Interrupted Is Not Free

Eleven times. You have counted, which tells its own story.

The first one was thirty-one days and you were extremely pleased with yourself. The longest was four months, which was the year of the course, when you were busy and tired and genuinely thought it had gone. The shortest was a Tuesday.

Every single one of them worked. That is what nobody understands about this. You are not a person who cannot stop. You are one of the world's great stoppers. You have proved eleven separate times that you can put a thing down and keep it down for weeks at a stretch by pure force of decision.

And here is the sentence that has been sitting on you since about March, and I think it is the reason you are reading this.

You have never once, in eleven attempts, had a day of not wanting it.

Not one. Not at day thirty of the good run. Not at month four. The wanting was there the entire time, underneath, completely unchanged, and what you were doing every day for four months was standing on a lid.

So the four months was not freedom. It was a very long interruption, held in place by a person, and the person got tired, because people do.

And you have started to work out what that means about the next twenty years, and it is not a comfortable piece of arithmetic to be doing at your age.

Paul asked the question you have been asking

There is a chapter in the written word where the most capable man in the New Testament describes exactly the thing you have been doing, with the Holy Spirit standing over the page, and then, at the end of it, does something people almost never do in public.

He gives up.

O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?Romans 7:24

Read the grammar of it, because the grammar is where the whole answer sits.

He does not say: what shall deliver me. He does not ask for a method, a discipline, a plan or a better week. He asks who.

That is a man who has run out of technique and has understood that what he needs is not a stronger version of himself but a different person entirely, arriving from outside, and doing something he cannot do from in here.

And the next verse answers him by name, and the chapter after it says the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made him free, and free is a different word from stopped.

So take that now, on your eleventh attempt. You are not a failed self-controller. The written word puts deliverance in a Person and never once in a method, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries out the freeing, and the reason eleven successful stops have not touched the wanting is not that you were weak. It is that the wanting was never in the department you were working in.

Stopping is your job. Wanting is not.

I want to divide this very clearly, because the confusion here is what has been costing you years.

Your behavior is yours. Genuinely. The written word gives you real authority over what your hands do, and the Holy Spirit has been in every one of those eleven runs, and none of it was wasted. The thirty-one days were thirty-one days that were actually different, and God saw all of them.

But the appetite underneath your behavior is not in the same department, and you have been trying to reach it with the wrong tool for years. The written word puts that room in God's hands and the Holy Spirit is the one with the key to it. You have been using discipline, which is an excellent tool, on something discipline cannot get to.

And here is the trap that has been closing on you, so let me name it before it does. Eleven successes with no change underneath produce a very specific conclusion in a person, and the conclusion is: it must be me. There must be something wrong with me specifically, because I keep doing the thing correctly and it keeps not working.

That conclusion is a lie, and it did not come from God, and you can put it down right now.

You have a Deliverer and not a technique. His word asks who and not what, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes free rather than the one who helps you hold on, and nothing about eleven attempts has disqualified you from the twelfth being different in kind.

The plain hall and the doctrine preached in it

There was a hall in Los Angeles in 1895 where a man named Phineas Bresee would not let anybody rent a seat, and what he preached in that plain room was a clean heart: an inward work of God, offered to people the respectable world had decided were not eligible for one.

The two go together and they are almost always pulled apart.

Because here is what happens to this doctrine when it is preached in a room where the good seats are bought. It becomes a standard. It becomes a level. It becomes something you can be behind on, and then it becomes a quiet ranking of Christians, and then a woman on her eleventh attempt hears the whole thing as an accusation.

In a room with no reserved seats it stays what it actually is, which is a gift handed to somebody who has nothing, arriving from outside, doing what they could not.

There is nothing here you can fail. There is only something you can ask for. The written word puts the whole of it in His hands and the Holy Spirit is the one who does it, and you are eligible today, at eleven attempts, exactly as you are.