who tells you the page is a bill has not read it either.

Most people can recite their own column half asleep. Show up. Tell the truth. Forgive fast. Pray on the mornings you would rather sleep.

So here is a sentence out of the other column, and it is God talking about His own signature.

My covenant will I not break, nor alter the thing that is gone out of my lips.Psalm 89:34

Read what He actually says there. He does not say He tries. He says He does not alter it. Not amend it, not revise it, not reissue it with a line added in smaller print along the bottom. It went out of His lips and that finished it.

So take this before we go one step further, and take it standing up. You are not the thing holding this agreement together. That is not my opinion offered kindly; Psalm 89:34 is God's own testimony about His own signature, and the Holy Spirit brought you to that clause tonight to set it down under your boots where it has belonged the whole time.

Ray was not in default. That is the part people miss about him. His column was immaculate. What he lacked was not obedience, it was a reading, and the two are not the same lack at all.

Which half is settled, and which half is yours

Say it plainly, because guessing at this is what wears a person down to the frame. God's half is settled. It was settled by oath long before your first breath, and nothing done last week moved it a quarter inch in either direction. Your half is not settled and was never meant to be. Your half is live. It is real, it is asked, and it is response.

Those are two different kinds of thing. One is ground. The other is walking.

Wherein God, willing more abundantly to shew unto the heirs of promise the immutability of his counsel, confirmed it by an oath: That by two immutable things, in which it was impossible for God to lie, we might have a strong consolation, who have fled for refuge to lay hold upon the hope set before us.Hebrews 6:17-18

He added an oath to a promise He had already made. He did not need to. He did it for the heirs, because He knew what people do with a promise from a Person they cannot see across the table.

Which is why the settled half is settled over you tonight, while your half is still half done. You have a strong consolation, in the exact wording of Hebrews 6:18, and the Spirit is not standing back waiting for your column to come clean before He hands it over. He hands it over as ground, and ground is for standing on, never for earning.

Anything settled by an oath cannot be improved by a good performance, and it cannot be endangered by your worst February either. That is what settled means. It is a hard word and it is meant to be.

What is actually asked of you

Now the other column, and I am not going to soften it into nothing, because a covenant with nothing asked of anybody is not a covenant, it is a rumor.

Moses puts both columns in a single breath.

Know therefore that the LORD thy God, he is God, the faithful God, which keepeth covenant and mercy with them that love him and keep his commandments to a thousand generations.Deuteronomy 7:9

There they are, side by side. He keeps covenant and mercy: that is His column. Love Him, keep His commandments: that is ours. And notice which side of that verse carries the thousand generations. The reach sits on His side of the comma, every time.

So put the pencil down, because you were never being scored on this page. Deuteronomy 7:9 does not say He keeps covenant with the ones who tallied well; it says He is the faithful God who keeps covenant, and the Holy Spirit is at work inside you producing the very love that verse asks for, which is why your response has never been the thing at risk.

Hear both halves of that and do not drop either one. What a person does matters. It matters the way a son's work on his father's place matters, which is enormously, and which is still not the same thing as the deed. The work is real. The work is asked. The work is not what makes the ground his.