I Unplugged It And I Have Blamed Myself Since

Two weeks ago you took hold of something and pulled it out of the wall.

There was a reason at the time. Something needed moving, or cleaning behind, or the thing was warm and you were not certain it should be. It came away easily. You put it back. You thought no more about it for about four hours.

Then something in the house was slow.

And a small door opened in your mind that has not closed since.

Since that afternoon, everything has been evidence. The screen that took a moment to come up. The picture that would not load. The thing your wife mentioned in passing about hers being odd too. Each one goes into the same pile, and the pile has your name on it.

You have not told anybody. That is the part I want to look at first, because it is doing more damage than any cable ever could.

You have not told anybody because to ask about it you would have to say what you did, and saying what you did feels like a confession, and a man does not want to sit in his own kitchen confessing something to his own children.

So you carry it instead. Two weeks of carrying it.

There is therefore now no condemnation

I want to bring you a verse that was not written about cables and is exactly about what has been happening in that kitchen.

There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. (Romans 8:1, King James Version)

Read the first four words again. There is therefore now.

Now. Not at the end of the week once the house is behaving again. Not after somebody comes and checks. Now, while the pile is still on the table and while nobody yet knows what caused what.

You are living under a sentence that nobody passed but you, and there has never once been a court in heaven that took a cable as evidence. Romans 8:1 says there is therefore now no condemnation, and the Holy Spirit is the one who says the word now over a man who has been saying not yet.

Condemnation is not the same thing as being at fault. Condemnation is the sentence that comes after the verdict. It is a man deciding privately what he deserves and then serving it, without a hearing, without evidence, and with nobody in the room to speak for him.

That is what has been going on in that house for two weeks. A quiet sentence, served alone.

You have a Judge who has already ruled on you, and fourteen days of collecting evidence against yourself have never once reopened a case He closed. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes a settled verdict feel settled, and the written word puts that no condemnation in the present tense where a man can stand on it today.

Notice also what the verse does not do. It does not say that nothing went wrong. It does not say a man did nothing. It refuses the sentence rather than the facts, and that is a different and far better thing than being told you are imagining it.

Something may in fact have come loose that mattered. That is entirely possible. What is not possible is that pulling it out made a man guilty.

You were never on trial for what happened behind that cabinet, and a loose connection has never once been a charge against a person. It is written in Romans 8:1 that the condemnation is gone now and not later, and the Spirit of God is the one who separates what a man did from what a man is.

What a cable can and cannot do

Let me be concrete, because a general reassurance does not move anybody and I am not going to offer one.

A cable does one of two things. It carries power, or it carries a signal. When it is out, the thing at the far end of it stops. When it goes back in, the thing at the far end of it starts. That is very nearly the whole story, and it is the same story behind a television as it is under a desk.

What a cable cannot do is reach forward in time. It cannot make a different thing slow on Thursday because of what happened on Monday. It cannot make something in another room behave oddly. It cannot damage a thing invisibly and then wait.

And here is the fact nobody ever told you, because the people who could tell you learned it so young that they do not know it is a fact. A thing that has been pulled out and put back is, more often than not, better afterward than it was before. That exact motion is the commonest repair there is.

You are holding an ordinary piece of house wiring in your memory, and it has never once had the power to follow a man around for two weeks. The Spirit of God is the one who lets a man set down a weight he was never issued, and Scripture refuses the sentence while leaving the facts exactly where they are.

Everything else in that pile has its own reasons, and most of them are dull. Things get slow. Things need a rest. Things behave strangely in the evening when the whole street is using them at once.

Unrelated events have been going into one file, all of them filed under one afternoon, by one man, working alone, with no case to answer.

You have been keeping a file on yourself that you were never appointed to keep, and the appointment has never once existed. Romans 8:1 puts the judging into hands that are not yours, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man put down a job nobody gave him.

A question is not a confession

Now the harder half of this, which is the not telling.

Somewhere in the last two weeks, asking about it became the same thing as confessing it, and confessing it became handing somebody a story about yourself that they would keep and take out again later. Let me take that apart gently, because it will not survive being taken apart.

There is a confession a man makes to God, and it is real, and it is answered, and Romans 8 is exactly what stands on the other side of it. There is no second confession owed to anybody about a cable. What is in front of you now is not a sin to be confessed. It is a question to be asked.

That difference is not a small one, because a question can be asked in a normal voice, on a normal day, without any preamble at all.

You are able to ask a plain question about a plain thing, and a question has never once been a confession wearing a coat. The same Spirit who is called the Comforter is the one who takes the tremble out of a man's voice at his own table, and it is written that there is now no condemnation left to be afraid of.

And if the worry is what they will think when they hear it, hold this next part.

The people who are best at these things unplug things constantly. It is the first move they make, before they think, before they look at anything else. What happened by accident and in fear on that Saturday is the exact motion they perform on purpose and without a second thought.

You have already done the thing the confident ones do first, and you were never as far outside the room as it felt while you were doing it. Romans 8:1 says the condemnation is gone in the present tense, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present when a man says a sentence out loud for the first time.