Working For It The Way I Worked For His

He was forty four before anybody said it to him, and it was his own daughter, and she was not trying to be profound.

She said, you do the same thing with God that you did with grandpa.

He asked what she meant and she could not really explain it. She said something about how he talks about doing enough, and how he never sits down at his own table until everybody else has, and how he always seems to be one job short of being allowed to rest.

He thought about it for a fortnight and then he understood it completely.

His father was a good man who ran a business and expected results, and love in that house came through the work, and a boy learned to run toward an approval that receded by exactly the distance he covered. And when he came to God at twenty six, he brought his legs with him.

So he has served hard for eighteen years. He is genuinely useful. And he has never once, in all that time, sat still in front of God, because sitting still is what a man does after he has arrived and he has never arrived at anything.

If you learned to run in a house like that, come and sit at this table. Nobody's father is going to be put on trial here.

The legs came with you

Let us describe the transfer accurately, because naming it is most of what needs doing.

A child works out how love moves in the house he is in, and then he does the thing that works. That is not weakness, it is intelligence, and it kept a boy connected to a father he loved. And a system learned that early does not present itself as a belief. It presents itself as the way things are.

So the running came to God as furniture rather than as doctrine, and furniture is very hard to see.

You are not required to run toward the Father. Nothing about how love worked in that house is how it works with Him, and no amount of service has ever moved His disposition toward you. I am not saying it to soften anything about your service. The written word says he hath made us accepted in the beloved (Ephesians 1:6), which locates the acceptance in Christ and finishes it there, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that hold in a man who has never sat down at his own table.

The one who ran in that story

Here is what changed this for me, and it is not a suggestion that you serve less.

Everybody knows the story of the son who came home. What most people carry from it is the speech he had prepared, and the ring, and the older brother in the field. But look at the verse where the father first appears.

But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.Luke 15:20

The father ran. In that culture, an older man did not run, and everybody hearing the story would have felt the indignity of it, and Jesus put it in on purpose.

And notice the order. He ran before the speech. The son had a rehearsed apology in his mouth and never got to finish it, because the running had already happened while he was still a great way off.

You are not the one doing the running in this arrangement, and the Word has the Father covering the distance first. That is written into the order of the verse itself, and the Holy Spirit sets that down in front of a man who has been running since he was a boy.

Keep serving, and stop paying

Something has to be said carefully, because by Sunday this could turn into a man giving up the work, and the work is not the problem.

Serve. You are good at it and people are genuinely helped and none of that is being taken away. What comes off is only the invoice: the quiet sense that the service is buying something, and that stopping would cost you standing.

You have your standing already and the service is not paying for it, and it never was. Scripture says now are we the sons of God (1 John 3:2), where now is the word that settles the timing and leaves nothing outstanding, and the Holy Spirit, not the wording, is the one who has held that over eighteen years of a man trying to earn what he had on the first day.

And if this has cost more than anybody at this table knows, if sleep has gone, if the evenings have started to frighten, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.