Holiness Was Never A Subtraction

The paint on the walls of that room is called Chalk, and Junie chose it because it was the quietest thing on the card.

Two summers ago she cleared the small back bedroom out entirely. The exercise bike went to her nephew. The boxes went to the loft or to the tip. She took down the shelf, filled the holes, sanded them, painted the whole room herself over four evenings with the window open and the radio off, and then she put one wooden chair in the middle of it and stood in the doorway looking at what she had made.

A prayer room. She had wanted one for years.

She hung nothing on the walls. That had felt right at the time. Nothing on the sill either, no cushion on the chair, no rug. Bare board, bare wall, one chair, one window with the blind up.

She sits in there most mornings for about half an hour. And what she mostly notices is the radiator ticking as it warms, and the sound of the neighbor's car, and her own knees.

She is not going to say any of this to anybody, because it sounds ungrateful and because she is fifty-seven years old and ought to be past it, but the honest report on two years of that room is that it feels exactly as empty as it looks.

Then in April her granddaughter came for the weekend and went wandering the way children do, opening doors.

What is this room for, Nana.

It is for praying, love.

The girl stood in the doorway swinging on the handle and looked around it slowly, the walls, the board, the chair, the window.

Yeah, but what is IN it.

Junie laughed and said something and got her downstairs for toast, and then she stood at the counter with the butter knife in her hand and could not put the question down, because she had understood exactly what the child meant, and the child was right.

She had built that room the way she had built her whole life with God, which was out of removals. She was excellent at removals. She could tell you what she had taken out of her days and what she had put down and what she no longer watched or said or went to, and she was not sorry about any of it, and none of it was wrong.

But she could not have told you, standing there with the knife, what any of it had been cleared FOR.

An empty room is what you get when subtraction is the whole method. It is clean. It is quiet. And nobody can tell you what it is for, including you.

If you have a room like that, or a life like that, come and sit on the stairs with me. I want to walk you through an old ceremony, slowly, in the order it actually happened.

Washed, then clothed, then anointed, and then sent

Leviticus 8 is the day Aaron and his sons were set apart, and it moves in a sequence that nearly everybody remembers the first step of and almost nobody remembers the rest of.

Step one, Moses washes them with water.

That is where a great many of us stopped. Clean. Sorted. Finished. And if the washing is the whole ceremony, then the goal of the spiritual life is to be as unmarked as possible, and the most holy person in any room is the one who has done the least.

But the chapter keeps going, and the next thing that happens to a clean man is that he gets dressed.

And thou shalt make holy garments for Aaron thy brother for glory and for beauty.Exodus 28:2

The coat, the girdle, the robe, the ephod, the breastplate with twelve stones in it and twelve names cut into the stones. Glory and beauty are the two words God uses about the clothing of a set-apart man, and neither of them is a removal. Something was put ON him, and it was heavy, and it had other people's names on it. You have been clothed rather than merely emptied, and Exodus 28:2 says God's own design brief for a consecrated man was glory and beauty, and it is His Spirit who dresses a person that way rather than a person managing it in a mirror.

Then the oil. Poured on the head, running down, and the whole tent and everything in it anointed with him, because a consecrated man is never consecrated by himself.

And then the strangest part, and the part that answers Junie's granddaughter.

And Moses took of the blood of it, and put it upon the tip of Aaron's right ear, and upon the thumb of his right hand, and upon the great toe of his right foot.Leviticus 8:23

The ear. The thumb. The toe.

Sit with that for a second, because it is not decorative. Of everything on a human body God could have marked, He chose three, and every one of the three is an organ of doing. The ear is what hears an instruction. The thumb is what makes a hand able to grip and carry and build anything at all. The foot is what takes a man where he is going.

Not the mouth, to seal it. Not the eyes, to cover them. Hearing, working, going. Every single mark was placed on a part of him that was about to be used.

That is what set apart means, and it always meant that. Set apart is not a fence, it is an assignment. You were marked for hearing and for working and for going, and Leviticus 8:23 puts the blood on the three parts that move, and the Holy Spirit did not come into you to keep you still and unmarked in a quiet room.

Now hold that beside the promise Ezekiel makes, because it lands in exactly the same place.

A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes.Ezekiel 36:26-27

Cause you to walk. Read who is doing the walking and who is doing the causing. Everybody who has ever tried to get holy by subtraction has been trying to power the walking themselves, and Ezekiel hands the engine over in four words. It is already done in you, because God said He would put His Spirit within and cause the walk, and that is the Holy Spirit's own work and not a target you are being set.

And then Peter, writing to ordinary people scattered all over, gives the purpose clause out loud.

But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light.1 Peter 2:9

That ye should. There it is. Every one of those titles arrives with a purpose bolted to the end of it. Chosen, royal, holy, and peculiar are not descriptions of a person who has successfully avoided things. They are what you call somebody who has been given a job in a house.