Reading About The Field From The Gate

There is a man who walks the road along that field most evenings, and he has done it for eleven years.

He knows the ground better than the people who own the ground. He knows where it takes water in a wet spring and which end the frost sits in and what came off it the year the yields were bad. He has the old aerial photographs. He has walked the whole outside of the fence enough times that the dog knows where to turn.

And every evening he gets to the gate at the top corner, and the gate is a plain steel one on a hinge post with a chain looped over, and he stops there. He puts his hand on the top rail. He looks the length of the field with the light going gold over the far hedge. And then he goes on down the road.

Eleven years, and his boots have never been off the tarmac.

You know why he does it, because you do it, and this is where I turn and say it to you rather than about him.

You have been at this for a long time. You listen to the good preaching. You have got the study Bible with your own writing crowding the margins from about eight years ago. You could stand up at a men's breakfast right now and give twenty solid minutes on what a covenant is, on the fire going between the pieces, on the stones at the river, on the lamp kept burning for somebody else's sake. You are not shallow and nobody has ever accused you of it.

And you have never walked in.

You would not say it like that, but you know exactly what I mean, and your chest went slightly tight when you read it, which is how a man knows a sentence found the right person.

There is a difference between a man who knows the field and a man in the field, and the difference is not information. It is dirt on the boots. You have been reading a deed on the far side of a fence, out loud, in a good voice, for years, and it never once occurred to you that the reason you know that ground so well is that somebody wrote your name on it.

I did not come out here to add to what you know. I came to open the gate and stand out of your way.

Read the sentence that has your name in it

Here is the deed, and I want it read slowly, because it is a line a man can quote for years without ever once receiving it.

And if ye be Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise.Galatians 3:29

Look at the word at the end of the line. Heirs.

Not students of the estate. Not admirers of the estate. Not men who know the drainage of the estate better than the family does. Heirs, which is a word that has nothing whatever to do with how well a man understands a piece of ground, and everything to do with whose he is.

And look at the front of the sentence. The whole weight of the thing sits on four words: if ye be Christ's. That is the only qualification named anywhere in it. Not comprehension. Not readiness. Not eleven years of walking the outside of the fence.

So take it, right where you stand with your hand on the top rail. You are an heir according to promise if you belong to Christ, and you were written into that line before you ever knew it was a line about you. Galatians 3:29 is the deed, not my opinion, and the Holy Spirit is the One turning the words in it from something you can explain into something that has your name on it.

What actually stops a man at a gate

It is never doubt about the field. Let us be honest about that first, because the easy explanations were ruled out years ago.

You believe every bit of it. You would go to the wall for it. If somebody at that breakfast started chipping at the truth of it you would answer them well and you would answer them kindly.

What stops a man at the gate is a quiet conviction that a person ought to arrive qualified. That the field is for people whose house is in order. That there is some standard of settledness or feeling or consistency that other people evidently met and that has stayed just out of reach since roughly 2011, and that the honorable thing, the humble thing, is to keep walking the road until a man is the sort who could go in without it being awkward.

I want to take that apart gently, because it is the most respectable thing in the world and it has kept you out of your own field for eleven years.

Every single picture in this covenant has the same shape. The fire went down the corridor while the man it was promised to lay asleep. The stones came up out of the river on the shoulders of men who felt nothing. The lamp stayed lit in the city on account of somebody long dead. In not one of those scenes did the smaller party arrive qualified. In most of them the smaller party was not even awake.

You have been trying to earn a gate that God has already left standing open, and Scripture puts the whole entrance on Christ's account rather than on yours. That is why the Holy Spirit has kept you circling this ground for eleven years instead of letting you lose interest. That circling was not failure. That was being walked to a gate.

The step, and how small it actually is

Now let me be exact about what I am and am not doing, because you deserve that.

I am not the man who tells you where you stand. Nobody with a pulse has that job. God says where a man stands, and He put it in writing so that it would never depend on somebody's assessment of you at a breakfast table.

So hear where He has already put you. You are Christ's tonight, on the tarmac, in the clothes you are standing in, and belonging is the entire qualification the deed names. That is written in Galatians 3:29, and His Spirit is the reason that sentence never stayed a quotation in your margins.

What I can do is tell you what the deed says, and then get out of the doorway.

And the step is smaller than you think. It is not a formula, and there are no words that work better than other words. It is a man saying one true sentence out loud to the God he has been reading about, in his own voice, without first getting his house in order.

I am Yours, and I am coming in.

That is the whole of it. You have full standing to say that this evening on a public road with a dog looking at you, and it is written into Galatians 3:29 that belonging is the qualification, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes an ordinary sentence out of an ordinary man and makes it the moment he stopped being a spectator.