Still Reporting In

Every Thursday at half past four he walks into town, and there is nobody expecting him.

He has done it for six years. He is not aware of it as a decision any more; it is simply what Thursday is. He leaves the house at ten past, walks the long way in past the school, arrives at the square about twenty five to five, and stands near the bench by the war memorial for eight or nine minutes. Then he walks home.

There was a period in his life when he had to be somewhere on a Thursday. There were conditions and he kept them and he kept them scrupulously, and the person who had set them was decent about it, and at the end of the agreed time he was told, in a short and kind conversation, that it was finished.

He said thank you. He went home. And the following Thursday at ten past four he put his coat on.

Now here is what makes this more than a curious story about one man. If you asked him, gently, why he still goes, he would not tell you he thinks the sentence is still running. He knows it is not. He was told plainly. He is not confused about the facts.

What he would tell you, if you got him at the right moment, is something much more human: that going in on Thursday is the only way he knows to be somebody who takes it seriously. That stopping would feel like acting as though it had never happened. That the walking in is not a punishment any more, it is an ongoing statement, and he has nobody to make it to and he makes it anyway.

Six years of Thursdays. And it is not fear. It is a kind of loyalty to his own past, and it is costing him one evening a week and something quieter than that.

That is you at the memorial.

You know the sentence was lifted. You are not confused about it. And you have kept the shape of it anyway, because keeping the shape feels like the honorable thing, and letting it go feels like claiming something you have not been given.

Therefore is the first word, and it is carrying eight chapters

Paul has just spent seven chapters describing, with total honesty, what it is to know the right thing and not do it. That is the run up. And then chapter eight opens like this.

There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus.Romans 8:1

Take the words in the order he wrote them, because he built the sentence carefully.

Therefore. This is a conclusion, and it rests on everything before it. It is not encouragement dropped in from nowhere; it is the verdict at the end of an argument that included the worst of what a person can say about themselves.

Now. Present tense. Not eventually, not on review, not pending good behavior. Now.

No condemnation. Not reduced. Not suspended. None, which is a quantity.

You are living under a verdict of no condemnation right now, and the therefore in front of it means it was reached after everything true about you was taken into account, and I am not being generous where Scripture is not: Romans 8:1 is the sentence itself, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my telling you so who can get that to a man on a Thursday at half past four.

Now let me deal with the loyalty, because that is the actual thing holding you and it deserves a proper answer rather than a brush off. You are not going in on Thursdays out of fear. You are going in because it is the only way you know to say that what happened mattered. That is not neurosis. That is a person with a conscience, and I would rather sit with you than with somebody who never gave it a second thought.

But hear what your Thursdays are actually saying, because I do not think you intend it. They say the verdict is not sufficient to carry the seriousness. They say that between God's finished statement and your own weekly one, yours is doing something His did not.

You have a verdict that carries the whole weight of the matter, and your Thursdays have never been adding to it, which is written into the word therefore rather than into my read on your character, with the Spirit of God able to get a coat off a hook it has hung on for six years.

Here is the thing I would most want to say to you if we were sitting on that bench together. Seriousness is not measured in penalties kept. It is measured in what a person does with their freedom. The most serious man I know about his own past is the one who lives entirely differently now, and he does not observe a single anniversary of it.

This is finished and you are free, and taking the freedom is not a light way of treating what happened, because Scripture says no condemnation now, and the Holy Spirit is the one making that a thing you can walk in rather than a truth you concede.