The Running Total In My Head

Alma let herself in on Saturday morning with a tray of cinnamon rolls and found Robin at the kitchen table doing arithmetic.

Not bills. Not anything anybody would call arithmetic if they saw it. A spiral notebook, open at the back page, and on that page eight rows of small pencil marks, four upright and one struck through, the way people have counted things since before there was paper.

Alma set the tray down. "What are you working out?"

"Nothing." Robin kept going.

"Robin."

"Where I am," Robin said.

Alma pulled out the other chair. "Where you are with what?"

And Robin heard the question land, and did not answer it for a second, because the answer out loud was going to sound like what it was.

"With God," she said.

She had been running it since spring. A week where she prayed in the mornings and did not snap at anybody and remembered the woman down the road who lives alone: a mark. A week where she did not, and the mornings went, and she was short with everyone in the house by Wednesday: no mark. She never wrote the totals anywhere. She did not have to. She carried them.

"And?" said Alma.

"I'm behind."

Alma laughed. Not unkindly and not for long, and then she reached over and took the pencil out of Robin's hand mid-count, and put it on the windowsill behind her, out of reach, which is a thing only a very old friend can do.

"Behind what?" she said.

Robin opened her mouth. She was going to say behind where I should be. And she could not finish it, because for the first time in eight weeks somebody had asked her to name the thing she was measuring against, and she did not have a name for it. She had a feeling with a running total attached.

You have a back page too. Maybe not in pencil. It runs while you are driving. It updates during the sermon. It is why you can walk out of a good week light and out of a hard one braced, without ever once deciding to, and if somebody took the pen out of your hand and asked you what exactly you are behind on, you would open your mouth in the same way.

There is no arithmetic. There is a verdict.

The tally feels like humility. That is the first thing to say about it, because it is why nobody ever challenges it and why it can run for years inside a serious, praying, generous person.

But look at what it actually assumes. It assumes there is a live account somewhere with your name on it, that it moves, and that where you stand this morning is the current reading. And Scripture does not describe anything of the kind. It describes a verdict.

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.Romans 8:1

Now. Read the word again, because everything is in it. Not eventually. Not once the eight weeks come good. Now, which is a word about the exact morning you are sitting in with a pencil in your hand.

You are standing under a verdict and not on a moving line. I am not softening anything to say that: Romans 8:1 is written in a letter as a settled state of affairs, and the Holy Spirit is what makes a legal sentence land in a kitchen as relief rather than as doctrine you already agreed with.

And now let me retire a word. Debt. It is the picture you have been running, and it is the wrong one, and I am putting it down here and not picking it up again for the rest of this message. Not because debt is a rude word, but because it belongs to a transaction that closed, and a closed thing does not get a running balance. Nobody is keeping the account you have been keeping. There is no second copy of your back page anywhere in the universe.

He says why, and the reason is not you

Here is what God bound Himself to, in the first person, and the middle clause is the one that will do the work.

I, I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins.Isaiah 43:25

For my own sake. Not for your improvement, not in response to a good stretch, not on review. He gives His own reason, and His reason is Himself, which is the only reason in the world that a run of hard weeks cannot move.

You have that sentence standing over you, and it was not issued on the strength of your spring. Isaiah 43:25 is where God says it about God, and His Spirit is the one carrying that written word into the exact place where your counting happens, which is not on a page at all.

And notice what He says He does with the sins: He does not remember them. That is not divine forgetfulness, which would be a strange thing to promise. It is a covenant word. It means He does not bring them up, does not hold them against the arrangement, does not produce them later. The thing you are bracing for is a thing He has bound Himself not to do.

The pencil goes. The walking does not.

Now hear the other half, because a woman who has been counting for eight weeks can put down the pencil and quietly decide that nothing matters, and that is not freedom, it is just a different kind of flat.

The mornings mattered. The woman down the road mattered. Robin's good weeks were not points, and they were also not nothing: they were a person walking with God, which is what she was made for and what she actually wants when nobody is scoring it. What ended was the scoring. What is asked of you did not end, and it never was the thing holding your place.

So say it plainly, and it belongs here in the middle rather than at the end where a disclaimer goes. Christ settled your standing, and that half is finished. Your response is real and it is asked and it goes on being asked. It is simply not what keeps you standing.

Right now, as you read, you are inside an arrangement where the settling is done and the walking is yours, and neither one is pretending to be the other. Romans 8:1 says what your standing is and Isaiah 43:25 says why, and the Holy Spirit is not in the room to check your rows. He is in the room to walk out of it with you.