I Apologize Before I Say Anything

The apology comes first. It has come first for so long that he did not know it was there until his son said something.

The boy is nine, and he prays out loud at the table the way children do, straight into the middle of whatever he wants, and one evening he asked his father why he always says sorry at the beginning.

He did not have an answer. He went and listened to himself for a week and found the boy was exactly right.

Every prayer opens with an accounting. Nothing dramatic, no long confession, just a settling of the books before anything else can happen: sorry about this week, sorry I have not been in this chair for a few days, sorry that this is the same thing again. And then, once the ground is level, he begins.

It has never once occurred to him that this is optional. It is not guilt exactly. It is more like a man wiping his feet, and he has been doing it at the same door for twenty two years.

If your praying opens with an apology, come and sit in the courtyard. Nothing about your week is going to be gone through here.

What the apology is actually paying

Let us look at what that opening does, because it is not what it appears to be.

It presents itself as humility. It functions as a toll. Something in a man decided a long time ago that access has a small entry price, payable each time, and that the currency is a brief acknowledgement of unworthiness before anything is asked for.

And a toll implies a gate, and a gate implies that the way is closed by default and opened per visit.

That is the belief underneath the manners, and it is worth seeing, because it is not what Scripture describes at all.

You are not paying at a gate. Nothing you say at the start has ever purchased entry, and the way was not closed and reopened for you this evening. I am not saying it to be easy on you. The written word says by a new and living way, which he hath consecrated for us, through the veil (Hebrews 10:20), where the way is described as already made and standing, and the Holy Spirit is the One who keeps it true in a courtyard at the end of a long day.

The verse that dates it

Here is what changed this for me, and it is not permission to take sin lightly.

Read the first word of the sentence, because most people go past it to get to the famous part.

There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus.Romans 8:1

Now. That is a word about timing and it is doing all the work. Not later, once something has been settled. Not intermittently, depending on the week. Now, at the moment of reading, in whatever condition the reader is in.

And notice where the freedom is located: to them which are in Christ Jesus. It is positional. It belongs to where a person is standing rather than to how their fortnight went.

You are standing in a place where the accounting has already been done, and the Word dates it now. That is written with the timing built into the first line, and it is the Holy Spirit who lands it in a man who has been wiping his feet for twenty two years.

This is not permission to stop repenting

Something has to be said carefully, or by Friday this becomes something it was never meant to be.

Repentance is real and it stays. When something needs saying to God, say it, fully and specifically, because that is honest and it is good and it is part of walking with Him.

What comes off is only the toll: the automatic, unspecific, every-single-time apology that is not about anything in particular and functions purely as an entry fee.

You have a settled position and a real relationship, and confession inside a relationship is a different act from a payment at a door. Scripture says if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins (1 John 1:9), which describes something done between people who are already at home together, and the Holy Spirit, not the wording, is the one who has been in the courtyard for twenty two years of unnecessary tolls.

And if this has cost more than anybody at this table knows, if sleep has gone, if the evenings have started to frighten, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.