Arm Out, Eyes On the Poster

Somebody taped a poster to the ceiling of that hall about nine years ago and nobody has ever taken it down. It is a beach. There is a slogan across the bottom of it in white letters and the tape has gone yellow at all four corners.

She could describe that poster to you in her sleep. Nineteen years, every four months, same hall, same chair if she can get it, the one by the radiator. The nurses know her. There is a woman on the tea table who always says here she is and always gives her two of the good biscuits, and there is a young lad two chairs down today who has gone the color of paper and is being talked to very kindly by somebody who has clearly done this a thousand times.

She is happy here. That is the thing to understand. This is not a duty and it is not a penance and she does not think of it that way even slightly. She likes these afternoons.

And for eleven or twelve minutes, every four months, her arm is out and her eyes are on a beach.

It is the only room in her week where looking up at the ceiling is the perfectly normal thing to do, so nobody has ever once noticed, and she has never once had to explain it, and if you asked her about it she would say she was watching the poster, and that would be true.

If your chest tightened a little at that, sit down here beside me and let me be plain about who I am talking to. Not the one carrying something another person did to them. That is its own message on this site and it is written for you and it uses none of these words. Today I am talking to the woman who did something, years back, and took it to God straight, and meant every word of it, and has a conscience that will not stop ringing.

Two hurts, one remedy, and nobody separated them

Guilt says: I did something wrong. Shame says: I am something wrong.

They come in together and they sound alike, so nobody ever pulls them apart for you. Which is why an honest woman can confess a thing properly, and know she meant it, and find the weight sitting exactly where it was.

Confession is the medicine for guilt and it is a real one. It worked. That account closed and it has stayed closed. You would say so on a porch with a cup in your hand and you would not be putting on a face while you said it.

Shame is a different injury. It is not a verdict about a thing done, it is a verdict about a person, and the medicine for guilt does not reach it. So all those years of going back over it were not weak faith and they were not evidence about your heart. They were the right cure taken for the wrong complaint, by a woman doing her level best with what she had been told.

You are cleared of every count that was ever brought, and you are not the count. That is not me being kind to you. It is written that if we confess our sins He is faithful and just to forgive us, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the sound of my sentence, who takes a settled thing out of a woman's head and puts it down where she lives.

Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience.Hebrews 10:22

Full assurance. That is the phrase to hold on to, and I want to tell you what an evil conscience actually is, because it is not what most people think.

A conscience is a bell. It is meant to ring when something is wrong, and a person without one is in real trouble. Yours works. It rang, and you listened to it, and you went and did the thing the ringing was for, and the matter was settled.

An evil conscience is not a loud conscience. It is a bell that goes on ringing after the fire is out. It has stopped reporting a fact and started reporting a person, and once it does that it can ring for thirty years and never once tell you anything true.

You have a heart God Himself has quieted, and you have full assurance as something handed to you rather than something you generate. That is what the written word puts plainly, and His Spirit is the one who gets a bell to stop ringing in a woman who has learned to live under the noise of it.

Assurance is not the same as a feeling

I want to say something plain here, because plain is what I have.

Full assurance does not mean you will feel certain. It means the thing is certain. Those are different, and the difference is the whole ease of this.

A woman can be sure the deed to a place is in the drawer and still dream about being turned out of it. The dream is not evidence. The deed is the evidence, and the deed does not stop being a deed on a night when a person sleeps badly.

So we are not going to work on your feelings this afternoon. We are going to look at the deed.

You are held by an assurance that does not go up and down with the day, and you were given it as a fact and not as a mood. Scripture says He is not a man that He should lie, and it is His Spirit, not the weather in your chest, who keeps the seal on what He said.