The page is folded into the back of her Bible and it is written in a hand that is slightly not hers, because she was writing fast and crying.
It was the second night. The speaker was extraordinary. She has looked her up since and watched two other things and neither of them did what that night did.
And in the last twenty minutes she wrote a list.
Eleven things. Under a heading. The heading is: what I will be from now on. And the eleven things are, every one of them, good and true and biblical, and there is not a single item on that page that a person could argue with.
Never speak about anybody who is not in the room. Pray before the phone. Give first, not last. Be the same at home as in the building. And seven more.
That was two years ago.
Since then, every Sunday, on the way in, she takes about ninety seconds and she goes through the list in her head, and she fails it. Every week. All eleven, most weeks, in some measure.
She has never once passed. That is not exaggeration; she has audited it, and there has never been a week where she would have said yes to all eleven.
And the effect of that, over a hundred weeks, has not been holiness. It has been a woman arriving at church already condemned, every single Sunday, before she has said good morning to anybody.
Reaching is a direction
Paul writes about his own progress in a way that would have got him marked down at that conference.
Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark.Philippians 3:13-14
Hear that on the way in. You are pressing, and pressing is a direction and not a line. The word says I count not myself to have apprehended, and it is the Holy Spirit who draws a person forward at the pace He sets.
He counts not himself to have apprehended. This is Paul. Late in his life, after everything.
And what he puts in place of arrival is not a list. It is a posture: forgetting what is behind, reaching forth toward what is ahead, pressing toward the mark. Every one of those is a direction word. Not one of them is a line you either cross or fall short of.
There is a mark. He says so plainly and this is not an article against standards. But the mark is a thing being pressed toward, which means the whole language assumes distance, and distance is not failure, distance is the normal condition of a person in motion.
So take this on the way into that building, and know it is not my softening, it is what is written: you are pressing toward the mark right now, and pressing is what it is supposed to look like. His word says I press toward the mark, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the drawing forward, at a pace He sets, in a woman who has turned up a hundred Sundays with a list in her head.
Now let me be careful, because the wrong version of this article would tell you the page is bad and to throw it out, and I am not going to say that.
There was a man in England in the seventeen hundreds who taught that a believer goes on toward holiness and who was mocked for it in his own century. He believed in real change, seriously, more seriously than most people do now.
And the instrument he built was not a page.
It was a room. Six people, once a week, asked out loud how it stood with them. And that is a completely different mechanism from a list, and the difference is the whole point.
A list is a judge. It has no memory, no context, no ability to say well done, and it delivers the same verdict every time because it can only measure against itself.
A room has people in it. A room notices that this week was worse because your mother is ill. A room remembers what you said in March and tells you that you sound different. A room says the thing a page can never say, which is: that is further than you were.
The name that got attached to those people started as mockery of how methodical they were. They kept it, because it was accurate.
A warmed heart with no method cools. A method with no warmth is only a schedule. He held both, and the method had faces in it.
You wrote that page in one extraordinary hour, and you have been measured by it in a hundred ordinary ones.
And the speaker did not do this to you. Scripture says I count not myself to have apprehended, but this one thing I do, and it is the Holy Spirit who has drawn you forward through a hundred Sundays of arriving condemned.
That is the mismatch, and it is not a fault in you and it is not a fault in the speaker, who probably said something that night about grace which you did not write down because you were busy writing the list.
So do not throw the page away. Do this instead.
Turn it into one sentence about direction.
Take the eleven and ask what they were all reaching for, because they were reaching for one thing and you knew what it was that night. Probably something like: I want to be the same person everywhere. Write that. One line, in your ordinary handwriting, in the present tense of a direction rather than the future tense of a standard.
I am becoming someone who is the same at home as in the building.
That sentence cannot be failed on a Tuesday. It can only be walked in or away from, and you have been walking in it for two years while reading a verdict off a page.
You are pressing right now, and I am not saying it to console you; it is written that Paul counted not himself to have apprehended and pressed toward the mark, and it is the Holy Spirit who is drawing you forward, and He has never once used that page to condemn you at the door of a building.
Nobody arrives on the way in. That is not what the door is for.
You are pressing toward the mark right now and pressing is precisely what it is supposed to look like. His word says I count not myself to have apprehended, but this one thing I do, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the drawing forward, at a pace He sets, in a woman who has turned up a hundred Sundays.
Declare this over yourself
- Page folded in the back of my Bible, you are one extraordinary hour and you are not a judge, and you do not meet me at that door anymore. His word says I press toward the mark, so I take you out in the name of Jesus.
- Verdict I arrive with every Sunday before I have said good morning, you have no place in that doorway. Scripture says Paul counted not himself to have apprehended, and His Spirit is the one drawing me forward at the pace He set.
- God, I press toward the mark, and pressing is a direction. Your word says forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forth unto those which are before, so one sentence goes in the back of my Bible tonight and the old page goes somewhere else.
Philippians 3:13
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.
