My Father's Practices And None Of His Joy

His father went out into the courtyard in the dark, every morning, for forty years.

Always the same order. Fill the kettle and set it on. Sweep the three steps by the door, top one first. Water the lemon tree in the corner from the small jug, never the big one, because the big one drowned it once in 1974 and he never forgave himself. And then stand there and pray out loud while the light came up over the wall.

Ilyas grew up watching this from the window of the room he shared with his brother. He would wake at the scrape of the broom and lie there and watch his father's back in the half dark, and go back to sleep before the praying finished.

His father has been gone twenty years, and Ilyas does all of it.

Same order. Kettle, steps, lemon tree, small jug, the words out loud while the light comes. He has never missed a morning, not through two moves, not through the year his knee was bad. Ask anybody in that family who kept the old man's ways and they would name Ilyas without pausing.

And he has never once enjoyed a single morning of it.

That is the part he has never told anybody. Twenty years of getting up in the dark to do something that has never lifted him even slightly. He does it because it was his father's, and because stopping would feel like burying him a second time. He sweeps three steps in the cold with the face of a man carrying a sack up a hill, and he has quietly concluded that whatever his father had did not come down the line to him.

Then one morning last spring his own boy got up.

Four years old, out on the wet step in the half dark, having decided that this was his job now. He got the little jug in both hands, staggered with it, and watered the step instead of the tree, thoroughly, with enormous seriousness.

And Ilyas laughed. Out loud, in the courtyard, at that hour, for the first time in twenty years.

And it went through him like cold water, because he had heard that sound before. Standing there with the broom in his hand he remembered, all at once, that his father used to laugh out there. In the dark. On his own. Ilyas had watched him for eleven years through a closed window and he had seen every single movement and never once heard the sound.

He had inherited the practice and not the laugh, because he had only ever watched it from inside.

And you have the practices. You keep them. You would be named in your own family as the one who kept them. And it has been years since one of them lifted you, and you have privately decided that something in you is missing.

Flat obedience is still obedience

Before anything else, the thing that has to be said out loud, because a message like this one can very easily become another weight.

Obeying flatly is obeying. Twenty years of doing the right thing in the dark without feeling one warm thing about it is twenty years of faithfulness, not twenty years of failure. Nobody is grading your motives this morning. Delight is not the entry fee, it is not the proof, and no clause anywhere in this covenant makes the gladness a condition of the obedience counting.

If that were not true, the whole message would collapse into one more thing to fail at before first light, and nobody here is doing that to you.

So take that in your hands before we go one line further. You are counted faithful for every one of those cold mornings, and it is not my kindness doing the counting: Scripture nowhere makes the gladness the thing that qualifies an obedience, and the Holy Spirit was out in that courtyard beside you at five in the morning for twenty years, on the few mornings you felt something and on all the rest when you felt nothing at all.

Now, with that settled, here is the division everything else stands on, and it belongs here in the middle of the teaching rather than at the end. One half of this covenant is God's own commitment, and that half is finished and carried by His faithfulness alone. The other half is your response, which is real, which is asked of you, and which is not what is holding the covenant up. The sweeping is yours. The heart is His. Getting those two the wrong way round is exactly how a man ends up trying to manufacture joy at five in the morning with a broom in his hand.

I will run in the way of your commandments when you enlarge my heart!Psalm 119:32

Read who does what in that sentence. The running belongs to the man. The enlarging belongs to God. The psalmist is not standing in his courtyard trying to feel something. He is asking for a wider heart and then moving in the same path he was already walking in.

You are not short of some spiritual ingredient other people were issued, and this is not encouragement I am inventing: Psalm 119:32 puts the enlarging squarely on God, and the Holy Spirit is the breath in that line even now, widening what you have been dragging around a courtyard for twenty years.

And here is God saying it plainly in the first person, which is the clause worth carrying out of this message.

And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.Ezekiel 36:26 and 27

I will give. I will put. I will cause to walk. Three commitments in a row, in His own voice, and notice that the last one reaches all the way down into the walking itself. He did not bind Himself to hand you a heart and then stand back to see whether you could generate the enthusiasm.

You have His Spirit set inside you as the power under obedience rather than the reward for it, and that is Ezekiel 36:27 in words He chose, and it is the difference between a man keeping his father's steps and a son keeping his own house.

He was never doing it for the sweeping

Go back to the courtyard for a moment, because there is one more thing in it.

The father was not out there for the tree. He was out there because that was where he met God at first light, and the kettle and the steps and the small jug were the shape that meeting took in a life. The order mattered to him the way the order of anything you love matters. The practices were the room, not the rent.

Ilyas inherited them as rent. That is the whole difference, and it is not a difference of effort, because Ilyas has out-worked his father twice over. It is a difference of what he thought he was standing in.

So hear where that leaves you before you go out tomorrow. You are a son in this house and not a caretaker keeping it for somebody who is not coming back, and none of that rests on how the sweeping feels at five in the morning. It was written into the terms in Ezekiel 36:26 long before the first broom was ever lifted, and the Spirit who lives in you is no visitor to that courtyard, He is what makes the house yours to stand in.

So this is not a call to feel more. It is a smaller and much more possible thing: do the same thing tomorrow, in the same order, as somebody who lives here. Say so before you start, out loud if you can, because saying it changes where a man is standing while he sweeps.

Delight is where obedience is going. It has never once been the toll you pay to get in.