Performing A Gladness I Did Not Have

The last car pulled out at about a quarter after ten, and Vance stood on the porch and waved at it until it turned at the end of the road, because that is what he does.

Eleven years he has hosted that thing. The whole church in his yard on the second Saturday of September, tables borrowed from two different families, his own truck making four trips for ice. Eleven years of standing at the gate saying so glad you came, and meaning it out loud, in a voice everybody recognizes.

His friend Ellis had stayed to help clean up, which nobody else does, and by ten thirty the two of them were at the kitchen sink with the house gone quiet and a stack of borrowed pans that had to go back clean.

Ellis washed. Vance dried. Neither of them said anything for a while.

Then Vance said, to the plate in his hands rather than to Ellis, "I did not want one minute of that."

Ellis kept washing.

"Not one minute. Not this year, not last year. I have been doing this eleven years and I do not think I have wanted to do it once." He set the plate down. "And everybody out there tells me how much I love it. Pastor said it from the front in August. Vance just loves this. And I stood there and nodded."

He picked up the next plate because his hands did not know what else to do.

"So what does that make me. They keep saying that if you really love Him you are glad about it. Glad is the proof. And I am not glad. I am tired, and I am here, and I have been faking the glad part for eleven years, and I am starting to think the whole of me is a fake."

Ellis rinsed a pan, turned it over, and set it in the rack. Then he said, "It is ten thirty."

Vance looked at him.

"Everybody is gone. Nobody is watching. And you are standing at your own sink drying somebody else's pans so they go back clean."

"That is just what you do."

"Yeah," Ellis said. "That is the part I would look at."

And you have stood in that kitchen. Maybe not that one. But you have done the thing again, the thing you have done for years, and gone home and privately concluded that because you did not enjoy it, none of it counted, and that the person everybody thinks you are is a costume you put on at the gate.

Somebody sold you the wrong entry

Start with the ground, because everything else stands on it and it is not a footnote at the end.

This covenant has two halves. One half is God's oath, settled and sworn and finished, and it does not go up on your glad Septembers or down on your flat ones. The other half is your response, and it is real, it is genuinely asked, and it is not the thing holding the covenant up. Say those two apart out loud often enough and a whole species of exhaustion dies.

Now the specific lie, because it is a common one and it is doing a great deal of quiet damage. Somewhere you picked up the idea that the feeling is the entry, and that obedience without it is worthless or even dishonest. That is not in the terms. Nobody at the sink at ten thirty on a Saturday night is a fraud.

You are obeying. Flatly, wearily, without a spark in it, and Scripture never once calls that counterfeit; it calls it faithfulness, and the Holy Spirit has been present in every one of those eleven Septembers whether or not a single feeling showed up to confirm it.

Who supplies the willing

Here is the sentence that takes the whole weight off, and it has been sitting in a short letter for two thousand years:

for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.Philippians 2:13

Read the order in that line, because it is the opposite of the one you were handed. Not: produce the wanting, and then you may work. God works both. The willing is His department first and yours second, and the doing comes along with it.

You have His own energy running underneath your obedience, and Philippians 2:13 says the willing is something He works in a person rather than something a person manufactures at a gate, and the Spirit is at it in you right now, on a night when nothing in you feels like anything at all.

And the clause He bound Himself to

Not a general sense that God is patient with tired men. That has been in your hands for years and it has never once held past a Saturday. Here is a specific commitment, in the first person, out of His own mouth:

I will make with them an everlasting covenant, that I will not turn away from doing good to them. And I will put the fear of me in their hearts, that they may not turn from me.Jeremiah 32:40

Count what He takes on Himself there. The covenant. The not turning away. And then the inward part, the disposition itself, the thing you have been trying to counterfeit at the gate for eleven years. He puts it in. That is His clause and He wrote it in the first person.

You were never asked to generate the affection and then bring it as proof. Jeremiah 32:40 has God undertaking to put the inward thing in a heart, and His Spirit is the One who does that work, quietly, over years, usually without telling anybody, which is exactly why you cannot see it happening in yourself.

What delight actually is here

So let this be said plainly, because it is the whole point of this shelf and it gets mangled constantly.

Delight is not the toll on the way in. It is where obedience is going. It is what a life inside this covenant turns into over a long time, the way a man who has walked the same road for thirty years eventually loves the road. It is not the credential you produce at the gate, and no one is grading your motives on a Saturday night in September.

And nobody here is going to tell you to feel something. Feelings are not the kind of thing a man can be commanded into. What can be said, and what is true, is that you belong, and that the belonging came first, and the pans in the rack are not what bought it.