The Paint Under His Fingernails

The last thing in the truck is the ladder, and the ladder is already in, so the job is done. Marco is sitting sideways on the open tailgate with his boots swinging and the sun coming low along the street, and he is picking at his hands.

It is a good job. Two hundred year old trim on the front of a house that had been let go, and he brought it back, and the woman came out at four and stood on her own path with her hand over her mouth. That does not happen every week. He should be driving home.

Instead there is a fleck of eggshell white in the seam beside the nail on his right index finger, and he is working at it with his thumbnail, and when that one comes out there is another one under the middle finger, and behind that there is the ridge of it along the cuticle where it always gets in.

He has a rag in the truck box with thinner on it. He has already used the rag. He has the pumice soap in the tub under the seat and he has already used that, at the client's outside faucet, twice, before he loaded the ladder.

His hands are clean. Anybody looking at them would say clean.

There is a thing from before he was married. He is forty four now and it was a long way back, and he told God about it in a way he has never told anybody else, and he meant it right down to the floor. He is not a man who says things he does not mean. He has never gone back to it.

And he sits on a tailgate at the end of a good day with a fleck of eggshell white in the seam beside his nail, and he works at it, and works at it, and the light goes off the street.

His wife will ask him if the job went well. He will say it went great, because it did.

One thing first, because it matters more here than anywhere. I am speaking to the one whose thing was his own doing, confessed and settled and still somehow on him. If what is on you was put there by somebody else, this is not the page for you, and nothing on it is addressed to you as though you had sinned; there is another written for you on this site and you belong there. Here is what I want to say to you if you have a version of this, whatever the material is in your case. The picking is not a character flaw and it is not a failure of belief. It is a man aiming the only thing he owns at a surface he can actually get to. And there is a verse that names precisely what you have been trying to do, and takes it out of your hands, and I want to hand it to you the way somebody once handed it to me.

Not by works of righteousness

Here is the sentence, and it is one long clause, so take it slow.

Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost.

The first four words do a lot of work. Not by works. And then Paul adds something he did not have to add: works of righteousness which we have done.

That is not talking about bad things. Read it again. He is ruling out the good ones. He is saying that the actual good a person has done, the real and sincere efforts, the honest attempts, the pumice soap and the thinner and the second wash at the client's faucet, are not the mechanism. Not because they are worthless. Because they were never the thing that did it.

You are washed by a mercy that never once consulted the quality of your work, and it did not start consulting it later either. Titus 3:5 rules out works of righteousness by name, and it is the Holy Spirit, named in that same sentence, who takes a written mechanism and makes it actual in a man, so this does not rest on how convincingly you can feel it on a tailgate.

Now I want to be careful here, because a painter hearing not by works can hear an insult to his trade, and that is not what this is.

Your work is good. Do it well. The woman on the path with her hand over her mouth was not imagining anything. There is real dignity in a job done right and God is not embarrassed by a man who takes pride in his hands.

The verse is not against work. It is against work as a mechanism for cleanness. Those are two entirely different claims and the difference is the whole of the gospel. A ladder is an excellent thing and a terrible bridge. Nothing is wrong with the ladder.

You have a cleanness on you that arrived by a route your hands were never on, and that is why nothing you do to them now can improve it or damage it. It is written in the plainest terms in that verse, and His Spirit is the one carrying a finished mechanism into a life, which is why it holds at the end of a day when nothing in you agrees.

The washing of regeneration

The middle of the verse is where it gets specific, and I love this because it is a trade word.

By the washing of regeneration.

Not by a washing of the surface. Regeneration means made again, from the beginning, from the substrate. Anybody who has ever taken paint back to bare wood knows the difference between a coat and a strip. A coat sits on top of what is already there and does what it can with it. A strip takes it back and starts from the material.

Paul does not say God gave the old thing a fresh coat. He says the substrate was made again.

And that is why the fleck by the nail cannot be evidence of anything, whatever it feels like at four in the afternoon. It is a surface item on a thing that was replaced underneath.

You were made again at the substrate, and the surface has never once been where God's verdict was reading from. Scripture says washing of regeneration and not touching up, and the same Spirit named at the end of that verse is the one testifying to a rebuilt substrate inside a person, so the argument on the tailgate is not the argument that decided it.

I want to put something here in the middle where nobody can skip it. If the picking has grown until it is taking the evenings, or if the nights have gone long and the thinking has traveled past regret into wishing to be gone, get a person alongside you. Call a doctor. Sit down with a counselor. If tonight is a dark one, call or text 988 or your local crisis line and let another human being be in it with you. That is not the smaller road and it is not a crack in anybody's faith. God has always worked through people, and one of them across the table from you is part of what He is doing rather than an alternative to it.

According to his mercy

There is one more phrase and it is the hinge of the sentence.

According to his mercy he saved us.

According to. Not in response to. Not in proportion to. According to means measured out from a source, the way a payment is drawn according to an account. The amount is set by what is in the account, and what is in the account has nothing to do with the man standing at the counter.

So the size of the mercy is not calculated from the size of your case, in either direction. A man who thinks his thing was small does not get less of it. A man who thinks his thing was enormous does not need more of it than exists. It is drawn according to His mercy, and that is a bottomless account, and the teller is not looking up at you while he counts.

You have been drawn on an account whose balance was never affected by anything in your file. That is what according to his mercy says in Titus 3:5, and it is the Spirit of God who presses that into the place where a man keeps his real fears, which is exactly why it does not thin out when the evening does.

Now let me be honest with you about what I am not saying. I am not telling you that you get in the truck tonight and your hands stop bothering you. That is not mine to promise and I would rather you trusted me than felt better for ten minutes. The fact and the feeling are separate items and they do not always show up on the same day.

What I am telling you is which one is load bearing.

You are clean right now while the fleck is still in the seam, and the fleck has no standing to testify. It is written, and it is His Spirit rather than the strength of your agreement who makes a written thing real in a body, so a man can be clean on a tailgate with nothing at all moving in him.