Author and Finisher

The word he uses to himself is owe, and he has used it for so long that he no longer hears it.

He owes God a good year. He owes Him better attention than he has been giving. He owes it to Him to have been further along than this by fifty-seven. When something good happens he is grateful in a way that has a wince in it, because gratitude for him is what you feel when the interest is waived for a month.

He is fifty-seven, and if you asked him to date the arrangement he could not, because there was never a day it began. It was simply the shape of the thing from early on: something enormous had been given to him, and a man who has been given something enormous is a man who owes.

And what that has produced over thirty-odd years is a life of servicing.

He has never enjoyed it. That is the flat truth, and it is not a complaint, because he does not think enjoyment was ever on offer. He has been faithful, thoroughly and unspectacularly, and every single thing he has done has been a payment against a principal that never comes down, and lately he cannot even remember what it would feel like for any of this to be a gift.

The dryness he has now is not a crisis. It is what happens to a man in year thirty of servicing something.

Two words at both ends

Hebrews puts two words on Jesus, and they are the two ends of the thing you have been carrying in the middle of.

Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith.Hebrews 12:2

Author. The one who began it. Not the one who offered it to you to begin.

Finisher. The one who completes it. Not the one waiting to see whether you manage.

And notice that between those two words there is no third role mentioned. There is no clause about the servicer, the maintainer, the one who keeps up the payments in the middle. Hebrews describes your faith as something with Jesus at the start of it and Jesus at the end of it, and it does not put anybody else in the sentence at all.

Which means the account you have been servicing for thirty years does not exist. Not that it has been paid off, and not that it has been forgiven. It was never opened.

You are inside something that has Christ at both ends and no debtor anywhere in it. That is not me offering you relief you have not earned; Hebrews 12:2 names Him author and finisher and leaves no middle role, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes two words and lays them over thirty years of payments.

Where the arrangement came from

Now let me say where it came from, because you have never once examined it and it did not come from Scripture.

It came from a decent instinct in a serious man. Something enormous was given. And a serious man, receiving something enormous, reaches immediately for the only category he has for that, which is obligation, because in every other part of life a large gift creates one.

That is how the world works and it is not wrong there. It is simply not how this works, and nobody told you, and by the time the assumption had set it was invisible.

And the cost of it has been the whole of the enjoyment. That is what a debt does to a thing; it converts it. The same actions, done as payment rather than as response, produce a man who is faithful and cannot remember what any of it was for.

You have been converting a gift into an obligation for thirty years, and the conversion was never authorized. The written word puts Christ at the beginning and the end and describes no debtor between them, and the Holy Spirit is not the collections department of an account that God never opened.

And the guardrail, because this is the last thing on the last page of this site's landing category. I am not giving you a way to enjoy it more. That would become a payment by Thursday, and you would service that too, because that is what thirty years does to a man.

You are not behind on anything and the next dry year will not be arrears. Scripture gives the authoring and the finishing both to Him, and the Holy Spirit has been the one carrying a man through three decades in which he thought he was paying.