He Rehearsed the Speech and Never Got to Finish It

There is a list and it is not written down anywhere, which is part of what makes it so effective.

Item one is a debt. Item two is a conversation he has been not having since March. Item three is a habit that he has cut down but not stopped, and he is honest that item three is where the whole thing usually stalls.

The rule is simple and he has never questioned it. Finish the list, then come back. Coming back before the list is done would be a kind of cheating, and worse than that, it would be presumptuous, which is a thing he was taught to be more afraid of than most sins.

He has been working the list for about four years. He has cleared one and a half of the three items, and item two got harder rather than easier, because the longer a conversation goes unhad the more it costs to have.

And every so often it occurs to him that the list may not be the thing keeping him out. But he does not know what to do with that thought, so he goes back to the list.

The son wrote a speech with a fallback position in it

In the story about the son who goes home, he prepares something on the road, and the speech has three parts.

I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, And am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants. (Luke 15:18-19, King James Version)

Part one is a confession. Part two is a disqualification of himself. Part three is a proposal.

Look hard at part three. Make me as one of thy hired servants.

That is a repair plan. He is offering to work it off. He has done the arithmetic and decided what tier he can reasonably request, and the tier is staff.

Nobody made him write that. He wrote it on the road, on his own, and it is the most natural thing in the story.

You are not the first man to arrive with a proposal in your pocket. Luke 15 has him composing the offer on the road, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old detail feel like it was written about a list nobody else has seen.

The speech gets cut off before the proposal

Here is what happens when he arrives, and the timing is the entire teaching.

And the son said unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son. But the father said to his servants, Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him. (Luke 15:21-22)

Read exactly where the interruption falls.

He gets through part one. He gets through part two. And then the father starts shouting for a robe.

Part three never gets said. The offer to be a hired servant is never made, because it is never heard.

Jesus told it that way deliberately. He could have had the father hear the whole thing and refuse it. Instead the proposal dies in the son's mouth.

You have a plan that is not going to get heard. Luke 15 cuts the speech off before the offer, and it is His Spirit who makes the placement of an interruption do something a four year list could not.

A man with nothing to offer and no time to offer it

There is one more case, and it removes the last version of the argument.

There is a man dying beside Jesus who has, by any accounting, run out of options. He cannot make restitution. He cannot go back and repair anything. He cannot even get down.

He says one sentence, and it is not a good speech.

And he said unto Jesus, Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom. And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, To day shalt thou be with me in paradise. (Luke 23:42-43)

To day. Not eventually, and not once something has been settled.

He had no list, no capacity to work one, and no hours left. And the answer came back in the same conversation.

You are not being held at a door until a balance clears. Luke 23 has the whole exchange finished inside two verses, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old deathbed scene reach a man on a tailgate with four years of work behind him.

Paul rules out the repair plan by name

There is a sentence in Ephesians that closes this off, and Paul closes it deliberately.

For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast. (Ephesians 2:8-9)

Not of yourselves. It is the gift of God.

And then he says why the arrangement is built that way. Lest any man should boast.

The reason it is not a repair plan is not that God is soft about the damage. It is that a man who repaired his way in would have something to say about himself afterwards, and the whole thing is designed so that nobody does.

You are given something rather than approved for something. Ephesians 2 names it a gift and gives the reason in the next line, and it is His Spirit who makes an old theological sentence stop being abstract.

And Titus says which side the work was on

Paul says it once more, even more flatly, in a letter to Titus.

Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost. (Titus 3:5)

Not by works of righteousness which we have done.

He is not talking about bad works. He specifically says works of righteousness. Good ones. The kind that are on a list.

And the mechanism at the end of the sentence is not a man's effort. It is a washing and a renewing, and Paul names who does it.

You have the whole of it credited to somebody else's account. Titus 3 rules out even the good works by name, and it is the Holy Ghost, named in that same verse, who is credited with the renewing.