Not Another Thing to Fail At

Let me guess what happened when you read the words one hour.

Something in you did not say that sounds good. Something in you said, here we go.

And you were not being cynical. You were being accurate, because you have been handed good things before and you know exactly what happens to them in your hands.

The reading plan. The prayer time. The journal. The walking. The fast. The early morning. Every one of them arrived as a gift and every one of them turned, somewhere around week three, into a thing with a record attached, and the record had gaps in it, and the gaps had your name on them.

And now you are carrying a list of good things you are behind on, which is a strange and specific kind of tired that nobody talks about in church.

So when somebody offers you an hour, you are not resisting rest. You are protecting yourself from a scoreboard, and you are right to, and I am not going to pretend that instinct is a lack of faith.

I want to spend this article making sure the hour cannot become one, because if it can, do not take it.

The yoke was the point

There is a verse in Galatians that people quote for the first half and it is the second half that speaks here.

Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage. (Galatians 5:1, King James Version)

Look at the word yoke.

A yoke is not a cruelty. It is a working harness. It is a thing you put on an animal so that it can pull, and it is fitted, and it is functional, and the whole point of it is that it keeps something attached to a load.

And Paul is not talking about the world. He is writing to church people about religious practice, about good things, about things that came out of the law of God and were genuinely from Him.

That is the sharp end of it. The yoke he is warning about is made out of good material. Nobody gets entangled in a bad thing and calls it devotion. They get entangled in a good thing that acquired a record.

You are right to be suspicious of a good thing with a record attached, and that instinct has never once been a failure of faith. Galatians 5:1 warns about entanglement in a religious practice rather than in an obvious sin, and it is the Holy Spirit who lets somebody trust a caution He put in them in the first place.

Entangled again

Now the word again, which is doing something that anybody in this room will recognize.

Be not entangled again.

Again means it has happened before. Paul is writing to people who had already been free once, and who had already gone back, and who had gone back to something good.

That is the pattern. Nobody wakes up and decides to put a yoke on. It goes on gradually and it goes on while a person is trying, and the trying is sincere all the way through.

Week one is joy. Week two is joy with a small note in it. Week three there is a number. Week five there is a gap, and week six is where a gap becomes a verdict, and the verdict is not about the practice, it is about the person, and that is the whole injury.

You have been entangled in good things rather than in shameful ones, and the sincerity has never once been what was missing. Galatians 5:1 uses the word again for people who had already been free once. The Spirit of God is the one who can name a pattern without adding a single ounce to what somebody is already carrying.

And I want to say the encouraging half at full volume, because a room like this needs it said rather than implied. Not one of those practices was a mistake. The reading plan was good. The prayer time was good. God was in the weeks you kept and He was in the weeks you did not, and He has never once looked at your record.

You are free right now, and no gap in any of those records has ever changed one thing about your standing. The written word says Christ hath made us free in the past tense and completed, and His Spirit is entirely able to make that felt by somebody who has been quietly keeping score on themselves for years.

Make it impossible to keep score

Now the practical part, and it is designed backwards from the problem.

The hour has to be built so that a scoreboard cannot attach to it. And a scoreboard needs two things to exist: a record, and an audience.

So take one away.

Take the hour, and tell nobody about it afterward. Not as a secret and not as a discipline. Simply do not report it.

That sounds small and it is the whole mechanism, because a thing nobody knows about cannot become a streak. Nobody can ask how it is going. There is no week two conversation. There is nothing to be behind on, because nothing was ever announced to be ahead on.

And do not decide about next week. If it happens again it happens. If it does not, nothing has broken, because nothing was ever started.

One hour. Unreported. No next one planned.

You are able to take a thing that no scoreboard can reach, and no hour has ever needed to be repeated to have counted. Galatians 5:1 tells people to stand fast in a liberty they already have rather than to build a better practice. The same Spirit who inspired that line is not standing anywhere near anybody with a chart.