Every Camp, Every Year

Sixth summer. Same lake, same field, same fire, and the same man walking up to it at the end of the last night.

Rob is thirty-four. He came the first time because a friend from work dragged him, and something real happened to him that year, and he has never once doubted that it was real. He came back the second year to help with the boats and stayed a Christian all winter, mostly, in the way a man does when nobody is watching. And on the last night of the second year he found himself walking up to the fire again.

The leader that year was a man called Sam, and Sam prayed with him, and it was good.

Third year, same. Fourth year, Sam remembered his name, which Rob found unaccountably hard to bear. Fifth year, Rob considered not going up and went up. And tonight, the sixth year, the fire is going and the guitar has stopped and Sam has said the thing he says, and Rob is looking at his own boots, and the arithmetic in his head is not about God at all. It is about Sam. It is: he is going to see me coming again.

Nobody at that camp knows this is his sixth time. Sam does not know; Sam prays with forty people a summer over eleven years and has a kind face and a bad memory for exactly this reason, which is a mercy Rob has never suspected. Rob thinks he is being counted. He has been carrying his own tally for five years and assuming somebody else keeps one too.

But underneath the embarrassment is the real thing, and the real thing is a question he cannot get past: if it took the first time, why am I standing up again? And if I am standing up again, did it take?

That is a fair question. It has never once been answered for him, and tonight I want to answer it, not with reassurance about his sincerity but with the last word Jesus said before He died, which is a stranger word than most people know.

And you have your own fire. Maybe a rail, maybe a chair, maybe a prayer you say in the car. You have gone up more times than you would tell anybody, and you are carrying a tally, and you have assumed somebody else is carrying one too.

The word He actually used

Here is the sentence. Everybody knows it and almost nobody has been told what kind of word it is.

When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost.John 19:30

In the language John wrote it in, that is one word, and it was not a poetic word. It was an ordinary word from ordinary life, and people who did business with it saw it on paper all the time. It was what you wrote across a bill when the whole amount had been settled. It meant: nothing further is owed on this account, and no further action is required of anyone.

Jesus took the word that goes across a settled account and used it as the last thing He said.

You have an account with that word written across it, and it is already settled, and the settling was announced out loud by the one who did it. I am not being sentimental at the end of a long week at a campfire. It is written in John 19:30, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a word spoken from a cross across two thousand years to a man looking at his boots.

What standing up again is, and what it is not

Now let me say something to Rob that nobody has said, because everyone assumes he is being told off and he is bracing for it.

Going forward six times is not a sin. It is not evidence against you. It is what a sincere man does when he has been given a moment and has not been given a ground. He was handed a place to respond and never handed a place to stand, and so every year, when the feeling wears thin, he goes back to the only thing that ever worked, which was the walking up.

Nobody is going to tell you to stop walking up. If you want to go and pray at that fire tonight, go. There is no rule here and there never was.

But hear what you would be going for. You would be going to get it done. And that word Jesus said means it is not available to be done, because it is not outstanding.

You are not able to complete a thing that was completed, and it is already finished, and there is no part of it waiting on a sixth summer. Scripture says He offered one sacrifice for sins forever and sat down (Hebrews 10:12), and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a man see that a seated Christ is not waiting on him to stand.

From responding to thanking

So what does a man do at a fire, if not walk up?

He gives thanks. And I want to be precise about why, because this is not a trick to keep you in your seat.

Responding is what you do about something unsettled. Thanking is what you do about something settled. They are two different postures toward the same event, and the posture you take is the posture you will live in all winter. Rob has spent five winters in the posture of a man with something outstanding. One evening of thanks would put him in the posture of a man with something received, and that is a different man in February.

You are the one He finished it for, and it is already yours, and thanks is the only thing a finished account is asking of anybody. It is written that it is finished, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves a man from responding to receiving without ever making him ashamed of the responding.