It is a hardback with a green cover and it lives in the drawer of the little table by her chair.
Bess started it on a New Year, the way people do, and it was never meant to be a nine year project. It was going to be a list. The things she wanted to do better, written down, so that she would actually do them.
She has kept it faithfully.
There are entries in there from every single year since, mostly in January, some in September, one from a Tuesday in June that she does not like to look at.
And in the spring she did something she had never done, which was read it from the front.
It took about forty minutes and she had to keep stopping.
Because the entries do not change.
The same four things, in her own handwriting, nine times over, in slightly different words. Be more patient with him. Pray properly instead of thinking about it. Stop going over that conversation. Be kinder about her.
Nine years. Thirty-odd entries. Four items.
And what she felt, sitting in that chair with the book open on her knees, was not shame exactly and it was not despair. It was tiredness, and under it a very quiet question that she has never said out loud in seventy-one years.
Does any of it get better, or do I just keep writing it down?
She is not a lazy woman. She has raised four people and buried a husband and sat with more dying friends than she can count.
She has simply been in a long private conversation with herself about improvement, since she was sixty-two, and the conversation has produced a book and no visible change, and somewhere in the reading of it she began to suspect that the whole shelf of her religion had quietly become the same thing: a very long list of what she ought to be.
And you may have your own green book. Or a note on a phone. Or no book at all and just the same four sentences arriving every January.
The sentence puts the saving somewhere else entirely
Take this off first, my love, because you have carried it since the spring and it was never yours.
You are not behind on anything. You never were. Scripture puts the whole business of being saved somewhere completely outside your own record of improvement, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the entries in a book, who does the actual changing in a person. Set it down on the table beside you. It is heavy, and it has been on your knees since April.
Now hear the sentence, and hear how firmly it closes one door.
He saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of His mercy.Titus 3:5
Not because of righteous things we had done.
That is not a gentle correction. It is a door closing, and it is closing on the exact thing your green book is full of.
And notice what is on the other side of the sentence. Mercy, which is a word about what somebody else decided to do, at their own cost, about a situation you had no way of improving.
He saved us. Past tense. Done, and done for a reason that has nothing at all to do with the four items.
That has been true of you the entire nine years. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who made it so, and not one of the thirty-odd entries has ever been consulted about it.
Now let me be careful, my love, because there is a ditch on this side of the road.
Nothing here says wanting to be kinder is a fault, or that the four items are silly. They are good things and they came out of a good woman's heart and God is not rolling His eyes at any of them. Be patient with him. Be kinder about her. Those are worth wanting.
And nothing here says the book was a waste of nine years. A woman who writes down what she wants to become is not a woman who has been idle.
The point is only where the saving came from, and it never once came from the page.
Here is the tender part, and Scripture is gentle with it. You have been reading the book as a record of failure and it is not one, and His Spirit has read it differently the whole time.
It is a record of a woman wanting the same four good things for nine years running, which is faithfulness, not failure. The same four items appearing again and again is not proof that nothing moved. It is proof that you have never stopped caring about the same things, which is a rarer thing than you know.
And the changing was never yours to produce. Scripture says He saved us because of His mercy, and His Spirit is the one who does the work in a person over years, and neither of them ever asked for a list.
So here is the turn, my love, and it is the smallest one in this whole message.
Nothing.
There is nothing for you to do with this. That is not a trick and there is no second half of it coming. The saving was done, at somebody else's cost, for a reason that was never the four items, and your part in it is to have it.
And I want to be plain, because you are waiting for the turn and there is not going to be one. This does not end with a better list. There is no final requirement here at all. If you read to the bottom of this page and put the kettle on and never open the green book again, you have received it exactly right.
You are saved and it was mercy that did it. Right now, at seventy-one, in that chair. That is written, and His Spirit is the one who made it true in you, and none of it was ever contingent on you improving first.
I am not going to tell you what the four items will do from here, or whether the same lines turn up next January. That belongs to God and He works in His own way and in His own timing, and I will not promise you a change to make this page finish well. What I can tell you is what is already yours, and what is already yours is a house you have been paying rent on.
Put your hands open. Plant something permanent.
Declare this over yourself
Say these sitting down with your hands open. Nothing here is a task and nothing here has to be earned; it is already yours in Christ, and it was settled before the first entry was ever written. Scripture is what these lines stand on, His Spirit is the one who makes them live, and the outcome is His, answered in His own way and in His own timing.
- Green book, you are a record of a woman wanting good things for nine years and you have never once been a record of failure. In the name of Jesus I set you on the table, because this is news before it is a requirement, and it happened before anything was asked of me.
- Question I have never said out loud in seventy-one years, you have sat under every January and you are being answered this morning. Scripture says He saved us not because of righteous things we had done but because of His mercy, and mercy is a word about what somebody else decided to do.
- Lord, You saved me and Your Spirit is the one who did it, and not one of those thirty entries was ever consulted about it. The house is mine and it always was, and I am opening both hands and putting nothing back in them.
Titus 3:5
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.
