The Tailgate at Dusk

The last pass finished after the sun went down, and he still has not started the truck.

He is sitting on the tailgate with his boots hanging, the lid of the thermos in one hand and nothing in it. The drill is folded up behind the tractor at the far end of the row. Sixty acres of wheat ground, and the last of the light lying flat and orange across the stubble. A killdeer runs the edge of the field the way it does every evening. The dog has given up on him and gone to sleep under the truck.

His work gloves are on the tailgate beside him, the right one split across the thumb since March. In the door pocket there is a church bulletin from Sunday with a hospital phone number on the back in his own hand. He has been a deacon for twenty years. He counts the offering with a witness, carries the table on Communion Sundays, and drives people to the hospital in the city.

And for most of those twenty years, sitting right here at the end of a field with the engine off, the same thing comes up in him and stands there.

He does not know what being born again is.

He can say the words. He heard them at nine in a tent on the fairground, and went up front with three other boys because the preacher asked, and he remembers the grass and the smell of the canvas better than anything anybody said. Nothing has ever split his life into a before and an after. He gets up, he farms, he prays with the men, he goes.

And there is not one of those men he could ask. Not the one who taught him to run a header. Not the two he has knelt beside on the concrete floor of the fellowship hall since he was nineteen. A deacon of twenty years does not put his hand up and say he never worked out what the phrase means. It would go around this county by Thursday, kindly, and every one of them would look at him a half second longer on Sunday.

So it stays in the truck. It comes up at the end of the field, and it goes back down when he turns the key.

You know the tailgate. Yours might be an office at six with the building empty, or a kitchen after everybody has gone up, or a parking lot you sit in a while before you go in. And you know the thing that stands up in you there, and exactly which people in your life it can never be said in front of.

The counsel He keeps for the ones who fear Him

I build things, so let me tell you how I read a promise. I read it like a load rating: what it says it will hold, and who for, and no clause added that was never printed on it.

David wrote a line about what God does with the people who fear Him, and it is not the line most men expect. It does not say He rewards them. It does not say He inspects them.

The secret of the LORD is with them that fear him; and he will shew them his covenant.Psalm 25:14

It says He tells them things. Translators reach for words like counsel and friendship there, and both are reaching at the same thing: the talk among friends after the meeting, not the notice pinned to the board.

You are the address that promise was written to, and you were the address long before you had language for the question. The fear of God is not a mood a man works up. It looks like forty years of a first Wednesday on a concrete floor and a hospital number on the back of a bulletin. His word says the counsel of the Lord belongs to that man, and the Spirit who carried Psalm 25 into the record is the one carrying it into a truck cab at dusk.

Now look at the second half, because that is where the load sits. He will show them His covenant. Show. Nobody uses that word about a man who already sees. The promise is addressed to the one who is going to be shown, which means the not knowing was accounted for in the sentence before any of us got here.

You have a God who confides, and that is His posture toward you before one word of the question comes out right. Scripture says He will show them His covenant, and it is His Spirit, not the quality of the asking, that turns a line on a page into a thing shown to a man in a field.

A ruler crossed the city in the dark

There was a man on the council in Jerusalem with the same problem, and a great deal more to lose by admitting it.

His name was Nicodemus. A Pharisee, John says, and a ruler of the Jews. He was the man people brought their questions to, which is the exact position that makes a question of your own impossible to carry. So he did the one honest thing available to a man in that seat. He came to Jesus by night.

Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God: for no man can do these miracles that thou doest, except God be with him.John 3:2

He is not the fool of that story and I will not have him made one. He got up. He walked across a city in the dark, knocked, and opened by honoring the man he came to see. Every other member of that council stayed home. I would have him on my board tomorrow.

And watch what Jesus did with him. He did not send him back to ask it in daylight in front of his colleagues. He did not tell one soul on that council. He answered him, and gave him in that room, at that hour, the sentence the world has since learned by heart. John 3:16 was not preached to a crowd. It was said at night to one respectable man.

You are received at that hour with the question in the shape it is actually in, and you were received before you tidied it up. That is not my hospitality to hand out. It is written into the third chapter of John that the man came by night and went home answered, and the Spirit who blows where He wishes opens a room two thousand years old onto a stubble field at the end of a day.

His standing was never given back to him as a bill, either. When Nicodemus turns up again he is still on the council, standing up in it to insist a man get a fair hearing. At the end of the book he is at the tomb in daylight with seventy five pounds of spices in his arms.

You have every one of your years still in your hands, and the question in your hands along with them. Scripture kept a ruler in his seat after a night visit and then put him out in the open with an armload of myrrh, and the same Spirit who moved on that page is moving on this one.

Nobody surveys the wind

Nicodemus asked how. How can a man be born when he is old. He asked it twice, and the second time Jesus answered him with the weather.

The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.John 3:8

I have run surveys on ground that looked fine and was not, and I trust a survey. But nobody surveys wind. A man hears it and sees what it moved, and that is not a failure of the instrument. It is the nature of the thing.

You were never asked to understand the new birth before you were allowed anywhere near it, and that was never a clause hidden in the fine print. It is written into the answer He gave a teacher of Israel in John 3:8, and the Spirit blows where He wishes without waiting on anybody's comprehension to give Him permission.

And here is the thing itself, plainly. Birth is not a decision executed well. Nobody arranged their own. John says it in his first chapter: born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. Every clause names somebody who does not do it, and the last names the One who does.

You have a word here that puts the work on the right side of the table, and it was never your side. John 1:13 rules out blood, flesh and human will one at a time and leaves God holding the whole load, and it is His Spirit doing that work rather than the strength of anybody's wanting.