The Box Marked Do Not Load

There is a particular kind of Saturday that only exists on a driveway with a rented truck on it, and it starts too early and it goes very well until about two o'clock and then everyone stops talking.

Six of them, plus the two kids, plus a neighbor who came out to say good luck and got handed a lamp. The ramp is down. The line has formed the way it always does, hall to door to ramp, and the boxes are going up in a rhythm.

And in the middle of the hall, on its own, is a box with DO NOT LOAD written on it in marker. All four sides. Underlined twice on one of them.

Ray picks it up on his second trip because he is not thinking, and Sam comes past with a chair and says, not that one, Ray, and takes it out of his hands and puts it back down in exactly the same square foot of hall.

Ray, who is fifty-one and has done a lot of these, says what everybody says. What is in it?

And Sam says, the kettle, four mugs, teabags, the phone chargers, the cat's bowl, a roll of paper towel, and the remote for the heating. That box goes in the car with us. That is the box we need in the first hour when we get there, before anybody can find anything.

So there it is. The least valuable box in the entire building. Nothing in it is worth anything. Everything in it can be replaced from a shop for eleven dollars. And it is the only box on the property that has been separated out, written on four times, and forbidden to every man on that ramp, and it is going in the car with the people who packed it.

Ray goes back for a wardrobe and does not think about it again until about half past four, sitting on the tailgate with a drink, watching the two kids fighting over who carries the box out to the car.

And what comes up in him then, uninvited, is the word he has been quietly failing at since he was thirty. Holy. In every church he has ever been in, that word came at him as a standard, and he has kept about sixty percent of it on a good year, and he has never once said that out loud to anybody, and the not saying it has become its own weight.

He looks at the box in the little one's arms.

That box is not better than the other boxes. It has been set aside because of where it is needed and who is carrying it.

You have sat on that tailgate. Maybe your percentage is different. But you know what it is to be quietly short of a standard for twenty years and to have made your peace with it in a way that is not peace at all.

Somebody else is doing the presenting

Paul writes to a church he has never met and puts this in the first chapter, and I want you to see verse twenty-one before verse twenty-two, because he set it up on purpose.

He says: you, that were sometime alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works. That is the starting position. Not, you who were nearly there. Not, you who kept about sixty percent. Alienated, and enemies, and in the mind, which is the part nobody else can inspect. Paul takes the entire question of your qualifying and closes it in one clause.

And then the next verse.

Yet now hath he reconciled in the body of his flesh through death, to present you holy and unblameable and unreproveable in his sight.Colossians 1:22

To present you holy. Presenting is not something a thing does to itself. A box does not present itself. It is picked up, and carried, and set down in front of somebody by the person who decided it goes in the car.

You are being presented holy, and the one doing the presenting is the one who reconciled you. That is what is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a sentence out of a letter to a town in Asia Minor and sets it down on a driveway on a Saturday afternoon.

And notice the purpose word in the middle. To present. That is what the reconciling was for. He did not reconcile you and then wait to see whether you would become presentable. Presenting you holy is the point of the whole operation, the reason the operation happened, the destination the whole thing was aimed at from the first move.

In his sight, which means the audience is not you

Then the last three words, which are the ones I want you to take out to the car.

In his sight. Not in yours. Not in the sight of anybody who ever handed you a standard. Not in the sight of the version of you that keeps the percentage in his head like a man checking a fuel gauge.

You have been standing in front of your own mirror for twenty years, marking yourself, and the verse locates the whole transaction somewhere else entirely: in His sight, where He is the one holding you up, and where the words He uses about you are holy, and unblameable, and unreproveable.

You have been called all three of those words in the same sentence, and it is already settled in the only sight that is judging. Colossians 1 puts them in a row, and the same Spirit who moved Paul to write them is the one making them a present fact in the man on the tailgate rather than a doctrine he agrees with in principle.

Let me guard it, because a man who has been at sixty percent for twenty years can hear this two ways and one of them is no use to him. I am not telling you the other forty does not matter. Paul is going to spend two more chapters on how a reconciled man lives and he does not go easy. I am telling you that the box was marked before the kettle went in it and it will be marked when the box is empty, and no percentage in the world put the writing on the side. Which is not a lower standard. It is a heavier one, and it is not on your back.