I Cannot Tell Which One I Am Doing

Every Sunday for eleven years he has driven his father to the six o'clock service.

Six in the morning. The cold one. The one where there are nine people and a heater that makes more noise than the organ. He gets up at five twenty, he warms the car for four minutes because his father's chest does not like the cold, and he has the door open on the passenger side before the old man is halfway down the path. Eleven years. Through two jobs, one house move, and a winter where the car had to be pushed twice.

And then afterward there is the kitchen, and the kitchen is the opposite of the church. Everybody is in it. The radio is on top of the refrigerator where it has been since anybody can remember. There is a pan going that will feed nine and there are fourteen people coming. His sister is arguing with an aunt about how much cumin is too much cumin, which is the same argument they have had since before either of them was married.

He is at the counter doing the same thing he does every Sunday, the dish he has made every Sunday for eleven years, and he could do it with his eyes closed and some Sundays practically does.

And his nephew, who is seven and has no idea he is doing anything at all, leans on the counter beside him and says, "Tío, do you even like doing this?"

And he opens his mouth to answer, and nothing comes out.

Not because the answer is no. That would have been simple. That would have been a thing a man can look at.

It is that he does not know.

He genuinely cannot tell. Eleven years of Sundays and the two things have welded together so completely that he cannot get a blade in between them. Is he here because he loves them, or because this is what he does, or because the day he stops is the day something in this family quietly ends and everybody would be too kind to mention it? Somewhere in there is love. He is almost sure of it. He just cannot find the edge of it anymore.

The seven year old, having asked the biggest question in the room, has already lost interest and is eating something he was told not to eat.

And then the radio does what the radio does, and the aunt turns it up because it is that one, and his mother comes across the kitchen and takes both his hands off the counter and dances him twice around the table with everybody yelling, and he laughs.

He laughs properly. From somewhere under the ribs. It surprises him more than the question did.

And you have been standing at that counter for years.

You do the thing. You have always done the thing. Prayer, or the visits, or the hospital runs, or the Sunday, or the phone call every Thursday to the one who never calls you. And somewhere along the way you stopped being able to tell whether you do it because you want to or because you are the person who does it, and you have quietly decided not to look too hard in case the answer is the one you are afraid of.

Whose joy comes first

Here is the mercy in this, and it arrives before any of the teaching does.

Nobody is going to ask you to produce a feeling tonight. Not this page, and not the covenant. You are not required to manufacture delight before you are allowed to obey. In John 15:11 the joy in question is named, and whose it is is stated, and the Holy Spirit is not standing in your kitchen with a clipboard scoring the warmth of your last eleven years.

These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full.John 15:11

Read the order, because the order is everything. My joy, He says, remaining in you. Then your joy, full. His comes first. His is the source. Yours is the outcome and not the entry fee, and if you have been trying to feel your way in through the front of that sentence, you have been carrying a thing He put down at the beginning of it.

You have His joy named as the origin and yours named as the result, and that is written down with a chapter and a verse on it. The Spirit takes a sentence in that order and works it into a man slowly, the way heat gets into a house, and it does not arrive because he examined himself hard enough.

What He feels about the terms He wrote

And now hear what He says about the whole arrangement, in His own voice, because this is the part almost nobody has heard.

Yea, I will rejoice over them to do them good, and I will plant them in this land assuredly with my whole heart and with my whole soul.Jeremiah 32:41

That is God, describing His own manner, inside a covenant passage. With my whole heart and with my whole soul. He is not keeping this agreement grimly. He is not the tired one at the counter. You are being rejoiced over tonight by Someone whose delight was never in question, and it does not wait on yours arriving first. Jeremiah 32:41 is where that is written and the Holy Spirit is the One carrying it into a kitchen where a man has just failed to answer a seven year old.

So here is the plain sentence, and it belongs here in the middle of the teaching rather than tacked on at the end.

Two halves stand in this covenant and they are not the same kind of thing. His half is settled: sworn, finished, and glad. Your half is your response, and it is real, and it is genuinely asked of you, and it is not what holds the covenant up. You were brought into this house gladly and you were not conscripted into it. Scripture says He swore by Himself because there was nobody greater to swear by, Hebrews 6:13, and His Spirit is what turns that from a fact about God into a floor under a man who cannot currently feel his own feet.

Which lets me say the thing this category exists to say, and I want it said plainly enough that you cannot get around it.

You have been obeying God for eleven years and every single one of those Sundays counted. Not the warm ones only. The flat ones too, the ones you drove through half asleep and slightly resentful, the ones where you felt nothing whatsoever except cold. What is written asks for faithfulness and never once asks for a mood, and the Holy Spirit is not grading your motives, because motives are a thing He purifies over a life and not a toll He collects at the door.

Delight is where obedience is going. It is not the fare you pay to get on.