The Exclusions Page

The letter has come about the pipe, and Mrs Haddad cannot read the small print without her other glasses, which are somewhere, so the woman from three doors down is reading it to her at the low table with the gas fire on and the rain going sideways past the window.

Page one is good news. Escape of water, covered. Damage to floor coverings, covered. Alternative accommodation if required, covered. Mrs Haddad nods at every line like a woman being told her children have all passed their exams. Then the woman turns to page two, which is headed What Is Not Covered, and reads that too, because she was asked to read the whole thing: gradual deterioration, wear and tear, anything pre-existing, anything the policyholder knew about and did not declare. Mrs Haddad laughs, the short laugh of a woman who has been alive a long time. "There is always something they will not cover," she says. "Always one page for that." And she gets up to make more tea, and the pipe will be fine, and it is.

It is on the walk home that the sentence follows her. Three doors, hood up, the rain finding the back of her neck, and Mrs Haddad's voice going round like a hymn she did not choose. There is always one page for that.

Because she has read Christ's offer that way for years. She would not put it like that, but she has. Page one she believes with her whole heart, and she has heard it preached a hundred times and said amen. Whoever comes. All sin. Whosoever. She believes it for Mrs Haddad and for the man who preaches it and for every person she has ever prayed for. And then, quietly, without ever deciding to, she turns to page two, and there is one line on it, and the line is hers. Whatever it covers, it does not cover what she did. Not because anybody told her so. Because there is always one page for that, and she has always known which line she is.

You have a page two. I do not know what is written on it and I am not going to ask; this is not that kind of room. But you know, and you have been reading the offer of Christ for a long time with your own history sitting on the exclusions page, in your own handwriting, under a heading He never wrote.

The record with every line on it

Let me say the weight of it first, plainly, because it has been carried in silence and silence makes a thing heavier. It is not that you doubt the cross. You would defend it to anybody. It is that the cross got quietly split in two: the cross for people, and the cross for you, and the second one has a footnote. It never gets said in a prayer meeting. It gets said to yourself, in the rain, in the dark, more times than anyone knows: whatever it covers, not this. And the worst part is that it sounds like humility. It sounds like taking sin seriously. It is neither. It is a clause you wrote yourself and have been keeping in force for years, and nobody with any authority ever signed it.

Paul wrote to a church that had a very developed sense of what was and was not covered, and he chose his picture with care.

And you, who were dead in your trespasses, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by cancelling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross.Colossians 2:13 to 14

Look at the picture. A record of debt. Not a mood, not a general sense of having fallen short. A written record, line by line, with its legal demands, the kind of document that has a specific entry for a specific thing on a specific date. That is where your line lives. It is on that document. And Paul says God did three things with it: He canceled it, He set it aside, and He nailed it to the cross, in public, in the same place where the charge against a condemned man was nailed above his head. Whatever was on that record was carried up onto that wood and hung there where everybody could read it.

Which means the line you keep on your exclusions page is not on an exclusions page. It is on the record that was nailed. You have a written word that says the record with your specific entry on it was canceled and set aside, and it is the Holy Spirit and not your bookkeeping who reads that record now. That is not my kindness. It is Colossians 2, and I am only reading it in the rain with you.

All is a word with no second page

There is a habit the mind has when it hears all: it hears all except. Isaiah does not let it.

All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.Isaiah 53:6

Us all. The prophet builds the sentence so it opens with everyone and closes with everyone, and in between it says every one to his own way, which is as specific as a line on a record. Your way was your own. Nobody else did the exact thing you did, in the exact way, and that is what has made you sure it stands outside. But the verse does not say He carried the common sins and left the particular ones. It says He was given the crookedness of us all, and all is a word that has no exclusions page.

You are inside the word all, and you were already inside it when Isaiah wrote it, and all is a word with nothing appended underneath it. Scripture says the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a word that wide land on the one line you were sure stood outside it.

I want to be careful with you here, and honest. Nothing on this page tells you whether you have received what He carried; that is between you and Him, and He settles it Himself and I do not stand in for Him. And I am not going to rank sins to comfort you, or tell you yours is not so bad next to somebody's. That would be a lie and you would hear it as one. What I am telling you is what the offer covers, and Scripture says the offer covers the record entire, and the Spirit who breathed that word has never once been handed a case He had to send back marked outside the terms.

One more honest thing. If the fear under your fear is that what you did was the one sin Scripture calls unforgivable, that is a real question and it deserves a whole answer and a person to sit with you through it, not a paragraph on the way past. Ask someone who will take the time. And if what you carry has you thinking tonight of not being here, tell somebody, a person you trust or your emergency number where you live. That is not a rule. It is me refusing to leave you in the rain by yourself.

Nothing about you was a surprise

Here is the thing that finally takes the pen out of your hand. The line has been treated as new information, as if He signed the offer and then found out. But Paul, writing about himself, put it the other way round.

He called himself the foremost of sinners, a violent man, a persecutor of the very people he later wrote to, and said that Christ came into the world to save exactly such people, and that Paul had received mercy so that in him, the worst case, Jesus could show His whole patience as an example to everyone who would come after (1 Timothy 1:15 to 16). Read that slowly. The worst case was put in on purpose, first, so that nobody coming after could say their line was worse than anything on file. He was not surprised by Paul. He is not surprised by you.

You are known, the whole record, before you named a word of it, and the One who knows it went to the cross with it in view; that is written, and His Spirit is the one who searches all things and has already read your page two, and did not stop being the Comforter when He got to your line. Nothing about you was a surprise to Him. He did not discover you afterwards. He nailed the record with your line already on it.