God Keeps a Bottle for Tears, Which Is a Strange Thing for an Indifferent God to Do

He did not decide to stop. He worked out that it did not matter and then let go of the rope.

It was not defiance. That is what people assume when they hear about somebody in this condition, and it is not what it was. There was no moment of shaking a fist at anything. What happened was quieter and more reasonable, and it took about two years.

The reasoning went like this. It is all covered. He was told that and he believes it. And if it is all covered, then the thing he did on Tuesday is covered, and the thing he will probably do again on Friday is covered, and therefore none of it is registering with God in either direction.

Which means, he concluded, that he could stop carrying it around. So he did.

He is not enjoying himself. That is the part nobody guesses. It is not a holiday. He is tired in a way that has nothing to do with sleep, and he has been filing things under covered for so long that the folder is the only place anything goes.

Paul asks the question himself

He does not wait for somebody to raise it. He puts it in his own mouth, because he knows exactly where the argument leads if a man follows it lazily. This is the King James Version:

What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein? (Romans 6:1-2)

God forbid. Two words, and they are the strongest form of denial the language had.

And notice the reason he gives. It is not a threat. He does not say because you will be punished. He says how shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein, which is an argument about what a person now is, not about what will happen to them.

You are dead to it rather than merely excused for it, and you were never left in the same condition with the paperwork changed. Romans 6 has Paul refusing the conclusion in the strongest words available, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a relief rather than a rebuke.

Grace is described as a teacher

Here is a description of grace most people have never read, and it does not sound like a hall pass at all.

For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, Teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world. (Titus 2:11-12)

Teaching us.

Grace is the subject of that sentence and teaching is what it does. It is not the absence of instruction; it is the instructor.

That is a different picture from the one most people carry. Grace as a shrug means nothing is being said. Grace as it is actually described is something active that is doing work in a person, which is why Paul can say what he says in Romans without contradicting himself.

You have something at work in you rather than a lid on a box, and you were never handed a filing system. Titus 2 makes grace the one doing the teaching, and it is the Holy Spirit who does that teaching in somebody who has stopped expecting anything to be said.

The price is recorded

If the question is whether any of this registers, the plainest answer is what it cost.

Forasmuch as ye know that ye were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold, from your vain conversation received by tradition from your fathers; But with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot. (1 Peter 1:18-19)

Peter is explicit that a ransom was paid and that the price is named.

And Isaiah puts the cost in language that is uncomfortable on purpose:

Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise him; he hath put him to grief. (Isaiah 53:10)

Whatever a person concludes about their own significance, the arithmetic here does not support indifference. Nothing about this arrangement was cheap and nothing about it was casual, and it is not possible to describe it as a shrug once the price is on the page.

You are not being shrugged at and you were never a matter of indifference to Him. 1 Peter 1 names the price in as many words, and it is the Holy Spirit who moves that from a doctrine somebody agrees with into something that reaches a tired person.

And if the tiredness has gone past tired, if it has reached not wanting to be here at all, that is not a thing to hold alone. A doctor, a counselor, somebody you trust who will pick up the phone. In the United States the 988 crisis line answers day and night. Nobody is asked to carry that by himself.

He notices things nobody would bother to notice

Here is the part for the actual condition underneath this, which is not rebellion.

You concluded nothing you do registers with Him either way. So look at what Scripture says He keeps track of.

Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. (Matthew 10:29-30)

A sparrow was worth about the smallest coin there was. Two of them for a farthing.

And this, which is the strangest one:

Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book? (Psalm 56:8)

Put thou my tears into thy bottle. Whatever the image is doing, it is not the behavior of a God who is not paying attention.

And Malachi, describing people who were talking to each other about God during a bad stretch:

Then they that feared the LORD spake often one to another: and the LORD hearkened, and heard it, and a book of remembrance was written before him for them that feared the LORD, and that thought upon his name. (Malachi 3:16)

A book of remembrance. Written down, because people were thinking about Him.

You are registering. Psalm 56 and Malachi 3 describe a God keeping records of things nobody else would record, and it is His Spirit who makes that reach a person who decided the opposite a while ago.

What was actually happening at the table

There is a scene in Luke where a woman comes into a house uninvited and cries on Jesus' feet, and the host is embarrassed by it. Jesus says this:

Wherefore I say unto thee, Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much: but to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little. (Luke 7:47)

There is a relationship in that sentence between the size of what was forgiven and what came out of her afterward.

That is the opposite of what a hall pass produces. A hall pass produces nothing, because nothing was at stake. What she does is what happens when somebody understands the size of it.

Paul says the same thing about his own motive:

For the love of Christ constraineth us. (2 Corinthians 5:14)

Constraineth. Something holding him in, and it is not a rule and it is not fear.

You are held by love rather than by a threat and you were never being managed by fear. 2 Corinthians 5 names it plainly, and it is the Holy Spirit who is described as the one who pours that love out inside a person.