I Went Looking For The Price

He is not a scholar and he would be annoyed if you called him one. He is a man who reads carefully because he was taught to, by a woman who is dead now, at a table not unlike this one.

And what he sat down to do on Tuesday night was not devotional. It was practical, and it was slightly hostile, and he would admit that.

He wanted to know the minimum.

Not out of meanness. Out of arithmetic. Things have been tight for two years and are going to stay tight, and he has heard a great many things said from a great many fronts about what a person owes, and he decided he was going to stop taking anybody's word for it and go and find the number himself.

So he took the pencil and the notebook and he went looking for the price.

Every place where somebody comes to God. Every doorway. Every invitation. Everywhere in the whole book where a person arrives with something in their hands or without it, and he wrote down what was required.

He was at it until nearly two on Tuesday and about the same on Wednesday.

And here is what he has got, on the second page of the notebook, in his own writing, with the underline he does when a thing has surprised him.

Nothing. There is no minimum. He could not find one.

He looked for it properly, the way you look for a fault in a wall, and it is not there, and he has been slightly winded ever since.

And you know that, because you have gone looking for what you owe somewhere and been unable to find the figure.

He looked for the minimum and there is not one

Let us settle what governs this whole page. It is not a technique, and there is nothing on it for you to bring.

You are looking at an invitation, and the One being tested inside it is God. Follow the verb in that famous sentence and it lands on Him. He is the one under examination. He is the one who offered to be found out. And there is no appeal at the bottom of this page, no ask, nothing smaller instead, nothing to sign. It is written, and thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts (Malachi 3:10), and it is the Holy Spirit, not this page, who takes the sentence back off the people who borrowed it.

Now the verse in its own room, because it is the one everybody quotes at the door.

Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. And thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need.Malachi 3:10

Said to a whole nation, in one decade, about one building, where the store room had emptied and the families who worked there had gone home hungry. It is a sentence about people eating. It is not a doorway and it is not a door charge, and it has never had anything to do with what you personally have or do not have.

Now the notebook, because the search was a good search and it came out right.

God has never once set a minimum at the door, and the invitation is stated in the negative on purpose. Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters, and he who has no money, come, buy and eat, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price (Isaiah 55:1). Read the construction. It does not say the price is low. It says the word without, twice, and it puts the phrase he who has no money into the invitation itself, so that nobody would have to work out whether they qualified.

And the whole book closes on the same construction. Let the one who desires take the water of life without price (Revelation 22:17). Not a reduced price. Without price. The last words of the last invitation.

You are welcome exactly as you are tonight, and there is no version of you that would be more welcome, including the version who could afford a minimum if there were one. It is written that by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast (Ephesians 2:8). Notice how the sentence keeps closing the same door: not your doing, a gift, not works, no boasting. Four separate negatives on one point, which is exactly what a careful reader would expect if the point were being defended against a very natural human instinct. His Spirit is what makes that read as relief rather than as a passage a man can already parse.

Now what your search actually found, stated as it stands.

God has not moved further off because your hands are empty, and there is no schedule anywhere in that book listing what a person owes at the door. It is written that while we were still weak, at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly (Romans 5:6), and Paul, who wrote that, immediately points out how unusual it is: one will scarcely die for a righteous person, though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die. He is naming the human floor and then showing that God went underneath it. The Spirit is the one who makes that a door you can walk through at two in the morning.

And if you want the thing that settles the arithmetic completely, it is this: who has given a gift to Him that he might be repaid (Romans 11:35). There is no account to open, and that is not generosity toward the poor. It is the nature of the party on the other side of the table.

Now the guardrail, and it matters more here than anywhere else on this site.

Nothing on this page is going to suggest what you could do instead, or offer, or manage. There is no small thing, no time, no service standing in for anything. Nobody here is going to tell you how well you are handling it. Your situation is not a lesson and it is not somebody else's illustration, and you are not being looked at. You are being spoken to. The Holy Spirit is the One who takes a line spoken in one decade and makes it live in an ordinary room today.

And nobody here is going to predict that anything changes, because nobody writing to you has been given the right to say that. What is written is what is being said: God is close, there is no entry price, and He is not rationing His nearness.