Sanding the Same Board

The shed smells of sawdust and instant coffee and, faintly and permanently, of the paraffin heater somebody brings out in November whether anybody wants it or not.

Thursday nights. Four men and a kettle and a radio nobody listens to. There is a lad of nineteen learning to cut a dovetail badly and being cheerfully told so. There is a retired electrician making his fourth bird box of the month, because he says a man should have a run at a thing until he can do it in the dark. There is somebody arguing that the bandsaw needs a new blade, and there is somebody else who has been arguing back about that blade since the spring.

And there is a man at the end bench sanding a shelf.

It is a nice shelf. Ash. Nothing fancy. He cut it out four years ago and it has been on that bench, on and off, ever since, and every Thursday he takes out the block and works the same edge, and every Thursday it comes up half a hair smoother than it was. He has taken the arris off three times. He has gone through four grades of paper and back down again. Somebody said to him last winter, mate, that shelf is done, and he laughed and said not quite, and picked up the block again.

Because finishing it means taking it home. And taking it home means putting it on a wall. And putting it on a wall means somebody says oh, did you make that, and looks at him while they say it.

If you know what that is, sit with me a minute, and let me be clear about who I am talking to. Not, today, the one carrying a thing another person did to them. That is a different message on this site, it is written for you, and it uses none of these words. Today I am talking to the man who did something a long way back, brought it to God properly and meant it, and has spent every year since quietly sanding himself.

Two wounds, one medicine, and nobody told you

Guilt says: I did something wrong. Shame says: I am something wrong.

They arrive together and they use the same voice, so nobody pulls them apart for you. And that is why a man can confess a thing properly, and mean it to the bottom, and find nothing has shifted at all.

Confession is the appointed medicine for guilt and it is a real one. It worked. That account shut and it has stayed shut. You would say so out loud in this shed with a block in your hand.

Shame is not a verdict about an act, so the medicine was never made for it. Which means the last however-many years of going back over the thing were not a failure of faith, and they were not evidence about your heart. They were the right cure carried into the wrong room, over and over, by a man doing his honest best.

You are cleared of every count that was ever brought against you, and you were cleared the first time you asked. That is not my warm opinion. Scripture says that if we confess, He is faithful and just to forgive us and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the strength of my sentence, who takes a settled thing down out of a man's head and into his chest.

There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus.Romans 8:1

I want you to put your thumb on one word in that verse and leave it there.

Now.

Not one day. Not when the shelf is finished. Not when you have taken enough off. Paul does not write there shall eventually be no condemnation for those who get themselves down to an acceptable thickness. He writes now, and he writes it to people in a city where plenty of them had a past that would empty a room.

You have no condemnation standing against you at this moment, and you have it as a present fact rather than a target. The word puts now right in the middle of that sentence on purpose, and His Spirit is the one who makes a present fact feel like something a man can stand on rather than a line he believes and keeps sanding anyway.

You cannot sand a man into a better man

Here is what I have watched happen in shed after shed and kitchen after kitchen, and it is one of the gentlest tragedies I know.

A man hears that he is forgiven, and he believes it, and he cannot feel it, so he starts a project. The project is himself. He is going to be so useful, so patient, so early, so good with the young lad on the bandsaw, that eventually the thing under it all wears away. He never says that out loud. He would be embarrassed to. But that is the project, and he has been at it for years.

And it does not work, ever, because sanding takes material off and shame is not material. There is nothing to remove. You could plane yourself down to a shaving and the weight would still be sitting on the bench.

The answer was never a smoother version of you. The answer is a verdict spoken over the man you already are, and it was spoken in public, at a cross, and it does not need one more pass with the block.

You are accepted as the man you are tonight, and you were accepted before a single one of those Thursdays. That is what the written word settles, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gets a man to put the block down without feeling like he is getting away with something.