Twelve Years of the Same Checklist

He has not missed a day in twelve years.

The notebook is the fourth one. Same brand, ordered three at a time. On the left, the reading, which is on a plan that takes him through everything in two years and which he has therefore been through six times. On the right, the list. Names, in three columns, with a small mark beside each one when it has been prayed for.

He is not smug about it. That has to be said clearly because it is the first thing a stranger would assume. He does not think it makes him better than anybody. He would be uncomfortable if you brought it up and he has never once mentioned the twelve years to another human being.

He does it because it is right and because a man should, and because his father did not, and because at twenty six he decided he would be a man who did.

It has cost him. Some of the days were on airport floors. One was in a hospital corridor at four in the morning. There was a stretch two winters ago when he was doing it out of nothing but the fact that he had said he would, and he would tell you that stretch was the most valuable one.

And here is what he has never said out loud, and would find genuinely difficult to say even alone in a room.

He is empty. Not doubting. Not tempted to stop. Empty, in the specific sense that there is nothing running in him, and there has not been for a long time, and the record is unbroken through the entire period.

Which produces a question he has no way to hold. If a man does everything he knows to do, correctly, for twelve years, and finishes with nothing in the tank, then what exactly has he been doing?

You may have a version of the notebook. The thing you have kept perfectly that has not filled you.

A kept discipline is not a supply

Begin by refusing the obvious wrong answer, because a lot of people would hand it to him and every one of them would be mistaken.

The wrong answer says the discipline was legalism, that the notebook was the problem, and that he should have been freer all along. That is not true and it would take something from him that he should keep. Twelve years of showing up is not a sin. God is not embarrassed by the fourth notebook.

The accurate thing is a difference of kind. A discipline is a channel. A supply is what runs through it.

He has built an exceptional channel. Straight, maintained, unblocked, in good repair after twelve years, which almost nobody manages. And a channel with nothing coming down it is a very well made dry ditch, and no amount of further maintenance changes that, because the shortage was never in the channel.

You are not being told that the twelve years were wasted, and Ezekiel 36:27 has God putting His own Spirit inside a person as something separate from anything they build, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself who takes a promise made to a ruined nation and lands it on a man with a notebook open at six in the morning.

Here is the sentence.

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 36:27

Watch the order, because the order is the entire point and it is the reverse of how he has been living.

The order in that verse

Read it again slowly. First God puts the Spirit inside. Then, out of that, comes the walking and the keeping and the doing.

He has been running it the other way round for twelve years. Keep the statutes, do the things, and expect that somewhere in the doing a supply will accumulate. That is an honest and honorable mistake and it is also backwards, and backwards is why the tank is empty at the end of it.

You have been doing the second half of that verse for twelve years, because the written word puts the Spirit inside first and lets the walking come out of it, and His Spirit is what makes that stop being a sequence he can explain and start being a thing he asks for.

And notice how much God takes on Himself in one sentence. He puts. He causes. Two verbs, both His. What is left for the man is a life that follows from something already placed in him, which is a completely different arrangement from the one the notebook has been running on.

You are being offered the thing that was supposed to come first, and Ezekiel 36 gives both the putting and the causing to God and leaves the man on the receiving end of both, and the same Spirit who spoke that over a heap of rubble speaks it over a fourth notebook.

The record is not held against him

Now the fear he would deny having, which is that after twelve years of this he ought to be further on than he is, and that the emptiness must therefore be a hidden fault somewhere in the record.

There is no hidden fault. Look at who God says that promise to in Ezekiel. Not to a diligent people. To people whose whole national record was a disaster, who are being told, plainly, that this is not happening because of anything they did. And He does it anyway, and He does it first, and He does not audit anybody before He puts anything inside them.

Which means his twelve years are not a claim and they are also not a liability. They are simply not the mechanism. The mechanism is a gift, and gifts do not read the notebook.

You were never going to earn this and you never had to, because Ezekiel 36:27 hands the Spirit to people with nothing in their favor and asks no qualification of them, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a relief rather than an insult to a man who worked hard.