Defer Not to Pay It

It was a corridor with a vending machine in it and he can describe the pattern on the floor.

His daughter was four hours into something the surgeon had said would take two, and nobody had come out, and he had gone to the end of the corridor to be sick and had not been.

He said it standing up, with his hands on his knees. He said it out loud, and it was specific, and it was not a bargain in the sordid sense, it was a man handing over the only thing he had left to hand over.

She came through. She is eleven now. There is a scar and a check-up every eighteen months and otherwise she is a girl who will not stop talking about horses.

That was four years ago.

He has not done the thing he said.

He has not forgotten it either. It comes back regularly, usually when something good happens, which he has noticed and thinks is probably not an accident.

Here is the sentence he has never said out loud.

He is afraid that going back to it now, four years late, would be worse than leaving it, because it would mean admitting he took something from God and did not pay.

Read the instruction and its tone

There is a line in Ecclesiastes about promises made to God, and its tone is not what people expect.

When thou vowest a vow unto God, defer not to pay it; for he hath no pleasure in fools: pay that which thou hast vowed.Ecclesiastes 5:4

Defer not to pay it. Pay that which thou hast vowed.

Read what the instruction actually is. It is not repent of having made it. It is not go through a process. It is not even explain yourself. The whole weight of the sentence lands on one action, and the action is paying.

And notice the direction. It is forward. Everything in that verse is about the payment rather than the delay, which means the writer's interest is in the thing getting paid and not in the man's four years of not paying it.

Your promise is payable now rather than closed by the delay, and Ecclesiastes 5:4 puts the whole instruction on paying it rather than on accounting for the years. That is what the word actually directs, not leniency I am inventing, and the Holy Spirit is the One who brings a corridor back to a man on purpose.

He has not been waiting to humiliate you

Now the plain thing, and it is about the fear rather than the vow.

The fear here is that going back means admitting something. It does. It means admitting you said a thing and did not do it, which is true and which He already knows and which has never once been news to Him.

What frightens you is actually the reception, and that fear is not built out of anything He has done. It is built out of how men handle a debt owed to them, and you've transferred that onto Him.

And notice the timing of when it surfaces. It comes back when something good happens. Read that as a threat and you will keep running. Read it as somebody quietly keeping a subject open rather than closing the file on you, and it is a completely different thing.

And nothing about four years has ever turned Him against you. Scripture instructs you to pay rather than to grovel, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting at the end of this to humiliate a father who was terrified in a corridor.

The first installment

Here is the practical piece, and it is not the whole vow.

Pay the first installment. This week.

Whatever you said in that corridor, there is a first real piece of it that can be done in the next seven days, and you know what it is because you've thought about this promise more than you've admitted.

If it was money, the first amount goes this week, not the total. If it was service, the first hour happens. If it was a change in how you live, the first concrete instance of it occurs on a specific day.

And do not preface it with an apology to God that takes a fortnight. The verse does not ask for that, and you would use the fortnight, and I have known men to spend four more years preparing to be sorry properly.

You are able to begin paying this week, and the paying was the whole instruction. Ecclesiastes 5:4 says defer not to pay it and pay that which thou hast vowed, and the Holy Spirit is the One who moves a man from a corridor to a first installment.