The Habit You Have Not Beaten

He always does it on the first, and he always does it the same way.

He wraps it in the empty cereal packet, folds the packet over twice, and pushes it down under the other rubbish so that fishing it back out would mean putting his hand into last night's dinner. Then he takes the whole bag out to the wheelie bin in the dark, in his slippers, because doing it in the morning gives the night too long to talk him round.

Rob has done that on the first of the month for nineteen months.

Somewhere around the eleventh it comes back. Sometimes the fourteenth. Once, gloriously, the twenty-third, and he remembers that month the way other people remember a holiday.

He is not going to be dramatic about it. Plenty of people carry worse and nobody has been hurt. It is a small, stupid, private thing and it has hold of him, and he has stopped predicting when it will stop.

But that is not actually what this is about.

Here is what it is about. There is a list of things Rob would ask God for, if he were somebody else. His daughter, mostly. Her flat, her job, the way she goes quiet on the phone. His back, which is worse this year. Work that does not finish him by Thursday.

He does not ask for any of it.

Not because he doubts God can do things. He watched his own father get well when nobody expected it. It is that when he starts to pray for his daughter, the bin comes up. The cereal packet comes up. Nineteen firsts of the month come up, and the whole thing feels like walking up to a counter to ask a favor with something unpaid on the account, and so he says a short general prayer about being thankful and goes to bed.

He has not decided this. Nobody decides this. It just settled in.

And you may know the shape of it exactly, whatever your own version is. There is something you have not beaten, and slowly, without a single conscious choice, it has become the reason you do not ask for anything.

Nobody has ever shown you what you are actually at the table on. So look at a king, and a cart sent out to a place nobody visits, and a man who had no idea any of this was coming.

The man they fetched from nowhere

Years after the old royal house fell, the new king asked a question at court that nobody had expected, and it was not the question a new king usually asks about the family he replaced.

And David said, Is there yet any that is left of the house of Saul, that I may shew him kindness for Jonathan's sake?2 Samuel 9:1

For Jonathan's sake. Not: is there anyone left who deserves better. Not: is there anyone who has behaved well since. He was keeping an oath he had cut years before with a friend, and the friend was dead, and the oath was not.

They found one. A man in his thirties living in a settlement at the far edge of nowhere, in someone else's house, crippled in both feet since he was five years old, when a nurse ran with him and fell. He had been out of the story so long that the search had to go through a former servant to locate him at all.

They sent for him. Not a message, a cart, and he came the whole way to the palace already knowing exactly how these things usually go for the last man of a fallen house.

And he was given his grandfather's land back, a household to work it, and a permanent place at the king's own table, and the account says he ate there continually, as one of the king's sons.

You are held inside a kindness that was arranged between two other people before you had a record to be ashamed of, and it was never a response to your run of form. I am not being generous with the facts here. 2 Samuel 9:1 has the whole thing turning on the words for Jonathan's sake, and the Holy Spirit is the One taking a promise kept in an old court and pressing it down into a kitchen at half past eleven at night.

Why the kindness came, and who it came for

Notice what never comes up in that story. Nobody asks the man from Lo-debar what he has been doing with himself. Nobody asks whether he is likely to be a credit to the household. His feet are not a subject of discussion at any point. The single reason he is at that table is a name that is not his, and everybody in the room knows it, and it is not held over him.

That is what covenant kindness is. It arrives for somebody else's sake, and it arrives whole.

Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy GhostTitus 3:5

Read that first clause slowly, because it is doing something enormous and it does it in eight words. Not by works of righteousness which we have done. That is not a discount on a price. It is the removal of the whole basis you have been quietly using.

You have been keeping a ledger nobody is reading, and there is no counter, no account and nothing unpaid standing between you and asking out loud tonight. Titus 3:5 puts it on His mercy, and the Spirit is the One doing the renewing there, which is a job description that was never handed to you and never will be.

Nobody at that table got there on their record

Here is the part that keeps a person from feeling like a charity case, and it matters, so take it slowly.

The king's own sons ate at that table too. They were not there on merit either. Nobody sits down in a king's dining hall because of a good quarter; they sit down because of who they belong to. The man fetched from nowhere was eating on exactly the same basis as everybody else at it, which is the only reason the meal was not humiliating.

It is the same here. For the sake of Christ is not a special arrangement made for the people with a problem. It is the only reason anybody at all is inside this, including the ones you have been comparing yourself to, and they know less about their own good weeks than you think.

Right now, as you read, the thing you would never say out loud has already been dealt with by an oath that has nothing to do with your consistency. Scripture says His mercy, plainly, with no asterisk after it, and His Spirit is the One who makes that land in a person who has spent nineteen months assuming otherwise.