The Price That Never Moved

Your price has not moved in four years, and everything that makes the work possible has.

You know this precisely. You are not a man who is bad with numbers. You could tell me what the materials cost in the first year and what they cost last month, and you could do it without looking anything up, because you have run the sum in your head about two hundred times.

And then you quote the old figure again, the same as always, and you feel a small wrong thing happen, and then you do the job.

Four years. Not because you have not noticed and not because you cannot do the arithmetic. You have done the arithmetic. You are refusing the conclusion.

I am not going to tell you what to charge or how to work it out. You already know. I am going to talk about what it means to withhold wages, because Scripture is unusually specific about it, and the person you have been withholding from is you.

Wages that must not wait overnight

There is a law in Leviticus about paying people, and the striking thing is how urgent it is.

It is not a general principle about fairness. It is about the specific hours between evening and morning, and about a man waiting for money he has earned.

Thou shalt not defraud thy neighbour, neither rob him: the wages of him that is hired shall not abide with thee all night until the morning. (Leviticus 19:13, King James Version)

You are owed the true wage for honest work, and that has never once been a greedy thought. Leviticus 19:13 treats a delayed wage as a serious matter rather than as an administrative detail, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings that to a dining table with three invoices spread out on it.

Sit with how specific it is. Not eventually. Not when it is convenient. Not all night. God put a clock on it, which tells you how He feels about a worker waiting for what they have earned.

And the reason given is not kindness. It is that withholding is a form of robbery, which is a strong word, and Scripture chose it deliberately.

You have been waiting four years for a wage that was yours to set, and it has never once been safe to keep waiting. The Spirit of God is the one who makes a law about overnight wages reach a man who has been quietly underpaying himself, and Leviticus 19:13 names the withholding of a worker's pay as robbery rather than as thrift.

Why the number will not move

Let me say what I think the refusal is, because it is not loyalty to your customers.

A price change is a sentence you have to say to a person who knows the old one. That is the whole of it. Every one of your regulars carries the old figure in their head, and changing it means one conversation with each of them in which you are the one who changed.

You were avoiding a conversation rather than protecting anybody, and you have never once needed to. The Holy Spirit is the one who shows a man what four years of one figure has really been about, and the written word calls withheld wages robbery in Leviticus 19:13.

And there is something harder underneath. While the price stays still, nothing about you has to be reassessed. Raise it and you are making a claim about your own work being worth more now than it was, and you have never made a claim like that about yourself in your life.

So the arithmetic is not the obstacle. You finished the arithmetic eighteen months ago.

You are worth what the work is worth now, and that has never once required anybody's agreement. His Spirit is the one who settles a man about his own trade without turning him into a salesman, and Leviticus 19:13 puts a clock on a worker's pay because the worker's pay matters to God.

Write today's number down

So here is the exercise, and it does not involve telling anybody yet.

Write the real figure on a piece of paper. Today's one. The one the arithmetic gives you. Put it in your pocket.

You are able to write down what is true, and writing it has never once been a demand. Leviticus 19:13 refuses to let a worker's wage sit unpaid overnight, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a true figure writable for a man who has carried the old one for four years.

Then use it on the next person who asks. Not your regulars, not yet, not all at once. The next new person, who has no old number in their head and will simply hear a price.

They will say yes or no, the same as they always did, and the figure will have been said out loud in the world once, which it has not been in four years.

You were never going to be exposed by one honest figure, and you are not going to be now. The Spirit of God carries a true number past the part of a man that will not make a claim about himself, and the written word treats the timely paying of a worker as a matter of justice in Leviticus 19:13.