Three Weeks Is Her Record

She starts beautifully. Better than almost anybody.

The first week is glory. She means every second of it, and it is not hype and it is not performance, and people around her can see it and are lifted by it.

The second week is real. Less glory, more work, and she does the work.

Somewhere in the third week it goes quiet.

And by the fourth she could not tell you when she stopped, because there is no moment. It simply is not happening any more, and there was no decision anywhere.

Twenty years of this. She has counted. The same wall, at roughly the same point, every single time.

She has stopped telling anybody when she starts something.

Here is the part that actually worries her, and it is not the failing.

She is used to the failing. She has made peace with the fact that she will not finish most things, and she can laugh about it and does.

What worries her is what she has decided about herself.

She has decided, quietly, over about nine years, that keeping things is not something she was given.

That some people got consistency in the distribution and she got other things. That she got fire and she did not get the other one, and that this is simply what she is, permanently, and there is no point in another attempt.

She has never said that out loud. She would deny it if you asked. And she has lived off it for nine years.

If three weeks is your record too, come and take a chair. Nobody in this hall is asking you to commit to anything.

What is at the end of that list

There is a list of the fruit of the Spirit that most people can nearly recite, and the last item on it is the one that matters this morning.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law.Galatians 5:22-23

Temperance. Self control. The thing you have concluded you were not given.

It is on the list.

And look at what kind of list it is. Not a list of duties. Not a list of things to work up. It is called fruit, which is a word about growth, and fruit is not manufactured by the branch. A branch does not decide harder and produce an apple.

And whose fruit is it? The Spirit's. It is in the name of the list.

You are looking at the thing you decided you were not given, sitting on a list of what the Holy Spirit grows. Galatians 5:23 puts temperance at the end of the fruit of the Spirit and calls the whole set fruit rather than achievement, and it is the Holy Spirit named as the one it belongs to, which means the quality you have written off in yourself is on an inventory of things somebody else produces in a person.

What the nine year conclusion actually is

Now the belief, because it should be looked at squarely and it is doing more damage than the three weeks ever did.

You concluded that consistency is not part of your distribution.

That is a claim about how you were made, drawn from a pattern of results. It is a reasonable inference from twenty years of evidence, and it is the sort of thing anybody would conclude, and it is not true. It is not true because the item in question is not distributed as a temperament. It is grown, in whoever is attached to the vine, over time, and slowly, which is exactly what fruit does.

You have taken a slow-growing fruit as a fixed trait you were not issued. John 15:5 says I am the vine, ye are the branches, he that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit, for without me ye can do nothing, and the bearing is put on the abiding rather than on the branch's effort, and it is the same Spirit whose fruit that list describes, which means what you have been trying to produce by resolution was always going to arrive by attachment.

The fire is not the problem

Let us be careful, because there is a cheap reading of this that would take something from you.

Nothing here says the first week is suspect. Nothing here suggests that a person who begins with fire is shallow, or that steadier people are further along.

That first week is real. People are genuinely lifted by it. There are things in that hall this morning that exist because somebody once started something with everything she had.

You have been given something real and it is not in competition with what you are asking for. 1 Corinthians 12:4 says there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit, and it puts the variety and the single source in one sentence, and it is the Holy Spirit named there as the one distributing, which means the fire and the keeping come out of the same place and you have never had to trade one for the other.