Eight weeks. You went to all of them and you took notes in the same notebook you still have.
The teaching was sound. That is what has made this so hard to talk about, because whenever you have tried to say anything about it, the first thing you have to concede is that there was nothing wrong with the content.
He was careful. He was thorough. He handled the texts properly and he did not overstate anything and he answered questions honestly, including two he did not have an answer to, which is more than most people manage.
And at the end of eight weeks you came out with a list.
Nine items, in your own handwriting, on the last page but one. Things to stop and things to start, all of them defensible, most of them things you have in fact done.
And you came out colder than you went in.
Not rebellious. Not angry. Colder, in the specific sense that the subject had become a piece of work rather than a place you wanted to go, and it has stayed that way for eleven years.
You have not been back to the subject since. Not a book, not a series, not a conversation. And you have never been able to say why, because the teaching was sound and there is nothing to complain about, and a woman who complains about sound teaching sounds like a woman who wants a softer gospel.
You do not want a softer gospel. You want the warm thing you went in looking for and did not come out with.
The verse puts two things in one instruction
There is a verse in Hebrews that is the standard text for the whole subject and it is quoted constantly, and it has a first half that gets dropped about half the time.
Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord.Hebrews 12:14
Follow peace with all men, and holiness.
They are in one instruction. Not two sentences and not a main point with an application attached. One verb, and two objects, and the first object is entirely about other people.
Peace with all men. Not with the ones who are easy. With all of them, which is a horizontal, exhausting, deeply practical business that involves phone calls and swallowing things and going first.
And that is inside the definition, not next to it.
So take this now, eleven years on. You are being pointed toward something that has other people in it. The written word puts peace with all men and holiness under a single verb, and the Holy Spirit is the one who works both, and any account of this subject that produces only a private list has dropped half of the verse it stands on.
He was not wrong. Something was missing.
Now let me name what I think happened in those eight weeks, and I am not going to attack a man who prepared carefully for eight weeks and answered honestly when he did not know.
What he taught was true.
What was missing was not accuracy. It was that nobody in that room was ever sent anywhere.
Eight weeks of a subject whose founding shape includes peace with all men, and at the end of it every person in that hall went home with a private list about their own interior life, and not one of them was put in a car with somebody on the Tuesday.
That is not a doctrinal error. It is a delivery that dropped the horizontal half, and it happens constantly, and it produces exactly what it produced in you: a subject that feels like maintenance.
And a person cannot love maintenance. Nobody has ever gone back for more maintenance eleven years later.
You are pointed at something that includes people. His word joins peace with all men to holiness in one instruction, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does both, and the coldness you came out with was a missing half and never the subject itself.
What the founding room did with the same doctrine
In 1895 a man named Phineas Bresee opened a hall near the middle of Los Angeles and would not let anybody rent a seat, and this exact doctrine is what that room existed to preach.
And here is the difference, and it is not in the content.
That hall had missions running in the streets outside it every day of the week. So a person who heard this taught on the Sunday was, by the Wednesday, in somebody's room with a plate in their hands.
The teaching and the sending were the same organism. Nobody in that building received this doctrine as a private project, because there was no time for it to become one; the horizontal half arrived within seventy-two hours, and it arrived as work rather than as an application point.
That is the whole difference between a doctrine that warms and a doctrine that chills, and it is not a difference of theology.
The written word puts peace with all men in the same instruction, and the Holy Spirit is the one who fills both halves.
Go back to the subject, and go back to it sideways.
Not another series. Not the book. If you go straight at it you will be back in that hall with a notebook inside four minutes, because that is the shape your body has for this subject.
Go at it through the first half of the verse instead.
Follow peace with all men. That is the doorway you have never used, and it is in the text and nobody can accuse you of avoiding anything, and it will take you straight into the same room by another door. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it true in you.
Pick one relationship that is not at peace. Make the phone call. Go first.
And notice, when you have done it, what has happened to the temperature of the word.
You are being called toward something that has people in it. The written word puts them in the instruction itself, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the work, so this is not you approaching a subject you have been avoiding. It is you finding the half of it you were never given.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, standing, in your own kitchen. The right to speak them was not earned by eight weeks of notes and is not lost by eleven years away. 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 warms and He works in His own way and in His own timing, and one cold notebook is never the measure of what He has settled.
- List, you are what I was handed and you are not what was promised. The written word puts peace with all men and holiness under one single verb, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does both halves of it.
- Coldness, get off this subject and out of my eleven years. Jesus never gave anybody a private project and His Spirit sends people into rooms, so I go back in through the first half of the verse, in the name of Jesus.
- Lord, You joined the two of them in one instruction and never separated them, and Your word says it and Your Spirit does it. I do one costly kindness this week for somebody I would rather not deal with, and I make no list about it afterwards.
Hebrews 12:14
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