A Heart That Does The Walking

For the first two years, Alec swept.

He swept the yard in the morning before the tarpaulins came off, and he swept the shed floor at the end of the day, and in between he swept whatever Wilf had just been working on, because you cannot see a line through dust.

He also filled the water butt, sorted offcuts by size onto the racks at the back, oiled the stone every Friday, and learned to put an edge on a chisel until Wilf stopped saying anything about it, which was how you knew.

What he did not do, for two years, was touch the work.

Not once. He was not allowed near the banker with a mallet in his hand. If he picked up a chisel it was to sharpen it, and if he carried a block it was to move it, and there were four or five specific things around the shed he was told, plainly and without explanation, that he was not to put his hands on.

By the second November he was fairly sure he had made a mistake with his life.

He had given up a proper apprenticeship at the garage and a girlfriend who had gone to Leeds and every Saturday for two years, and what he had to show for it was a very good broom technique and an oilstone with his thumbprint worn into the side of it. His mother asked him at Christmas what he was actually learning and he could not answer her. He could list, in detail, everything he was not allowed to do. That was the whole shape of the job as far as he could tell. A list of things he was set apart from.

Then on a Tuesday in February, with a frost still on the trestles at half past seven, Wilf put a chisel in his hand.

Not to sharpen. He set Alec in front of a lintel, put his fingers on the tool, corrected the angle by about the width of a hair, and then closed his own hand over the top of Alec's hand and hit it.

And the stone came away clean.

Alec has said since that the strangest part was that he felt it happen through his own arm and knew perfectly well he had not done it. The hand was his. The cut was not.

They did eight inches like that, hand over hand, and then Wilf let go and said, "Right. Carry on," and walked off to make tea.

And Alec stood in a cold yard at twenty to eight with a chisel in his hand and understood, for the first time, what the two years of sweeping had been for. Nobody had ever been keeping him away from the work. They had been getting him ready for the wall.

If you gave a lot of things up and you still could not tell anybody what you were set apart for, put the broom down a minute and stand here with me.

Set apart for a wall, not away from a room

There is a chapter in Leviticus where God consecrates people, and the order of it is the whole teaching. Leviticus 8, and it runs like a sequence because it is one.

First they are washed with water. That is where it starts, not where it ends, and if you have come here from anything about the crossing, this is the very next thing on the page. One sequence, in one order, and His Spirit has been running it from the first line.

Then they are clothed. Actual garments, described in detail, put onto them by somebody else.

Then they are anointed. Oil poured out, on the place and on the person, which in Scripture always means a life being commissioned rather than a life being restrained.

And then the strangest part, and the part I would like you to hold. Blood is put on the tip of the right ear, on the thumb of the right hand, and on the great toe of the right foot.

Ear. Hand. Foot.

What you hear. What you make. Where you go.

Not one of those three is an abstention. There is no mark for what you must stop doing. Every mark on that body is on an organ of function, and the whole ceremony is a person being fitted out to work. You were set apart for something and not merely away from something, and Leviticus 8 puts the washing at the beginning of a sequence rather than at the end of one, and it is His Spirit who keeps that order alive rather than my liking for it.

This matters because most people are handed the other version. Holiness arrives as subtraction. A list of what you have stopped, quietly getting longer, and a slow suspicion that you are mostly a collection of the things you no longer do. And the honest problem with that version is not that it is too hard. It is that it never once tells you what the broom was for.

Now here is where it gets good, because there is an obvious objection and God answers it before anybody raises it.

The objection is: fine, but I have met my heart. I know exactly what it is made of. It is not up to a wall.

And I will give them one heart, and I will put a new spirit within you; and I will take the stony heart out of their flesh, and will give them an heart of flesh: That they may walk in my statutes, and keep mine ordinances, and do them: and they shall be my people, and I will be their God.Ezekiel 11:19-20

Read the verbs. He gives. He takes out. He puts in. Not one of the four belongs to the person being described.

And a few chapters later God says the same thing again, because He knew it would need saying twice, and the second time He adds the line that settles it: I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes. You have a heart of flesh where the stone used to be, and the walking is His to cause rather than yours to generate. That is Ezekiel 36:27, and it is His Spirit inside the promise rather than an instruction bolted onto the end of it.

Sit with the word cause for a second. Not permit. Not require. Not expect. Cause you to walk. That is a hand closing over the top of your hand on a cold morning.

Which is why the exhaustion you have been carrying is not a sign that you were unsuited. It is the entirely reasonable result of trying to produce, out of your own chest, an obedience that Scripture never asked your chest to produce. You have been handed a new heart. It is His Spirit doing the walking in it, not the muscle in your own chest, and the striving is the part that gets to stop.

And notice that the walk is still yours. Alec's arm was Alec's arm. His hand held the chisel and his shoulder felt the shock of the mallet, and the cut was still not his doing. Both of those are true at once and neither cancels the other. That is what a walk with God actually feels like from the inside, and anyone who tells you it feels like effortlessness or like effort alone has told you half.