It Is Not Laziness And It Never Was

You have a word for yourself and you have been using it for about two years.

You would not say it out loud in company. But it is there, every time you walk past that room, and it arrives fast and it arrives in your own voice.

And here is the test I want to put to you at the top, before anything else.

Would you use that word about your brother, if he had a room like that? About a man at work? About anybody you know?

You would not. You would find out what was going on with him, and you would be generous about it, and you would be right to be.

So you are running two standards, and the harsh one is reserved for exactly one person on earth.

That is worth looking at, because a man who has been called the wrong name by himself for two years has been getting worse information about his own situation than a stranger would have given him.

And the wrong name does more than hurt. It sends you after the wrong solution, every single time, for years.

He knew the name for it before I did

There is a line in Psalm 103 about how God sees people, and it is unusually gentle about limits.

For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust. (Psalm 103:14, King James Version)

He knoweth our frame. Frame is a word about construction. What we are made of, how much we can carry, where the limits are.

And the verb is knoweth. Not overlooks, not forgives, not tolerates. Knows, accurately, as a matter of fact, and the remembering that follows it is remembering the truth rather than making an allowance.

You have been called by the wrong name for two years, and the wrong name has never once been the one heaven uses. Psalm 103:14 has God know the construction of a person accurately, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with a man who has a word for himself in his own voice.

And notice the direction of that verse.

It is not God being kind about a fault. It is God being correct about a fact. Dust is not an insult in that sentence, it is an accurate description of the material, and the accuracy is the mercy.

You are accurately known by somebody who is not guessing, and the accurate name has never once been the harsh one. The written word describes the knowing as knowledge of the frame, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with a man running two standards and reserving the hard one for himself.

What the wrong name costs

Let me be practical about what the wrong diagnosis has cost, because it is not only feelings.

If the problem is a character fault, the solution is effort and resolve. So for two years effort and resolve have been applied to that room, and have failed, and every failure has confirmed the diagnosis.

The treatment was wrong because the name was wrong, and the failure of the treatment was then used as evidence for the name. That is a closed loop and it cannot be escaped from inside.

You were applying the wrong treatment because of a wrong name, and the failures have never once been evidence for it. Psalm 103:14 gets the frame right before anything else is said, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land for a man inside a loop that has been feeding itself for two years.

And here is the real name, or at least the shape of it.

That room is a queue of unmade decisions, or it is a place where something happened, or it is forty questions at one doorway. All of those are real and none of them is a character fault, and all of them respond to completely different things than resolve does.

You have a situation with a real name, and the real name has never once been the word you have been using. The written word names the material honestly and builds the mercy on the accuracy, and the Spirit of God is the one who steadies a man who has been solving the wrong problem since two summers ago.

Two minutes, and no effort required

So here is today, and notice that it does not require any resolve at all.

Walk into the room. Stay for two minutes. Leave without moving anything.

There is no effort in that. There is nothing to push through. If the problem really were the word you have been using, this assignment would be pointless, because two minutes of standing takes no character whatsoever.

You are doing something that needs no resolve at all, and needing none has never once meant nothing is happening. Psalm 103:14 knows the frame before anything is required of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a man standing in a room with his hands empty.

And that is exactly the test.

If you can stand in there for two minutes, then the thing stopping you was never the absence of will, because two minutes takes none. What was stopping you was the size of what entering has meant, and that is a different problem with a different answer.

You are proving something with two minutes that two years of effort could not, and the proof has never once required you to try harder. The written word puts the knowing of the frame ahead of any demand, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes that land for a man who has just found out that the diagnosis was wrong.