The Name the Street Still Uses

They do not mean anything by it now. That is almost the worst part.

Fifteen years ago it meant something. Fifteen years ago it was said the way you say a thing about a man you are furious with, and the whole street was furious, and they had every reason. What he did was real, it hurt people who lived within a hundred meters of his own front door, and there was a period of about eighteen months when he could not walk down to the corner without a specific quality of silence following him.

That passed. It genuinely passed. These are decent people and they have long memories and short tempers and both of them wear out.

What did not pass is the name. It became the shorthand, the way street names do, and then it stopped being an accusation and became simply what he is called, and now it is said with affection. Somebody's teenage son said it to him last week with real warmth, and that boy was two when it happened and has no idea what it refers to. It is just Rafael's name now, the way another man is called Flaco and nobody remembers he was ever thin.

And Rafael, who is fifty-one, who has been steady for fifteen years, who paid back what could be paid back and apologized where an apology could be received, has quietly agreed with the street.

That is the thing to see. Nobody is condemning him. The condemnation ended a decade ago. But somewhere in that eighteen months he accepted the naming as accurate, and he has carried it since as the true description under all the other descriptions, and when he prays it is the name he assumes God is using.

You may have a street too. It might be a family instead of a street; families do this more efficiently than neighborhoods ever could. Somewhere there is a shorthand for you, and at some point you stopped disputing it, and you have quietly assumed heaven uses it too.

There is one verse that does something with this that nothing else in Scripture does, and I want to walk you into it slowly.

Paul writes the list, and then he does not stop

There is a passage where Paul writes out a list of the plainest kind. He is writing to Corinth, and he names things people did, bluntly, without softening any of them, the kind of list that would make a street go quiet.

And then he writes this.

And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.1 Corinthians 6:11

Take it in two halves.

And such were some of you. Past tense, and it is not a euphemism. Paul does not pretend the list was about other people. He says: that was you. Some of you were exactly the thing on that list, and I am not going to be delicate about it.

But ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified. Three verbs, present state, each with its own but, hammered one after another. He does not say you are working toward being washed. He puts the three of them down as the current description of the same men the list was about.

You were described in that list and you are described by those three verbs, and it is already the case, and both halves of the sentence are about the same person. I am not being generous with a man on a doorstep. It is written in 1 Corinthians 6:11, and the Holy Spirit is named in that very verse as the one by whom it was done, and He is the one carrying it down a narrow street in the evening.

Which naming is the report

Here is the thing that decides everything for a man in Rafael's position.

There are two namings in play. The street's, which is fifteen years old, formed in a bad season, kept alive by habit and affection, and used by people who mostly do not remember what it means. And God's, which is three verbs in a letter, formed at the cross, and used by somebody who was present for the original event.

One of those is a nickname. The other is a report.

Rafael has been treating the nickname as the report for fifteen years, and the report as a nickname, which is precisely backward, and nobody has ever put the two side by side for him.

You have a description given by God Himself, and it is already the accurate one, and it outranks the shorthand of any street. Scripture says ye are washed, ye are sanctified, ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a report land in a man who has spent fifteen years agreeing with a nickname.

Nobody is being asked to correct the street

And let me say what this does not mean, because a man could read that and get up tomorrow determined to fix his reputation, and that road has no end on it.

He is not being sent out to correct anybody. The street can call him what it likes. Reputations are slow and they belong to other people, and a man who spends his sixties trying to reclaim a name has handed the last of his life to the same eighteen months.

What is being corrected is not the street. It is what he says to God about himself, and what he assumes God says back.

You are able to leave a reputation where it lies, and your standing is already settled in a place the street has no vote in. It is written that you are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the settling without asking a neighborhood for its opinion.