The One That Never Paid

Daniel has been paid on time every month for nineteen years, and he has never once received what he was working for.

He would want that stated carefully, because he is precise and because it sounds, said quickly, like a complaint about money, and it is not. The money has arrived. It has arrived reliably, and in years when other people's did not, and he is not ungrateful and would not want to be heard as such.

But he was not working for the money. He has known that from the beginning. If you had asked him at twenty-six what he was actually doing it for he would have told you in one sentence, and the sentence would not have had a figure in it.

He was working for a feeling. Specifically, for the moment when the whole thing would be settled enough that he could stop bracing.

That is the wage he has been working for. Nineteen years, faithfully, every month, and it has never once been paid.

He worked this out at a table, listening to somebody younger describe a plan, and the plan was his own plan, described back to him in another man's voice, with the same sentence in it about how it would be once the thing was done. And Daniel sat there and did the arithmetic and realized he had reached that point four separate times and had not noticed on any of the four occasions, because on each of them the line had moved before he arrived at it.

Not by anybody's decision. There is no villain in this. The line moves the way a horizon moves, which is not because it is running away from you.

And here is the thing he said afterwards, which is the reason I am writing this down. He said: I have been employed by something that pays in a currency I do not want, and I have been going in every day.

Now, hear the necessary thing before anything else, because a serious man will use this against himself.

Daniel is not greedy and he has not wasted nineteen years. The work has been good work. It has kept people, it has taught him things, there are three people alive in his circle whose situations are better because of what he built, and none of that is undone by anything in this message.

And this is not a message about earning less. That error costs people just as much as the other one and I will not preach it. A man with a full account is not standing further from God than a man with an empty one, and choosing to have less still leaves the amount in the middle of the room where it does not belong.

The point is not the amount. The point is the wage.

You have your own version. There is something you have been working for that is not the thing that arrives, and it has never arrived, and you have been going in anyway because the arrangement was never actually examined.

Nobody is calling you materialistic. You almost certainly are not.

You have just been employed by something that cannot pay you in what you came for.

The prophet asks about the exchange, not about the spending

There is a question in Isaiah that is usually preached as a warning about materialism and is actually about an exchange rate.

Wherefore do ye spend money for that which is not bread? and your labour for that which satisfieth not? hearken diligently unto me, and eat ye that which is good, and let your soul delight itself in fatness.Isaiah 55:2

Two clauses, and the second is the one that bears on this. Your labor for that which satisfieth not. He is not scolding them for working. He is asking what they are receiving, and pointing out that whatever it is, it is not what they went to work for.

And the invitation that follows is not work less. It is come and eat, which is an entirely different instruction, and it is aimed at people who are hungry rather than at people who are lazy.

That is the register of this whole chapter, and it is worth having: God speaking to people who have been working extremely hard for the wrong wage, and not once telling them off for the working.

And now hear what is already true over you. You are not going to be paid in bracing. That is not my line: the word says He gives His beloved sleep, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a man at a table who has just heard his own plan in somebody else's mouth.

And the settled thing you have been working toward has already been given. Not earned, not scheduled, not pending a final year: the word says peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto you, and the Spirit is the one described as bringing it, which means it has never once been on the other master's payroll and never could have been.

Nobody is coming for your work

I want to be very plain, because this is where a message like this tells a man to walk away from something and calls it freedom.

Nobody here is telling you to leave. I do not know your circumstances, who is depending on you, what is unfinished, or what a change would cost people who have never read a word of this. A man who preaches somebody else's resignation is spending money that was never his.

Nobody is telling you the years were wasted, either. They were not. God saw all nineteen and the word says He is not unrighteous to forget your work and labor of love, so the record is kept somewhere that does not move its line.

And nobody is telling you to want less. Wanting the thing settled is not greed. It is one of the most ordinary and decent things a person can want, and the reason it has not arrived is not that you wanted it too much.

The question is only this: which of the two is your employer, because one of them is, and the arrangement in which they both are has never once existed.

And you already have one Master. Not once the line stops moving: the word says you are not your own, you were bought at a price, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit that this is settled ground rather than a target.

And the other one was never paying you anyway. That is the plain fact and it is not bitter, it is freeing. Nineteen years and four arrivals and not one payment in the currency you came for. The written word says riches make themselves wings and fly away, and the Spirit is entirely able to make a man feel that without one thing being taken off him.