She was right. That is the thing you have never been able to get round.
About the boy in the year above, she was right, and you found that out four years later and it cost you a great deal in the meantime. About the thing you were going to do at eighteen, she was right, and you did not listen and it went exactly the way she said. About two of your friends, she was right, and you have never told anybody that.
Six years she ran that group, and she gave up her whole Friday evening for six years, and she prepared properly, and she never once said anything to any of you that was not true.
And you cannot think about her warmly.
You have tried. You have been trying, on and off, for about twenty years, because you know what you owe her and because being unable to feel gratitude toward somebody you owe is a specific and horrible kind of discomfort.
And there is nothing there. Respect, yes. A kind of wincing admiration. Warmth, no.
Here is why it matters, and it is not about her at all.
She was the first serious Christian you ever spent real time with, and something in you concluded, at about fifteen, without ever putting it in words, that this is what it looks like when a person actually means it.
And you have been quietly avoiding meaning it for twenty years.
Paul lists the fruit and correctness is not on it
There is a list everybody has heard, and I want you to read it slowly and notice what is missing from it.
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance.Galatians 5:22
Nine things. Read them again.
Accuracy is not there. Being right is not there. Discernment about which boy in the year above is a bad idea is not on that list, and neither is the ability to see a mistake coming four years off.
Those are real capacities and some of them are gifts, and she had them, and they are not the fruit.
The fruit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance, and it is what grows on a person when the Spirit is at work in them, and it is the actual test of what is happening inside a life.
So take this now, twenty years on. You were shown a set of capacities and told it was the fruit. The written word lists nine things and correctness is not one of them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who grows what is on that list, and what you have been avoiding for two decades is not holiness at all.
She was not a fraud and she was not the picture
Now let me be careful, because it would be very easy to write a page that made a woman who gave up six years of Friday evenings into a villain, and I will not do it, and you would not thank me for it.
She was not pretending. Everything she did, she did at real cost, and she was very likely lonely in ways none of you could see at fifteen.
And here is a thing worth knowing about people who are right all the time. They are usually right because they are watching very carefully, and people watch carefully when they are afraid of something, and there is nearly always a story underneath it that nobody at fifteen is in a position to know.
So put down the question of what she was. You cannot answer it from here and it is not yours to settle.
What is yours is the picture. At fifteen you took a photograph of what a serious Christian is, and it was a photograph of one woman on a Friday evening in a particular decade, and you have been using it as the definition ever since.
You are free to take another picture. His word gives you the nine and none of them is accuracy, and the Holy Spirit is the one who produces them, and what grows on a life He is at work in is warmer than what you were shown.
The plain hall and the word it was built on
In 1895 a man named Phineas Bresee opened a hall near the middle of Los Angeles and made a rule that not one seat in it could be rented, and the doctrine that hall existed to preach was holiness.
That is worth sitting with for a second, because the word probably makes you tighten slightly, and the room does not fit the tightening at all.
Read what that place was actually like. Free seats. People off the street. Missions running in the neighborhood every day of the week. Suppers. Noise.
Holiness in that room was a warm word and it was preached to people who had been told they were not eligible for it, and the fruit of it was that they went out and sat with the people nobody else would sit with.
There is a version of the word that is cold and severe and correct, and it is a hundred years downstream of that room, and it is not the original.
The written word lists nine things and warmth is all over them, and the Holy Spirit is the one growing them.
Take a different photograph.
Not of her. Of what a serious Christian looks like, and take it from somebody else, and take it deliberately.
There is a person in your life, or on the edge of it, who is plainly the real thing and who is also warm. There nearly always is. You may not have counted them, because at fifteen you learned that warmth means somebody is not serious, and so a person who is both does not register properly.
Go and look at them on purpose. Put yourself near them. Notice what they are actually like.
And then start letting the word holiness point at that person instead.
You are free to want this. The written word puts nine warm things on the list and no cold ones, and the Holy Spirit is the one who grows them, so what you have been avoiding is a photograph and never the thing itself.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, standing, on your own. The right to speak them was not earned by getting anything right and is not lost by twenty years of avoidance. It is Christ's own authority, delegated, and because you are in Christ it has been given to you whole, today. Speak them under not my will, but Thine: He grows and He warms in His own way and in His own timing, and one awkward kindness is never the measure of what He has settled.
- Cold correctness, you are not the fruit and you never were. The written word lists nine things that grow where the Spirit works and not one of them is being right, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the growing.
- Photograph I took at fifteen, get out of the middle of that word. Jesus is the holiest person who has ever existed and people wanted to be near Him, and His Spirit produces the same, so I go and look at somebody warm on purpose, in the name of Jesus.
- Lord, You put love and joy and gentleness on that list and left accuracy off it entirely, and Your word says it and Your Spirit does it. I do one imperfect kindness this week, and I do not correct it afterwards.
Galatians 5:22
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.
