Nine Years Of Being Fine About It

Your conduct has been immaculate.

I want to start there, because you have never been given credit for it and it has cost you more than anybody knows. Nine years. Every Christmas. Both funerals. The thing with the house, where you said the gracious sentence at exactly the right moment and everybody moved on, and your mother told somebody afterwards how well you had handled it.

You have never said one word about it. Not to your wife. Not to a friend after two drinks. Not once, in nine years, and if you had said it, even once, the shape of it would have changed, and you know that, and you still have not said it.

Here is what happens instead.

Somebody says his name. Not even in connection with anything. In a list of people coming to something in March.

And there is a movement under your ribs. It is about two seconds long. It has a physical location and you could point at it. And then it passes and you are perfectly normal and you say something about March.

Two seconds, for nine years.

You went into this thinking that time would do it. Everybody says time does it. And you have been unfailingly decent for nine years, which is the longest run of good behavior you have ever managed at anything, and the thing under your ribs is precisely the same size it was the week it happened.

Not smaller. Not sharper either, to be fair. Exactly the same, preserved, like something in a jar.

And what has started to frighten you, quietly, at about four in the morning, is the arithmetic. You are forty-six. If this is the method, you have thirty years of two seconds in front of you.

God does not say He will help you with it

There is a promise in Ezekiel that gets read as a general encouragement, and it is not general at all. It is extremely specific about who does what.

A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh.Ezekiel 36:26

Read the verbs and read who owns them. I will give. I will put. I will take away. I will give.

Four verbs and every single one of them belongs to God, and there is no instruction anywhere in the sentence. Nobody is told to try. Nobody is told to work on it. It is not a partnership described with a polite division of labor. It is a surgeon describing an operation.

So take this now, at forty-six, at four in the morning, before we go any further. You are not the one appointed to change what is under your ribs. It is written that He takes the stone out and puts flesh in, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does it, and the reason nine years of immaculate conduct has not touched it is not that you did not try hard enough. It is that it was never in your reach.

It was never in anybody's reach. That is the whole point of the promise.

The conduct was real and it is not the same thing

Now I have to hold two things at once, and I will not drop either, because the written word is generous about a man like you and the Holy Spirit has been with you through every one of those nine years.

The first is that the nine years count. They genuinely count. Every Christmas you were decent, your mother had a Christmas, and your children have a family, and none of that would exist if you had let the two seconds have their say even once. That is love, held at cost, for nine years, and I will not hear it called hypocrisy by anyone.

The second is that behavior and heart are two different things, and one of them was your job and the other one never was.

You have been doing your job flawlessly and quietly assuming the other one was failing. It was not failing. It was not started, because you have never once asked Him for it, and the written word puts that whole operation in His hands with the Holy Spirit carrying it out. You have asked for strength to keep going and He has given it, every year, and you have never asked Him to take the stone out.

I want to be careful here because this is where this gets bent every time it is preached. This is not a level you climb to. There is no second tier of Christian who has arrived at it. There is no room anywhere in which the people with clean hearts sit nearer the front, and if anybody ever handed you a list to measure yourself against, put it down, because it is not the shape of this.

You have a new heart on offer as a gift, not as an achievement. That is what is written and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives it.

The tradition this comes out of started in a plain room

There was a hall in Los Angeles in 1895 where a man named Phineas Bresee refused to let anybody rent a seat, and the doctrine he preached in that room was this one: a clean heart, offered to people who had been treated as though they were not eligible for one.

Those two things belong together and they are usually separated.

The free seats and the clean heart came out of the same conviction, which is that God gives what people cannot buy and cannot earn, and that the ones who arrive with nothing arrive first. A clean heart preached in a room with rented pews would have become another thing to be good enough for. Preached in a plain hall with no reserved seats, it stayed what it actually is.

You are eligible. Fully, this morning, in the state you are in, with the thing still in the jar. The written word puts the whole operation in God's hands and the Holy Spirit is not waiting for you to get further along first.