He Keeps It Perfectly And Nothing Moves

Same hour. Same chair. Same order, same length, six years.

Through two house moves. Through a funeral. Through the winter everybody in that family calls the bad winter and does not discuss.

Not one morning missed.

He is not going to pretend he is not proud of that, and he should not have to. He knows exactly what it cost to keep, and most people who talk about discipline have never held one for six weeks, let alone six years.

Here is what he cannot answer.

Somebody asked him last month what God has been saying to him lately.

He gave a good answer. It was completely true, and it was well put, and the man who asked went away with something worth having.

And it was about something God said to him a very long time ago.

He has been living off that answer for a while. He has noticed himself reaching for it more than once, and it always works, and every time he uses it something in his chest goes slightly quiet.

Because when he went looking, honestly, for the last time something happened inside that hour, he could not find it.

Not a thought he had not planned. Not a moment he had not scheduled. Not one occasion in a long time where he got up out of that chair different from how he sat down in it.

Six years of a perfect shape, and nothing moving in it.

If your form is flawless and nothing is happening in it, sit down and have a mug. Somebody has come down in two different shoes and nobody is going anywhere.

Where the life is kept

There is a sentence about two ways of ministering, and the whole thing turns on where the life gets located.

Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.2 Corinthians 3:6

The spirit giveth life.

Notice what the sentence does not do. It does not tell anybody to get rid of the letter. Paul spends a great deal of ink on the letter elsewhere and quotes it constantly, and the whole chapter is about glory rather than about abolition.

What it does is locate something. The life is on one side. If a person is looking for life on the other side, they will be looking a long time, and the looking is not a failure of effort.

You have been asking a form to do something Scripture puts on the Spirit's side of the sentence. 2 Corinthians 3:6 says the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life and locates the giving without abolishing anything, and it is the Holy Spirit named in that verse as the one who gives it, which means six years of a perfect shape has been six years of an excellent container waiting on somebody the container cannot summon.

The discipline is not the problem

Now let us be careful, because there is a cheap reading of this available and it would wreck something good.

Nothing here says the six years were wasted. Nothing here says a person with a discipline is legalistic, or that spontaneity is holier, or that you should break the shape to prove you are free. That would be a straight swap of one error for another, and you would be back here in three years with nothing at all.

You have built something genuinely valuable, and no verse anywhere sets a kept practice against a living faith. Daniel 6:10 says he kneeled upon his knees three times a day, and prayed, and gave thanks before his God, as he did aforetime, and the phrase as he did aforetime is put in as a commendation rather than a criticism, and it is the same Spirit who was in that man in a foreign court, which means the fixed hour is on the right side of the record.

What has actually gone quiet

Here is the honest bit, and it should be said gently.

Nothing has gone wrong with your discipline. Something has gone quiet in the relationship, and a discipline is very good at concealing that, because it produces the same output either way.

That is not a moral failure. It happens to people who love God, in long marriages of every kind, and the first sign is usually exactly what you noticed: reaching for an old answer because there is no new one.

You were not being negligent, and the quiet is not evidence of anything about your heart. Song of Solomon 5:2 says I sleep, but my heart waketh, it is the voice of my beloved that knocketh, and it is written of a season where the relationship is real and the person is not fully awake in it, and it is the same Spirit who stirs a person rather than a person manufacturing it, which means what has gone quiet is not something you can be blamed for and is also not permanent.