They Told Me There Were No Conditions

Dale came over about the truck.

That was the reason he gave at the door, and for the first half hour it was even true. The fuel pump. The man out on the county road who would do it for parts and a favor. Whether it was worth doing at all on a truck with that many miles on it.

Then the talk ran out the way talk runs out in a front room in the late afternoon, when the sun comes in low across the carpet and nobody has thought to turn a lamp on yet. Two mugs going cold on the low table. A Bible sitting at an angle on the arm of the chair, because it had been open since before Dale knocked.

Dale looked at the carpet for a while. Then he said, "Can I say something and you not think less of me."

"You can say anything."

"Six years," Dale said. "Six years I have sat in a good church with good people, and every few weeks somebody tells me from the front that there are no conditions. Nothing is asked of you. It is all free, all of it, end of story. And I say amen. Everybody says amen. I say it louder than most."

He put his hand flat on the open page, the way a man does right before he says the thing he actually drove over to say.

"But I read this book every morning of my life. And it does not say that. It says if. It says keep. It says do. It says walk in them. It says it on nearly every page I turn, and I am not clever enough to make those two sentences into one sentence, so I quit trying about four years ago. Now I just say amen with everybody else and drive home."

He stopped.

"So I have been agreeing out loud with something I do not believe. For six years. What does that make me."

His friend did not answer that last question, which was the kindest thing anybody could have done with it. He reached over instead, took the Bible off the chair arm, turned it around so it faced Dale rather than himself, and set it down on the table between the two cold mugs.

"Read me the part you keep getting stuck on," he said. "Out loud. I want to hear it in your voice."

That is the whole of it. No argument, no clever answer, no third position between the two sentences. Just a man being handed the page and told to read it out loud in a front room with the light going amber, because in six years nobody had ever once done that with him.

And you know the inside of that feeling. Somebody handed you a sentence about God with no conditions in it whatsoever, and you nodded, because who wants to be the one raising a hand in a warm room. Then you went home to a book that plainly asks for something, and the gap between the two has been sitting in your chest ever since, and you have been calling the gap your own fault.

Nobody ever read it to you

Let me name the weight first, because it is a real one and it almost never gets said in a room where everybody is being encouraged.

The sentence that there are no conditions at all was almost certainly built to protect somebody. It was aimed at the scorecard, at the exhausting business of earning a place that was never for sale, and the aim was good. But it was built too wide. And a sentence built too wide leaves an honest man agreeing with his mouth while his eyes disagree, every morning, for years, in private.

So here is the ground, and it is not a note at the bottom of the page. This covenant has two halves. One half is God's own oath, and that half is settled: sworn, finished, holding without any help from you. The other half is your response, and it is real, it is asked for by name, and it is not the thing holding the whole arrangement up. Everything else in this message is those two sentences with the detail put back in.

Then he took the Book of the Covenant and read it in the hearing of the people. And they said, "All that the LORD has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient."Exodus 24:7

Read what actually happens in that verse. The terms get read out loud, in front of everybody, before anyone agrees to a word of them. That is the first mercy in the whole arrangement and hardly anybody notices it is in there.

You are not a man who skipped the fine print. You are a man nobody ever read the sheet to, and Exodus 24:7 puts you in front of a God who has the document read aloud in the hearing of the people because He has no interest whatsoever in your agreeing to something you have not heard. The Holy Spirit is doing that same reading right now, in your own front room, at the pace you actually read at.

The half He swore to, in His own words

Take the settled half first, because it is His, and because no man can respond to something he cannot name.

Not a general sense that God means well. That has been in your hands for years and it has not held. Specific sentences, in the first person, out of His own mouth, with no if anywhere in them:

And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.Ezekiel 36:26 and 27

Count the I wills. And then look hard at the last one, because it is the exact thing Dale could not get his two sentences to do. God does not only ask for the walking. He undertakes to cause it.

You have a heart He committed Himself to replacing and a Spirit He committed Himself to placing inside a person, and neither of those is your project or your performance. Ezekiel 36:27 is the line where the covenant stops being a notice posted on a wall and starts being something alive inside the one being asked, and the Holy Spirit named in that verse is the same Spirit at work in you while your eyes cross the words.

And the half that is asked is real

Now the other side, and this is not going to get shrunk to make you comfortable.

Something is asked. Walk with Him. Keep His word. Love the people He has set around you. Answer Him when He speaks. Those are terms, they are not decoration, and anyone who tells a grown man that nothing at all is asked has handed him half a document and called it kindness.

I am not going to number them for you either. The moment a covenant becomes a list a man can be graded against, it has quietly turned into the very thing he was afraid of, and there has been enough of that already.

But notice what kind of thing they are. They are not the price. The price was settled outside a city wall by Somebody else, and no installment of yours is outstanding on it. They are the shape of the life, the way working a plot of ground is the shape of owning one rather than the rent on it.

For this commandment that I command you today is not too hard for you, neither is it far off. But the word is very near you. It is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it.Deuteronomy 30:11 and 14

You have the word near you, in your mouth and in your heart, and Deuteronomy 30:14 says plainly why it was put there: so that the doing would be possible. That is not a standard held over your head. That is a term that arrived carrying its own supply, and the Spirit breathes on it every single time you say it out loud instead of only thinking it.