In No Wise Cast Out

There is a key on the ring in his pocket that does not open anything he is likely to open again.

It is the small brass one, worn silver along the edge, and it has rubbed a bright patch into the leather fob over the years. He used to lock up on Thursdays. He knew which lights to leave on and which ones tripped the alarm. He knew the trick with the door that swelled in the rain, which was to lift it half an inch on the handle before you turned anything.

Four years ago he stopped going. There was no scene. He did not write anything, or say anything, or ask anybody for a meeting. He missed one, and then he missed two, and by about the sixth week the not going had turned into a decision without anybody having made it.

He has never taken the key off the ring. He could not tell you why if you asked him. Every so often his thumb finds it in his pocket at a stoplight and he puts it back.

You have a key like that. It might not be brass. It might be a folder on a laptop, or a mug in the back of a cabinet, or a name you still cannot say in a sentence without your voice doing something odd on the way past it.

I am not going to ask you what happened. Notice that I have not asked, and that I am not going to. What happened there is yours and it does not go on trial in this article, in either direction. I am not here to make a case against anybody and I am not here to make a case for anybody, and if you have been braced for one of those since the first line, you can put the brace down.

I only want the sentence you said to yourself somewhere in the second year. Because there was one, and it was quiet, and it has been running underneath everything since. It went something like this: when I walked out of that door I walked out of more than a building.

The strongest form the sentence comes in

There is a promise in John's Gospel that the old translators could not render with a single no, and the reason is worth a few minutes of your evening.

All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.John 6:37

In no wise. Not in any way, not under any circumstance, not by any route, not on any grounds. Underneath that phrase is a doubled negative, which is the most emphatic refusal the language has available, and it is aimed at one specific action: casting out. Throwing a person from the house. Jesus is not being warm here. He is being absolute, and the thing He is being absolute about is what He Himself will not do.

You are held tonight by a promise made in the strongest words the language had available. John 6:37 is where that is written, and His Spirit is what keeps a written promise from lying flat on a page.

Now read the sentence again and ask who is holding the authority in it. There is exactly one party in that verse who could put a person out, and it is Him, and He has ruled it out in the strongest words He had.

Which means the act you have been assuming you performed four years ago is not an act you were ever able to perform. Casting out is not something a man can do to himself. It is not in his hands. You changed your Thursdays. You did not, and could not, execute a removal, because the removal was never yours to sign.

You are not cast out, and you never held the authority to cast yourself out of anything. John 6:37 is the deed on that, and the Holy Spirit is the one who filed it in you, which is why the feeling of having done it has never once been able to produce the fact.

You have a place that four years of absence did not touch. That is promised, in writing, and the Spirit of God is the proof already delivered rather than a reward being held back until you turn up somewhere.

The room never held the thing you think it held

Here is where a lot of good men get the arithmetic wrong, and I want to slow it down.

A building holds a number of real things. It holds a schedule. It holds a habit, and habits are not nothing. It holds chairs, and a smell, and where the coats go, and a way of doing the last twenty minutes that your body learned so well you could have done it asleep. A man who leaves loses all of that, genuinely, and the losing of it is not imaginary and does not deserve to be waved away.

But a building has never held a person's standing before God, because a building was never given that to hold. Nobody in that room issued your place among God's people. It did not come out of a drawer in the office. It was not voted, granted, extended or renewed by anybody who was ever in there, and a thing that was never issued by a room cannot be revoked by leaving one.

You were never held by that room, which is exactly why that room was never able to let go of you. Go and read John 6:37 yourself tonight, slowly, and while you are reading it the Holy Spirit is the one turning an old promise into a present tense fact about a man in a parked car.

Think about what your key actually is. It is not evidence against you. It is not a wound you are refusing to let heal, and it is not sentimentality either. It is an ordinary object that proves something you have not let yourself see: you did not stop caring about the people of God. A man who had genuinely walked away from a people would have thrown that key in a drawer without a thought. Four years, and it is still on your ring.

This is yours, and it was settled by somebody who was not in the building when it happened. He promised it and then He had it written down, and the same Spirit who was in you on the last Thursday you locked up is in you tonight, unmoved by the intervening four years.