Two Parcels At The Same Counter

He is second in the queue at the post office and he is holding a brown envelope he has posted in the same week of the same month for nineteen years. It is not a difficult envelope. It takes eleven minutes to fill in and it costs him nothing but the stamp and the walk. He does it correctly, every year, and he has never once been late.

In front of him a woman is posting a parcel, and she is telling the man behind the glass what is in it, which nobody has asked her to do. A cardigan. A bag of those sweets, the pink ones, that her daughter has liked since she was six. A tea towel with a joke on it that the daughter will not find funny and will keep anyway. She is holding the parcel with both hands while she talks about it, and when she finally hands it over she pats it, actually pats it, and says right then, off you go.

He watches this from eighteen inches behind her and something in him goes very quiet.

Because they are doing the same thing. Same counter, same clerk, same scale, same queue on a Tuesday morning. Both of them have brought something and both of them are handing it over. And one of them is discharging an obligation and the other one is loving somebody through the post, and from the outside you could not tell which was which until she patted it.

Walking home he thinks, and he does not enjoy the thought: that is exactly how I pray. That is how I read. That is how I turned up on Sunday for the last four years. Correct. On time. Never once late. Filing a return.

Maybe you have had that thought in a queue somewhere. You do the right things. You genuinely do. And somewhere under the doing there is a small gray feeling that you are keeping up with something, and that the day you stop keeping up is the day somebody produces the paperwork.

Which half is settled

I am not going to tell you that a covenant has no terms. It does. Anybody who says otherwise has not read one, and it would not be believable anyway, because the terms sit on the page in plain sight for anybody who reads them.

So let us do the honest thing and separate the halves, because everything depends on which half a person believes they are standing on.

Here is a term God bound Himself to. His words, not a summary of them.

And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.Ezekiel 36:26-27

Count the I wills. That is God putting His own name to a list of things He undertakes to do, and not one of them is contingent on your Tuesday. He gives the heart. He removes the stone. He puts His Spirit inside. He causes the walking. That half is settled, sealed by an oath, and it was settled before you were born and stayed settled through every flat year you have had since.

And the other half is real too, and I will not pretend it away: you respond. You walk. There are statutes and there is obeying and it matters and it is asked of you. What that half is not is the thing holding the covenant up. Your walking rests on His oath; His oath does not rest on your walking. That is the whole sentence, and if you read nothing else on this page today, read that one twice.

So hear this over you. You have been given a heart that is not stone, and I am not saying it because it would be nice; it is on the page in Ezekiel, and it is the Holy Spirit who was promised as the one doing the causing, which means the ability you have been trying to manufacture was issued to you a long time ago.

Where the walking comes from

Now watch what happens to the envelope.

There is a moment in Deuteronomy where Moses is standing in front of a whole nation who are quite reasonably wondering whether any of this is possible for ordinary people, and he says something that has been the comfort of the tired ever since.

For this commandment that I command you today is not too hard for you, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven... But the word is very near you. It is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it.Deuteronomy 30:11-14

Not up there. Not across the sea. Not filed somewhere in an office that ordinary people are not allowed into. Near. In your mouth. In your heart, which is precisely where Ezekiel said God would put it.

That is the difference between the two people at the counter. The woman with the parcel was not obeying a postal regulation. Everything in that box came out of a life she was already inside. The relationship came first and the parcel came out of it, and that is why she patted it.

You have the same order of things, and it is not aspirational, it is your actual legal position under the covenant. The word is inside you already, put there by God's own hand, carried by His Spirit, and what you do on a Tuesday comes out of what you have rather than going in to earn it.

And a flat Tuesday still counts

I want to say this carefully because it is where an article like this usually does damage.

I am not asking you to feel delight. I would never do that to you. Delight is not a term of the covenant and it is not on the page anywhere as a condition, and the day somebody makes a feeling the entrance requirement they have built a heavier bill than the one already being carried.

Obedience done flatly is obedience. The prayer said gray is prayer. The man in the queue with the brown envelope has been faithful for nineteen years and heaven has not been rolling its eyes for nineteen years; He has been receiving every single one of them. God is not grading your motives on a Tuesday morning.

What I am offering is not a better mood. It is a truer address. You are inside this thing already, and Scripture calls it a heart of flesh rather than a license to be renewed, and the Spirit within you is the one who has been doing the walking all along, on the good years and the gray ones alike.