Met With Nothing Added

Aharon understood it on a Thursday, and it was not a dramatic understanding, and it has changed the way he walks into rooms.

What he understood is this: from now on, for a while at least, he is going to be met exactly as he is, and there is nothing he can bring in with him.

That sentence needs unpacking, because it sounds obvious and it is not.

For most of his life, Aharon has arrived places with something attached. Not deliberately. He is not a boastful man and he would be embarrassed to be described as one. But there has always been a fact about him that walked into the room slightly ahead of him, and it did some of the work, and he has never once had to think about it because it was simply there, the way a person's height is there.

It was doing more work than he realized.

He found that out by no longer having it. The fact is gone, and now he walks into rooms and he is only the man who walked in, and it is a completely different experience, and it took him about four months to be able to say what was different.

And here is what he actually said, sitting at a table after everybody else had gone, and I think it is one of the truest sentences anybody has said to me about this whole business.

He said: I am going to have to be enough on my own now, and I have never once tested that.

Now hear me before anything else.

I am not going to ask you how it happened. Not once, anywhere on this page. Whether the thing that walked in ahead of you was lost through your doing or somebody else's or nobody's makes no difference to a word of this, and there is no point in this article where you have to give any account of yourself.

And nobody here is going to tell you that this is a good and healthy stripping that God arranged for your growth. I do not know that. Nobody does. That sentence gets said to people in your position constantly and it is a guess dressed up as theology, and it does real damage.

You have your own version. Something used to arrive slightly before you, and now nothing does, and you have four months of walking into rooms and noticing.

The sentence has three clauses and each one closes a door

There is a verse everybody can quote and almost nobody notices the architecture of.

For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God.Ephesians 2:8

Three clauses, and Paul is being extremely careful, in the way a man is careful when he is drafting something that will be read by people looking for a loophole.

By grace are ye saved. The mechanism.

And that not of yourselves. Closing the first door, the obvious one, which is the idea that you contributed the decisive part.

It is the gift of God. Closing it again from the other side, by naming the whole thing as a gift, which is a category that by definition cannot be earned, part-paid, or matched.

And then, because he clearly still was not satisfied, he adds another clause in the next verse: not of works, lest any man should boast. Four attempts in two verses to say the same thing, which tells you how strongly he expected people to resist it.

Why would anybody resist good news? Because being met with nothing added is much harder than it sounds, and every one of us would rather arrive with something.

And now hear what is already true over you. You were always met with nothing added. That is not my encouragement: the written word shuts the door four times in two verses, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a man at an empty table on a Thursday.

And the thing that used to walk in ahead of you was never doing that work. It did work in rooms, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. It never did a single thing here. The word says God is no respecter of persons, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit that you are a child of God, which is a fact about parentage rather than a summary of your position.

Your welcome was never priced

This is the sentence this whole set of messages was built to arrive at, and this is the last article in it.

Nothing about how you are received has ever depended on what is in your hands.

Not in the years when your hands were full. That is the part worth saying at the end. The full years were not a period of higher standing that you have now fallen from. Nothing was ever weighed. There was never a moment, in the whole arrangement, when what you carried was assessed and found sufficient, because assessment was never part of the design, and the four clauses in Ephesians 2 are there precisely to make that impossible to misread.

So you have not lost standing. You have lost a thing that used to walk into rooms with you, and the two of those have never once been connected: the word says by grace, not of yourselves, the gift of God, not of works, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a floor under a man's feet rather than a doctrine he agrees with.

And you are enough on your own, because that was never the question being asked. The word says our sufficiency is of God, and of God is the operative phrase, so the test Aharon is dreading is one that nobody is administering, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a relief rather than a technicality.