Three Months From Ready

He says it in the kitchen doorway, most mornings, without noticing he is saying it.

Not out loud. It is more of a settling, the way a man leans on the frame with the mug in both hands while the coffee maker finishes its last gasp and the window over the sink goes from gray to almost gold. His wife is not up yet. The dog has been out and is back in and is already asleep again by the stove. And somewhere in the four or five minutes he stands there, the thought crosses that he ought to get right with God, and right behind it comes the second thought, which is the one that has been doing the actual work for eleven years.

Not yet. Give it three months.

The three months always have a reason attached and the reason is always real. There is the stretch at work that ends in March. There is the thing with his father's estate that has to be finished first. There was the year he was drinking more than he wanted to and he was not about to walk into anything with that going on, and then there was the year after he stopped, when he decided he should let it hold for a while before he went making promises. Every one of those was true. Not one of them was an excuse in the way people mean the word. He is not a man who dodges things. He replaced his neighbor's fence post in February for nothing and did not mention it to anybody.

But he has been three months out since he was thirty three, and he is forty four now, and if you laid all the three months end to end you would have eleven years of a man standing in a doorway at dawn intending to begin.

Here is the part he has never said to another human being. He has stopped wanting the three months to end.

They are safe. As long as he is three months out, he is a man on his way, and a man on his way is a decent thing to be. The moment the three months run out he becomes a man who showed up as he actually is, and he has a fairly clear idea of what he actually is, and he does not think it will hold up. So the delay quit being a delay somewhere around year five and became a kind of shelter, and he has been living in it, and it is warm in there, and he pays for it every single morning at about ten past six.

If you know that doorway, I have got something for you and it is not a push. I am not going to tell you to stop stalling and get serious. That is what you have been telling yourself for eleven years and it has not moved you an inch, because the problem was never your resolve. The problem is that you think the meeting has not happened yet. You were reconciled at a time you did not pick and could not postpone. That is not my line. It is written in Colossians 1:21, and the Spirit did not walk you into this paragraph to leave it theoretical.

The Tense Paul Used

Paul is writing to a church in a town he has never visited, and he says a thing about them that is so blunt it is almost rude, and then he does something with the verb.

And you, that were sometime alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now hath he reconciled,Colossians 1:21

Look at where the alienation sits. It is in the past. Were alienated. Were enemies. And look at where the reconciling sits. Hath reconciled. Done. Complete. Behind them.

Now look at when it happened relative to their condition, because that is the whole thing. It does not say: you cleaned yourselves up and then He reconciled you. It says you were alienated and enemies in your mind, and now He has reconciled you. The reconciling landed on people who were still standing in the enemy column. It did not wait for the column to change. It changed the column.

Enemies in your mind is the phrase I want you to sit with for a second, because it is not describing a man out committing atrocities. It is describing the inside of a head. It is the low continuous conviction that God is somebody you are on bad terms with and will have to square up with eventually. That is the condition. And Paul says: while that was going on in you, He finished it.

You have a standing that was settled without your calendar being consulted. The Holy Spirit does not argue with what is written in Colossians 1:21. He repeats it, at ten past six, in a doorway, until a man hears it.

What the Three Months Were Actually For

I want to be careful here, because there is a way to hear this that ruins it.

I am not telling you that change does not matter, that the drinking year did not matter, that what you do with your Tuesdays is beside the point. It matters enormously. God is not indifferent to your life and neither are you, and the changing He does in a man is one of the best things that happens on this earth. If anybody ever tells you God has no interest in what you become, they have handed you half a gospel and kept the good half.

What I am telling you is which one is the gate.

The three months were never the price of admission, because there is no admission, because you are already in. The claim was made first. He did not look down the years, see the version of you that finally got the estate sorted and the drinking behind him and the temper mostly handled, and decide that man was worth reconciling. He reconciled the man in the doorway. The one with the mug. The one who was, in his own mind and by his own account, an enemy.

Nothing about you brought this on. That is not an insult, it is the only reason it is durable. A claim you qualified for is a claim you can un-qualify for, and you know exactly how fast you could do that. A claim He made first, out of Himself, while you were still in the enemy column, does not have a clause in it that you have the power to trip.

So the changing still comes. It just comes from inside the house instead of on the step. It comes as a son doing his father's work, not as a man auditioning at the door.

This is yours this morning, and not one of the eleven years was a payment toward it. Paul put the tense in writing at Colossians 1:21, and the Spirit has been holding you to it every time you tried to move the date.