You Can List Them In Order

Somebody at work asked you about it in about the third year and you gave them the list.

You did not mean to give them a list. You were asked a friendly question by a decent man over a sandwich and you opened your mouth and out came seven things, in order, cleanly, without a pause anywhere in it.

He said, right, and nodded, and then said something about the weather.

That was eleven years ago and you have thought about it more often than you would admit, because what has never left you is how fluent it was. Not defensive. Not preachy. Fluent, the way a man is fluent about the thing he has heard described a thousand times.

Seven things you do not do. In order. No pause.

And here is the sentence that has been circling since about February, when your nephew asked you a variation of the same question and you heard yourself begin again.

You do not have the other one.

If somebody stopped you in a corridor tonight and asked what you are for, there would be a pause, and it would be long enough to be noticed, and then you would say something that started with the word well.

You have been in that faith for twenty-nine years. You know the doctrine properly. You could hold your own with anybody about most of it.

And the entire content of what you have been given about your own life is a set of subtractions, expressed as a list, learned so well that it comes out fluent to a stranger over a sandwich.

Paul gives the whole thing four words at the end

There is an image in a letter to a young minister about vessels in a large house, and everybody remembers the purging and almost nobody reads what the purging is in aid of.

If a man therefore purge himself from these, he shall be a vessel unto honour, sanctified, and meet for the master's use, and prepared unto every good work.2 Timothy 2:21

Purge himself from these. That is the list, and the list is genuinely there and I am not going to pretend it is not.

Now read the four things that follow it, because they are all destinations.

A vessel unto honor. Sanctified, meaning set apart. Meet for the master's use, which means fit to be picked up and used. Prepared unto every good work.

The purging occupies six words. The purpose occupies the rest of the verse, and the purpose is entirely about being usable.

A vessel that is only clean is not finished. A clean vessel sitting in a cupboard has not achieved the thing the passage is describing. The whole point of getting a jug clean is that somebody is going to pick it up.

So take this now, with a sandwich and eleven years behind you. You are made fit for use and not merely made empty. The written word puts four destinations after the purging, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the setting apart, and nobody has ever said the second half of that verse to you in twenty-nine years.

The list is not wrong. It is a fragment.

Now let me be careful, because there is a version of this that would have you throwing the list away, and that is not what I am saying and it would be a poor trade.

The seven things are not arbitrary. Most of them have protected you and one of them has probably protected your marriage, and the man who taught them to you was not a fool and he was not a legalist, he was passing on the half of it that he had been given.

That is how this travels. Somebody hands on what they received, and what they received was a fragment, and after four generations of that a man can be twenty-nine years in and completely fluent in the fragment.

The fault is not in the list and it is not in you and it is not really in the man with the sandwich either.

But you cannot live on a fragment for another twenty-nine years, and your nephew is watching, and what he is currently learning from you is that this whole thing is a set of seven things and a pause.

You are a vessel prepared unto every good work. His word says fit for use and prepared, and the Holy Spirit is the one who prepares, and a life described entirely by its subtractions is a life half reported.

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 one of the things preached in that plain room was being wholly set apart to God.

The doctrine has often been carried since as an inventory, and the reason it did not become one in that place is not that the preaching was more careful. It is that the building had somewhere to put people.

That hall ran missions in the streets outside its own door, every day of the week. A person who came in and gave something up was, within days, in a kitchen or on a doorstep somewhere with both hands full, because the place needed them and because there was work at the end of the road.

Set apart there meant fit for use, and fit for use meant somebody came and got you on Tuesday.

The written word puts four destinations after the purging and the Holy Spirit has been preparing you for twenty-nine years, and a clean vessel in a cupboard is a jug that has not yet been picked up.