The Terms Include the Keeping

It is a thing she does with her mouth and she is very good at it, which is the problem.

Her brother's wife. Twelve years of it. Never anything you could call a lie, which is what makes it work: a small true detail delivered at exactly the right angle, in the kitchen, with two or three of the aunties, and the whole room understands what has been said without anybody having said it. She could stop a career with a sentence and a pause, and she knows it, and there is a part of her that enjoys knowing it.

Last Easter she went upstairs in the middle of a family party and sat on the edge of the bath and said to God, with the noise coming up through the floor:

I am finished with this. I am not doing it again. Not one more time.

She was completely sincere. She had come to the end of herself with it. She was tired in a way that goes past being tired of a habit and into being tired of the person the habit had made.

She was finished with it until the next family dinner, which was seven weeks later.

Not a slip. Not one careless sentence at the end of a long day. A whole performance, warmed up and delivered, and she heard herself doing it and did it anyway, and she went home that night and did not pray and has not properly prayed since.

Because here is the conclusion she came to on that drive: it is not that I break my promises. It is that I am constitutionally unable to hold up my end of anything. Which is a different and much heavier conclusion, and it makes a person stop offering.

You may have proved something to yourself like that. Not that you failed once, but that you are the kind of thing that cannot hold. And once a person believes that about themselves, they stop bringing God any part of it, because what is the point of handing over a promise you already know is worthless.

Read the terms properly

Now. I am a teacher, so let me do what teachers do, which is make you look at the actual words.

You believe the covenant reads like this: God does His part, you do yours, and yours is the walking. And you have tested yours to destruction and it does not hold.

So read what God says the terms are, in Ezekiel, where He is speaking to a people whose end had comprehensively not held.

A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them.Ezekiel 36:26-27

You are inside terms that include God supplying the very thing you have proved you cannot supply. Ezekiel 36:27 says I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk, and the Holy Spirit is not decoration on that sentence, He is the mechanism named in it.

Count the verbs

Go through it slowly and count whose verbs they are.

I will give. I will put. I will take away. I will give. I will put. And then, the one that ought to stop you where you stand:

And cause you to walk.

The walking is in there. It is not deleted and I would not delete it. Ye shall keep my judgments and do them, it says, right at the end, and that is a real keeping by real people with real Tuesdays. But look at what sits immediately before it and governs it. He causes the walking. The doing is genuinely yours and the power to do it is genuinely His, and both of those are in one sentence and neither one cancels the other.

You are inside a covenant whose terms include God supplying the very thing you have proved you cannot supply. Ezekiel 36:27 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is not a decoration on that sentence, He is the mechanism named in it.

Do you see how badly you have been reading it? You have been holding yourself to a clause that says and cause you to walk, and you have been reading it as and you must manage the walking. That is not a small misreading. It is the difference between a woman who has failed and a woman who has been trying to do God's job with her own mouth on Easter Sunday.

You have been failing at something that was never assigned to you, and the assignment was misread, not defied. Scripture says it in so many words, and that is what the verbs say when you count them, and the Spirit of God has been at the causing in you through all twelve years, including the seven weeks.

The heart of stone

And now the other half, because it is the kinder half.

He does not say: try harder with the heart you have. He says the stony one comes out. That is not an improvement plan, it is a replacement, and it is His hand doing the taking away.

Which means your discovery on that drive home was not wrong, it was incomplete. You are right that you cannot hold up your end with what you had. That is exactly what a heart of stone cannot do. Where you went wrong is in thinking the discovery disqualified you, when in the covenant He describes, the discovery is the doorway.

You are the sort of person this covenant was written for, and the proof of it is the very thing you thought disqualified you. Scripture puts the new heart and the new spirit on His side of the sentence entirely, and His Spirit is the one who has been doing that work while you have been standing outside calling yourself unable.

I am not going to walk you through the twelve years or through what you said seven weeks after Easter. A tally is a courtroom with the chairs shifted, and there is no courtroom in this yard.