For the one who pays in full for an account nobody asked to see.
The ticket is in your hand at the top of the ramp, folded twice, with the barcode going soft where your thumb has been.
There are maybe forty people ahead of you in the queue and the wind is coming straight up the slipway off the water. You've got an overnight bag on one shoulder and the strap has been slipping since the car park. The man in front turns round, and it's somebody you worked with for six years, and his face does the thing faces do when they place you.
You're both pleased. It's genuine. You do the whole exchange about the crossing, the weather, his knee. It is warm, and for about two minutes you have entirely forgotten that you were dreading anything.
Then he asks whether you're still involved with the church.
You hear yourself begin an accurate account. Not a lie, not an evasion. An accurate, chronological, four year account, delivered on a ramp in the wind to a man who is about to board a ferry.
Nobody was charging you for an accurate account, and you've been paying anyway. The Word says that that there is now no condemnation, and the Spirit hasn't asked you to produce your records.
Accuracy Is Not the Same as Honesty
Separate two ideas that have been fused in you for four years, because the fusion is what costs you.
Honesty means not saying anything false. You manage that easily and you always have done. You would rather be uncomfortable than inaccurate, and anybody who has known you for a year would say the same.
Accuracy in this sense means something else. It means completeness, the full chronology, every qualification in its place, nothing important left out. That's what you've been supplying, and it's a far heavier obligation than honesty.
A short true answer is entirely honest. It simply is not complete, and completeness was never what anybody asked for at the top of a ramp in the wind.
You have been holding yourself to a standard that no ordinary conversation uses. Ask a man how his work is going and he says fine, or he says it has been a hard year, and nobody considers either reply dishonest for leaving out eleven months of detail.
Honesty is not completeness, and nobody on that ramp asked for completeness. The written word puts no accounting requirement on you, and the Spirit doesn't require a chronology either.
No Condemnation Means No Audit
Here's the verse, and read it as a statement about records rather than feelings.
There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.Romans 8:1 (KJV)
If no condemnation stands, then no account is being called in. There's no audit running, no file open, nothing being reconciled against what you said four years ago and what happened since.
You've been behaving like a man who expects to be audited. That is why the full account comes out at the first opportunity, in the wind, unprompted by anybody. A man who expects an audit keeps his books ready and produces them at the slightest request.
He also produces them before he is asked, which is the tell. You were not answering his question. You were discharging a suspicion, and the suspicion has been running since long before you met him on that ramp.
Paul said that to believers in Rome who were being weighed constantly by people on every side, and it carries over to a ferry ramp without losing anything at all.
No audit is running, so the books you keep ready are for nobody. The written word closes the account, and the Spirit has never once asked to see it.
What It Costs You Each Time
Count the cost honestly, because you've been treating it as free and it isn't.
Each full account takes five or six minutes. It requires you to go back through the whole of it in your head while you are speaking, which means you live the worst parts again in miniature, standing up, in public, and usually in bad weather.
Nobody would ask that of you. If a friend proposed it as an exercise you would refuse, and you would be right to.
Afterwards you are flat for the rest of the day. You have noticed that and you have attributed it to seeing the person, rather than to the account you gave them about four minutes after the greeting.
It is worth testing which of the two it is. You have seen other old colleagues who never asked, and those days did not end the same way at all.
And the person receiving it didn't ask for five minutes. They asked a social question at a ferry ramp. They then had to stand there being kind while somebody they liked worked through four difficult years at them.
Each full account costs you a day, and nobody ordered it. The written word frees you from producing it, and the Spirit is not served by your exhaustion.
I Am Not Telling You to Be Vague
Be careful, because vagueness isn't the alternative and it would cost you something real.
You're a straight person and I'd not take that off you for anything. The answer I'd want you to have is short and true rather than short and slippery. Something like this: you're not in a congregation at the moment, it's been a hard few years, and you still walk with Christ.
Nor am I telling you that nobody deserves the long version of it. Some people do, and you will know exactly who they are, because they are the ones who sit down before they ask.
What I want off you is the obligation. Not the honesty. Not the years themselves.
He Was Boarding a Ferry
Here's the turn, and it's in the logistics rather than in anything either of you said.
He was about to get on a boat. So were you. Neither of you could have continued that conversation past the ramp even if both of you had wanted to, and he knew that when he asked.
Which tells you what the question actually was. It was a ramp question, sized for a ramp, asked by a man filling ninety seconds in the wind with somebody he was glad to have run into.
You answered it with a document. Not because he asked for one, but because you've been carrying one, folded and ready, in the same hand as the ticket, for four years.
He asked a ninety second question and you had a document ready. The written word says there is no condemnation over you, and the Spirit has not been waiting on your account either.
Declare this over yourself
You are in Christ and Christ is in you, so what follows is not a claim made out of your own authority. It is agreement, said back to God in His own words, while the Holy Spirit carries it. How He orders the rest of it is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His own time.
You are not asking to be let in. Christ has already joined you to Himself, the Spirit carries agreement back to God, and the sequel is His to write.
Say it once, with nothing added on the end.
Nobody was charging me for an accurate account of four years, and I have been paying anyway. The Word says that there is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, and no condemnation means no audit is running against me. The Spirit has never once asked to see my records. I am not producing a document at a ferry ramp. A man I liked asked me a ninety second question in the wind, and I answered him with four years, which cost me the rest of the day and was never ordered by anyone. I hand the whole of it back to God, and the ledger stays shut.
Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.
This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.
Romans 8:1
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.
