The Ledger I Have Been Keeping

Marcus has been keeping an account and he has never once written any of it down.

He would not call it that. If you said the word ledger to him he would look at you strangely and then, about a minute later, go quiet.

For nineteen years he was the one you called. He drove the van. He locked up. He led the thing on Wednesdays for six of those years and then handed it over well, which is rarer than it sounds. When somebody needed collecting from a hospital at eleven at night, four different people had his number for that reason.

And then two years ago he ran out.

Nothing happened. There was no falling out and there was nothing to be ashamed of. He simply came to the end of something and stepped back from all of it, and everybody was kind about it, and he has been sitting in the third row doing nothing since.

Here is what has been going on in him for those two years.

He has a sense of a balance.

Nineteen years of deposits, and then two years of nothing going in, and something being drawn down the whole time, and a growing quiet fear about what happens when it runs out. He would not put it in those words and he would deny it if you did.

But he can feel the level dropping.

And there is a shame under that which is worse, because a man who has given nineteen years does not want to find out that he was banking it.

He was at a funeral in the spring and a woman he did not recognize came over.

She told him what he had done for her. Something specific, a lift somewhere and an afternoon and a conversation, and she named the year and it was seventeen years ago.

And Marcus stood there and could not remember one second of it.

Not vaguely. At all. It is not in him anywhere, and it was, by her account, the thing that changed a direction her life was going in.

He drove home and did not put the radio on.

Because the one that mattered was not in the ledger. He never entered it, because he did not think it was anything, and if the best entry he ever made is one he did not record, then the ledger has been measuring the wrong thing for nineteen years.

Now let me ask you what your last entry was.

Because if this is you, you know the shape of your account, and you know roughly when the deposits stopped, and there is a number in your head that you have never said to anybody.

Granted before time began

Paul is old, in prison, near the end, writing to a young man who is frightened. And he tells him what the calling rests on.

Who has saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to His own purpose and grace which was granted us in Christ Jesus from all eternity.2 Timothy 1:9

Take that sentence apart slowly, because it is doing something specific.

Not according to our works. That is not a warning against boasting. Paul is telling a tired man what the calling is anchored in, and he anchors it by naming what it is not anchored in.

According to His own purpose and grace. His purpose. His grace. Both possessive, both His.

Granted us in Christ Jesus from all eternity. And this is the line that undoes the ledger completely. The grace was granted before there was time to grant it in. Not at your conversion. Not on the Wednesday you started leading. Before there was a first day.

A grant made before you existed cannot have been made in response to anything you did, and it cannot be drawn down by anything you stop doing.

So hear this said over you, sitting in a car outside your own house with the radio off. There is no balance in you that is running low, because nothing was ever deposited by you in the first place, and the account was opened before the world was. That is written in Paul's own words to a frightened man, and it is the Holy Spirit who is called the guarantee of our inheritance, and a guarantee is something God puts down Himself, never something you are holding.

Now let me be gentle about the nineteen years, because I am not calling them nothing.

They were real and they mattered and some of them cost you a great deal, and God is not indifferent to a man who drives a van at eleven at night. The New Testament is full of God noticing exactly that sort of thing, and it says plainly that He is not unjust so as to forget your work and the love you have shown toward His name.

He remembers it. That is not the question.

The question is what it was ever for, and it was never for this.

You have been treating your service as the thing that keeps you in, and so the moment you had nothing left to give, you started calculating how long you could last. That is what a man does when he thinks he is paying rent.

You have not been paying rent. You have been living in your Father's house and quietly leaving money on the table on the way past for nineteen years, and He has been letting you, because He is kind and because some of it did real good, and none of it ever bought you a single day of standing.

And notice what the funeral told you. The entry that mattered most was one you never recorded, and the reason you never recorded it is that you did nothing at all: you gave somebody a lift and had an ordinary afternoon. A ledger cannot see that. Whatever God is actually doing in your life, your accounting method has never once been able to detect it.

The written word says it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure, which puts even the wanting on His side of the page. And the Spirit of God is the one who bears witness with your spirit that you are a child of God, and a child is not a contractor and does not have an account.

That is the whole of what this tradition has ever had to say on this subject. Not that you are useful. That He chose, and He keeps, and the keeping is not subcontracted to you on the weeks you are empty.