You Called It Standards

You are very good at what you do and you have never once been careless.

That is not vanity. It is a description, and other people would give the same one. Things you are responsible for are correct. Things you say you will do are done, on the day, to the standard, and in thirty years there has been no exception worth mentioning.

And every time somebody near you is not like that, something happens in you that takes about a second, and you have had a word for it for so long that you have almost stopped hearing the word as a choice.

Standards. That is what you call it. I have high standards.

Here is what made you stop, three weeks ago.

Your nephew forgot to send a form. It was not important. It cost a fortnight and nothing else, and everybody in the family said, in the way families do, that he would get there in the end.

And you said something warm and correct and slightly amusing at the table, and everybody laughed, and it was fine, and afterwards, driving home, you replayed it and heard it properly for the first time.

It was not the sentence. The sentence was fine. It was the little movement of pleasure underneath it, about a second long, that you felt when the thing came out of your mouth.

You have felt that a thousand times and never once looked directly at it. And you looked at it in the car, and it was not standards.

You have not told anybody. What would you say. A man who says he has just discovered contempt in himself will be told, warmly, by everybody who knows him, that he is being far too hard on himself, and the telling will bury it again for another five years.

Paul gives the exact opposite motion and puts it in the mind

There is an instruction in Philippians that people read as a call to modesty, and it is not about modesty at all. It is about a direction of view, and it names the two things that turn a good man sour.

Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves.Philippians 2:3

Strife and vainglory. Those are the two, and neither of them looks like itself from the inside.

Strife arrives as being right. Vainglory arrives as having standards. Nobody in the history of the world has ever thought, I shall now do this through vainglory. It always comes wearing the name of a virtue, and usually one you actually have, which is why it is so hard to find.

And look at what he asks for as the cure. Not lower standards. Not a shrug about the form. Lowliness of mind, and an active esteeming of the other person as better, which is a movement of the mind and not a change to the work.

So take this now, in the car, three weeks after your nephew. You are not a hard man and I am not going to let you carry that word out of this page. The written word says the fault is a direction of view and never the diligence itself, and the Holy Spirit is the one who turns a direction, and thirty years of doing things properly has never been the problem.

The diligence is a gift. The passenger is not.

Now let me separate two things that have been traveling together for so long you may not have seen the join.

The care is real and it came from God, and the written word never treats diligence as a fault while the Holy Spirit keeps handing it out. Somebody has to be the person who checks. Somebody in every family, every firm and every congregation has to be the one who reads it before it goes, and God made a few people like that on purpose, and you are one of them, and the world runs on you.

That has never been the problem and I will not have you repenting of it.

What you found in the car was a passenger. Something that has been riding on a good gift for years, taking a small tax at every junction, one second at a time, and calling itself by the gift's own name.

And here is the thing that ought to give you hope rather than shame: you found it. Most men who have that never see it once in their lives, because it is completely hidden by a genuine virtue, and it took thirty years and a forgotten form and a drive home for you to catch a single second of it.

That was not you being clever. His word says the Spirit searches the deep things, and the Holy Spirit is the one who turned the light on in that car, and He does not turn a light on in order to leave a man standing in it.

What was preached in a plain hall

There was a hall in Los Angeles in 1895 where a man named Phineas Bresee refused to let anybody rent a seat, and what he preached in that plain room was a clean heart: God's own work, on the inside, given to people who had been treated as though they were not the sort who got one.

The room and the doctrine belong together, and for a man like you the room is the more important half.

Because preached anywhere with reserved seats, a clean heart becomes an attainment. And an attainment is precisely the fuel that your passenger runs on. You would have it, other people would not be as far along, and the whole apparatus would move indoors and get worse, and it would all be happening under the name of holiness, which is the most respectable cover it has ever had.

In a plain hall, nobody is further along. It is a gift, given to people who came in with nothing, and there is no ladder in the room to be higher up.

You are eligible tonight, exactly as you are, with the second still in you. The written word puts the whole of it in His hands and the Holy Spirit is the one who does it.