Bringing What Was Already Brought

He has never once come to that door with his hands empty, and he is fifty-two years old.

There is always something in the basket. Figs, if it is the season. Bread he did not need to bake. Once, memorably, a chair he had repaired for them that they had not asked him to repair and did not need, which he carried up that street on his shoulder in August because arriving without it was not a thing he could do.

The household at the top of the street love him. They have told him a hundred times to stop. The old man of that house, who is not sentimental, took him by both wrists at the door two summers ago and said, Yosef, put it down. And Yosef laughed and put the basket down on the step and came in, and he has brought something every single time since.

He is not buying their affection. He knows they love him and he would say so plainly. It is something else, and it is older, and if you got him talking late at night he might get near it: he does not know how to be somebody who receives. He knows how to be somebody who brings. A man with something in his hands has a reason to be at your door. A man with empty hands is just asking to be let in, and Yosef has never in his life been able to do that.

And it is exactly, precisely how he comes to God.

He would not put it in cultic terms; he is not carrying goats up a hill. But he has never once come to prayer without something in the basket. A resolution. An apology, offered again although it was accepted the first time. A stretch of doing better that he can point at. Some small piece of himself, brought up the street on his shoulder, so that arriving is not simply asking to be let in.

If you know that basket, then this is for you, and I am not going to take it off you by telling you it is silly. It is not silly. It is the habit of a man who has never been able to believe that the door opens for nothing.

There is one verse, one sentence long, that ends the whole business, and everything depends on the order of its two halves.

Read the order of the sentence

Now where remission of these is, there is no more offering for sin.Hebrews 10:18

Two halves, and the order is everything.

First: where remission of these is. Remission means the thing has been sent away, released, dismissed. The writer has spent the whole chapter establishing that this has happened, once, by the offering of Christ.

Then, and only then: there is no more offering for sin.

Notice what the verse is not saying. It is not saying that offerings are forbidden because God dislikes them. It is saying there is no more offering because there is nothing left for an offering to do. The sentence is not a prohibition. It is a report on an empty job.

You are living where remission is, and it is already sent away, and there is nothing left in the basket for the basket to carry. I am not being clever with a short verse at somebody's door. It is written in Hebrews 10:18, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a conclusion drawn for a first-century congregation and lays it on a man of fifty-two on a stone step.

What is actually in the basket

Now let me say the thing gently, because it took Yosef until his forties even to notice this about himself.

The basket is not about God's honor. It is about his own standing. What he is really doing at that door, every time, is manufacturing a reason to be admitted, so that the admission is not a pure gift. Because a pure gift would have to be received, and receiving is the one posture he has never learned.

And you will notice that the contents change but the function does not. This year it is a stretch of doing better. Ten years ago it was a resolution about his temper. The basket has held twenty different things and it has always been carrying the same one item, which is: a reason for you to open the door to me.

You are admitted on the strength of what Christ did, and it is already the reason, and no other reason has ever been required at that door. Scripture says we have boldness to enter by the blood of Jesus (Hebrews 10:19), which is the very next sentence after the one about no more offering, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that written boldness available to a man who has never had any.

Learning the other posture

And here is the thing that would take Yosef about two years to learn and would change the rest of his life.

Receiving is a skill. It is not a lower form of giving; it is its own competence, and a person who has never developed it is not humble, whatever it looks like from the street. He is uncomfortable, and his discomfort quietly organizes every relationship he has, including his relationship with God, and the people who love him have been feeling it for decades and have not known what to say about it.

The old man at the door has said the one true thing available: put it down.

You are able to arrive with nothing, and the door is already open, and it was open before you baked anything. It is written that where remission is there is no more offering for sin, and the Holy Spirit is the one who teaches a bringing man how to be a receiving man without shaming him for the years of baskets.