Pardoned Is Not the Same as Home

Nikau can say the word forgiven with no trouble at all and he cannot get the other one out.

He has tested it. Alone, in a truck, which is where he tests most things. He said out loud: I am forgiven. It came out level and he meant it and nothing in him objected.

Then he said: I belong here.

And it came out wrong. Not false exactly. Thin. The way a sentence sounds when you are quoting somebody else.

He has thought about that difference for about a year and he has got further with it than most people do, because he is the kind of man who will not let a thing go until it is named accurately.

Here is where he got to.

Forgiven is a verdict. It is about something that happened, and it is delivered by somebody with the standing to deliver it, and once it has been said the matter is closed. It is a transaction between a person and their own past, and it can be completed in a sentence.

Belonging is not a verdict. It is a position, held over time, in a room, with other people in it. It cannot be delivered in a sentence, because it is not about the past at all: it is about the present and the next twenty years.

So a man can be entirely and honestly forgiven and still not know where he stands, and there is nothing confused about him for feeling both. He is describing two different things correctly.

What he has not been able to work out is how you get the second one. Nobody has ever explained the mechanism. Everybody talks about the first, and he already has the first, and the first has not produced the second in a year of waiting for it to.

And this is where I stop writing about Nikau, because one of those two words sticks in your mouth as well.

I am not going to ask what happened. That is yours and it stays yours.

The verse does both, in order

I want to give you a sentence that names the exact two things you have been trying to hold apart, and puts them in the right order, and does not stop at the first one. It is Colossians 1, and the Holy Spirit had it written for people who can say one of those words and not the other.

And you, that were sometime alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, 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 1:21

Follow the movement.

It starts where you actually were: alienated. That is a word about position and not about guilt. It means outside, at a distance, not part of. Paul names the standing problem before he names anything else, and he does not soften it.

Then: hath he reconciled. That is the verdict half. Done, past tense, accomplished by somebody else, in the body of his flesh through death. That is the word you can already say in a truck.

And then it keeps going, and this is the half nobody reads to you.

To present you holy and unblameable and unreproveable in his sight.

Present is a word about a room. It is what you do with a person: you bring them in, in front of everybody, and you stand them there. It is the opposite of alienated, and it is the answer to the second word, and it is in the same sentence as the first.

So take that in the truck where you tested it. You are presented and not merely pardoned, and Colossians 1 says reconciled and then presented, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes the second half of that sentence land in a man who has only ever been able to say the first.

And notice the three words attached to the presenting. Holy. Unblameable. Unreproveable. That last one means there is no charge that can be brought, and the written word puts it at the moment of presentation rather than at the moment of pardon, and the Spirit of God has been standing you in that room the whole year.