Not the Works I Brought

She will not arrive anywhere without something in her hands and she has been like that since she was a girl.

You know the type and you may be the type. She does not walk into a house without a dish. She does not accept a lift without filling the tank. If somebody does something for her, there is a period afterwards in which she is looking for the way to make it even, and she is not at peace until she finds one, and everybody around her has stopped arguing with it because arguing is more trouble than accepting.

Now, that is generosity and it is also something else, and the something else is what I want to talk about.

Because she brings things to God too.

When she comes to Him about the matter, she comes with exhibits. Not deliberately, and she would deny it if you put it that way. But there is always a preamble, and the preamble is a short account of what has been different lately: the thing she has been doing consistently, the way she handled a situation last month, the fact that she has kept at it even when it was hard.

None of it is untrue. That is the strange part. She is not fabricating a case. She is doing a genuinely good job of a hard stretch and she is bringing the evidence of it to the door with her, in her hands, because she cannot arrive with nothing.

And what that has quietly done, over about four years, is make her welcome feel proportional to her performance. Good months, she comes freely. Poor months, she does not come, because she has nothing to put on the table.

That is you at the door with a dish.

You've been arriving with exhibits. And they are real, and the effort behind them is real, and the arrangement has left you unable to come at all in the months when your hands are empty.

Paul names what it does not rest on, and then what it does

Here is the sentence, and it is unusually blunt about the mechanism.

Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost.Titus 3:5

Not by works of righteousness which we have done.

Notice something precise about that phrase. Paul does not say: not by the bad things you did. He says works of righteousness, which means the good ones. The actual, real, genuinely righteous things a person has done. He names the best of what you could bring and rules it out as the basis.

That is not an insult to the works. He is not saying they were worthless or dishonest. He is saying they are not the mechanism, which is a different claim entirely, and it is the one you need.

You are saved on a basis that has never included the exhibits, and Paul rules out the good ones by name rather than the bad ones, and I am not making that comfortable: Titus 3:5 says not by works of righteousness which we have done, in writing, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my saying so who can get a dish out of a woman's hands.

And then the other side of the sentence: according to his mercy. According to is a phrase about proportion. It means the saving is measured out in line with His mercy, which means the size of it is set by His supply and not by your evidence.

Think about what that does to your good months and your poor ones. If the basis is His mercy, then a poor month does not reduce the welcome, because the welcome was never being calculated off your side of the ledger at all.

You have a welcome sized by His mercy and not by your recent record, and that is why the empty handed months were never the problem you thought, which is written into the phrase according to rather than into my affection for a generous woman, with the Spirit of God able to open a hand that four years of arriving well has kept full.

Now let me teach the last clause, because it is where the joy is. By the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost. Two things named, and both of them are done to a person rather than by them. Washed. Renewed. There is no verb in that half of the sentence that belongs to you either.

This rests entirely on His side, in the poor months and the good ones alike, because Scripture names the works and rules them out, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that onto a veranda at midday.