Come Now and Let Us Reason

Before anything: it is still lit in you.

I know because of the six years. Nobody keeps apologizing for six years about a relationship they have written off. You would have stopped in the second year if the thing were dead.

He is forty-seven and his confession has a shape, and the shape is a cloud.

Lord, forgive me for the things I have done wrong. Lord, I know I have not been what I should be. Lord, cleanse me from anything that is between us.

All of it true. All of it sincere. None of it about anything in particular.

And there is one thing in particular. It has a date, and a name, and about four minutes attached to it, and it happened when he was forty-one, and he has never once brought it to God by its own name.

He has brought it wrapped. Every one of those cloudy sentences has been carrying it, the way you carry something through a customs hall inside another bag, and he knows it, which is the part that has been wearing him down. He is not a man who does not know what he is doing.

So six years of general sorrow have produced a general guilt that goes nowhere, because a fog cannot be dealt with. You cannot forgive a fog. There is nothing there to take.

The invitation and the tone of it

God says something in the first chapter of Isaiah, and I want you to hear the tone before you hear the content.

Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.Isaiah 1:18

Come now, and let us reason together.

That is an invitation to sit down and talk about it plainly. It is the language of two parties putting a matter on the table between them, and the party who issues it is the one who was wronged.

And notice He names a color. Scarlet. He is not being vague either. God does not say though there be things or whatever may have occurred; He names the worst grade of it, out loud, without flinching, and then says what He does with that grade specifically.

He is more willing to be specific about your four minutes than you are.

You are being invited to put an actual thing on an actual table, and the One inviting you already knows its color. That is not me pressing you toward something painful for its own sake; Isaiah 1:18 is an invitation to reason it out with the injured party, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it and lays it beside a man who has been declaring nothing at customs for six years.

Why the fog stays

Now let me be honest about the mechanism, because you already suspect it and it is worth having said out loud.

A general confession produces general absolution, and general absolution has nothing to attach to. Forgiveness has to land on something. It is like a bandage: it needs a wound with edges. Apply it to a whole body and it holds nowhere.

So you have been receiving, for six years, a forgiveness that is real and that cannot find the place it is for, because you have not shown Him the place. And He knows the place. That is the strange part. He is not waiting for information.

The naming was never for His benefit.

You have been withholding a location from Someone who already has the coordinates. The written word invites the plain conversation and names the color itself, and the Holy Spirit is not learning anything new when a man finally says the sentence.

And I want to take one fear off you before you get there. Naming it will not make it worse. It cannot. The specific thing is not more forgiven when named and less forgiven when hidden; what changes is whether you can receive it, because a man cannot receive on behalf of a fog either.

You are not going to shock a God who named scarlet before you opened your mouth. Scripture puts the worst grade in His own vocabulary and the invitation in His own voice, and the Holy Spirit has kept an ember in a man through six years of carrying something through in another bag.