A Fire Shut Up In His Bones

He does it at ten past five, before the house is up, and he has done it at ten past five for eleven years.

For the first ten of those he would have told you it was the best part of the day, and he would have been telling the truth.

For the last one it has been a job.

He sits down. He reads. He gets to the end and closes it and could not tell you with any confidence what he read. Some mornings he catches himself reading the same eight lines three times without the words going anywhere at all, and the honest description of what he feels while doing it is not resistance and it is not boredom. It is nothing.

He is forty-eight, a joiner, and he thinks in a fairly plain way about most things.

And the thought that has come at him about six times in the last two months, and it comes at ten past five, is this: this is not honest. A man who does not want to do a thing and does it anyway to keep up appearances with God is a hypocrite. It would be more truthful to stop.

He has not stopped. That is the part he cannot square. He has thought about it clearly, more than once, decided it would be the honest thing, and then found himself sitting there at ten past five the next morning anyway.

The prophet who decided to stop

Jeremiah says something out loud that is almost word for word your six o'clock thought, and then describes what happened to it.

Then I said, I will not make mention of him, nor speak any more in his name. But his word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I was weary with forbearing, and I could not stay.Jeremiah 20:9

Read the first sentence. He decided to stop. That is a real decision by a real prophet and it is written down without apology.

Now read what stopped him. Not conviction. Not a rebuke. Not somebody talking him round. His word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones.

Something was in him that would not let the decision hold, and he did not put it there and could not remove it, and he describes it as exhausting rather than as pleasant. I was weary with forbearing. Holding it in was harder than going on.

You are being kept at a table by something you did not install, and Jeremiah could not get rid of it either. That is not me flattering your habit; Jeremiah 20:9 has the prophet's own decision to stop and the fire that overruled it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an ancient man's frustration and stands it beside a joiner at ten past five.

What the duty actually is

Now let me get at the word hypocrite, because it is the wrong word and it is doing you damage.

A hypocrite is somebody performing for an audience who would behave differently if nobody were watching. Look at your situation. Nobody is watching. It is ten past five and the house is asleep and there is no audience, and there has not been one for eleven years. Whatever is happening at that table, it is not a performance.

You do a thing you do not feel like doing, alone, for a Person, repeatedly, over a year in which it has given you nothing back. That has a name and the name is not hypocrisy.

You have been mislabeling faithfulness, and God has never once confused the two. The written word describes a prophet continuing against his own stated intention, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been the fire in the bones of a man who keeps arriving at a table he does not want to sit at.

And I want to deal with the honesty question directly, because you are a straightforward man and it matters to you. The honest option is not stopping. Stopping would resolve a tension by removing one of the two true things, and both of them are true: you do not want to, and you keep going. Sitting down anyway while feeling nothing is not a lie about your feelings. It is a fact about your feelings and a different fact about your will, held together, which is what most love looks like after the first decade of anything.

You are not pretending, and the year of nothing has never once been counted against you. Scripture gives the fire as something in a man rather than something a man works up, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping it lit through eleven years and a flat one.