Second Row, Third From the End

The photographer has a small blue stool and a system, and the system is excellent. Reception first, then Year One, and a parent helper at the end of each row whose whole job is to stop the line dissolving into a wrestling match. She is very good at this. She has done it four years running.

She has also said the same three words about two hundred times this morning, to every child who comes past her: chin up, love. Chin up. She says it warmly and she says it while she is doing something else, straightening a collar, finding a missing cardigan, telling a boy called Reuben that yes, his shoe is a shoe, and it is on the correct foot. Chin up, love, look at the nice man with the camera. And every single one of them does it, because a six year old has no idea yet that a face is a thing you can be careful with.

Then the deputy head claps twice and says right, staff and helpers, quick one for the newsletter, everyone down the front. And she is already saying she will just grab the register from the office. She goes and gets the register. She takes her time. She comes back at exactly the moment the photographer is packing the tripod, and she is sorry she missed it, and everybody says never mind, and the morning carries on being a nice morning.

Nobody in that hall knows one thing about her. Not one. And if you have just gone quiet reading that, I want to say something carefully, because there are two people who arrive at a message like this one and I am speaking to one of you today. I am not speaking here to the person carrying something another human being did to them; that is its own message and it takes its own words. I am speaking to the one who did something, years back, and who has brought it to God properly, and meant it, and who cannot lift their eyes in a room full of people who know nothing about any of it.

Two wounds, and only one of them has been treated

Here is the thing nobody explains, and the reason so many honest people conclude that the forgiveness did not take.

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

They feel like the same weight because they arrive together and they use the same voice, but they are two separate injuries and only one of them is about an act. Confession is the appointed medicine for guilt, and it works, and it worked for you. The record was cleared. That is not in question and it never was.

But you have been taking that medicine for the other wound for years now, and it has not touched it, and somewhere in the middle of all that you started to suspect that the failure was in you. It was not. You were treating a wound with something that was never made for it. You are cleared, right now, of every count that was ever brought against you, and you are not the count. I am not handing you my opinion there. It is written that there is now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the sentence I just typed, who carries that into a place your confession could not reach on its own.

For then shalt thou lift up thy face without spot; yea, thou shalt be stedfast, and shalt not fear.Job 11:15

Now look at who says that, because it matters and almost nobody stops.

That is Zophar. He is one of the three friends, and he is in the middle of telling a suffering man that his suffering has a cause and the cause is him. The lifted face is real. Zophar's price on it is not. He hangs it on a list: prepare your heart, put your iniquity far away, and then, then you may lift your face. He is selling a man his own countenance back and charging him for it, and by the end of the book God says plainly that Zophar has not spoken what is right.

Which means the most beautiful sentence about a lifted face in the whole of Scripture arrives in the mouth of a man who had the mechanism exactly backwards. God did not delete the sentence. He deleted the price. You have the lifted face without spot, and you have it as a gift and not as a wage. That is not a hopeful reading of the passage. It is what the cross settled and what His Spirit is pressing into you while you read.

The face is His department, not your nerve

There is a reason this message is not going to end with me telling you to try harder to make eye contact.

Everywhere Scripture touches this, the lifting is done by somebody else's hands. The Lord is a shield about me, and the lifter of my head. They looked to Him and were radiant. Not: they steeled themselves and managed a glance. They looked, and something happened in their faces that they did not do.

So the work in front of you today is not a nerve problem and it is not a confidence project. It is a matter of where you are looking, and for a very long time you have been looking at the file. Reading it back. Checking whether the account really closed. And a person cannot look at two things at once, which is exactly why nothing has shifted.

I am going to tell you what the file says now, and I want you to notice that I am not softening anything and not skipping anything.

It says: settled. You are held tonight by a verdict you did not argue and cannot lose, and the hands that hold it are not shaking. Scripture calls Him faithful and just to forgive, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a felt fact in the body rather than a line you agree with and go on flinching.