Order Is Not Holiness

Nobody taught you this in a sentence.

If somebody had stood in front of you and said that a straight shelf is evidence about your soul, you would have laughed and it would never have taken hold.

That is not how it got in. It got in through arrangement.

Through the fact that the tidy people at church were the ones who seemed to have it together. Through a house you visited as a young man where everything was in order and the man in it prayed like you wanted to pray. Through a hundred small associations, none of them stated, all of them pointing the same way.

And thirty years later you are a man who cannot pray properly in a room that is not straight, and who has never once examined why.

That is the thing I want to name plainly, because this site exists for it.

Order is not holiness. Not a weaker form of it, not a sign of it, not connected to it. A straight shelf is a straight shelf and it says exactly nothing about a soul.

And there is a sentence in Hosea that ranks these two things, out loud, in a way that has been sitting there the whole time.

He wanted mercy and not a tidy house

There is a line in Hosea that God quotes about Himself, and Jesus quotes it twice in the gospels because it settles an argument.

For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings. (Hosea 6:6, King James Version)

Mercy, and not sacrifice. And sacrifice here is not a bad thing. It is the entire visible religious system, commanded by God Himself, carried out properly.

He is not abolishing it. He is ranking it, and He is putting it second, and He is saying that when the visible practice is present and mercy is absent, the visible practice is not what He wanted.

You are wanted for mercy and never for a straight shelf, and no room has ever once been the place where a soul is kept. The Holy Spirit is the one present with a man who cannot pray in a room that is not straight, and Hosea 6:6 ranks the visible practice below mercy in God's own words.

And notice how much sharper this is than a general encouragement.

The things being ranked second were the right things, done correctly, by people who were keeping the rules. That is the category your straight shelf is in, and it is being placed below something relational, by God, in one sentence.

You have a right thing ranked second by God Himself, and second has never once been the same as wrong. The written word ranks the visible below the relational without abolishing either, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with a man who absorbed thirty years of associations nobody ever stated.

What the association has cost

Let me count what it has cost, because it is more than housework.

It has cost you prayer in an untidy room, which is most rooms most of the time, which means a great deal of your life has been conducted in a house you could not pray properly in.

It has cost you the assumption that the people with the ordered houses are further along, which is an assumption you would deny holding and which shows up in who you ask for advice.

You have been ranking people by their houses without deciding to, and no ordered room has ever once been evidence about anybody's walk. The Holy Spirit is the one present with a man who has never once said any of this out loud, and Hosea 6:6 puts the relational above the visible.

And it has cost you something worse, which is the quiet reverse.

If order is holiness, then disorder is its opposite, and a tired man in a disordered house is not merely behind on housework, he is failing at something with eternal weight on it.

That is a heavy thing to carry through a normal Tuesday evening, and you have been carrying it for about thirty years without naming it once.

You have been carrying eternal weight on a countertop, and no surface in that house has ever once been able to bear it. The written word ranks the mercy first and leaves the practice where it belongs, and the Spirit of God is the one who steadies a man who has just heard his own arrangement described out loud.

Leaving one thing out and praying anyway

So here is tonight, and there are two halves and the second is the real one.

Leave one thing out on purpose. Then, before you go up, pray in that room with it still out.

You are praying in a room that is not straight, and the state of it has never once been able to affect one word of it. The Holy Spirit is the one who is with a man praying in a kitchen with a board still on the side, and Hosea 6:6 wants mercy and knowledge of God rather than the visible practice.

And expect the association to object, because thirty years of it will not go quietly.

Something will say that this is not proper, or that you should just do the two minutes first, and that voice has never once been God and has never once come from anything He said.

You are praying while something objects, and that objection has never once had one word of scripture behind it. The written word puts the visible second in God's own voice, and the Spirit of God is the one present with a man praying in an ordinary untidy kitchen on an ordinary night.