The aprons hang on a rail by the fire door, eleven of them, heavy unbleached canvas gone soft from a hundred washes, and every one has a name written on the waistband in black laundry marker.
Simone had been coming three Thursdays and had not touched them.
The kitchen ran from four until seven and fed whoever came. Simone got there at three, because the two big aluminum stockpots were never properly done at the end of a night and somebody could do them in the hour before, if that somebody arrived early and made no fuss about it. So she did the pots. Twenty six years old, coat still on, sleeves pushed up, at a deep sink with a green scourer and a pot the size of a bin, getting the burnt line off the bottom while the room filled up behind her.
She could not have explained why she was doing it. If you had asked her she would have said she was helping, and she would have meant it, and it would not have been the truth.
The truth was that Simone had spent two years giving things up.
Some of them mattered. Some of them she now suspects did not. She had come out of a stretch of her life that was genuinely going somewhere bad, and she had walked away from a lot of it, and she was proud of that in the guarded way people are proud of something nobody congratulated them for. But when she was honest, and she was mostly honest, she could not have named one thing she had been set apart for. She had a very clear list of what she was no longer. She had nothing on the other side of the page.
So she scrubbed pots. Because somewhere underneath, without words, she had decided that if she did the unglamorous thing long enough and well enough and quietly enough, then at some point God would show up with the oil, and she would finally be one of the people He was actually using.
Third Thursday. Ten past three. She had her hand on the tap.
Miss Hyacinth, who has run that kitchen since before Simone was born and moves through it like weather, came across, reached past her, turned the tap off, and walked her back to the fire door.
She took an apron off the rail and put it into Simone's hands.
Simone turned the waistband over. Her own name, in black laundry marker, in handwriting that was not hers. The marker had already faded slightly, which meant it had been written a while ago, which meant it had been written before her first Thursday.
"Apron first," Miss Hyacinth said. "Then the work. That is the order. I have never once done it the other way round and I am not starting tonight."
Somebody read the order out to me once, and I have never got over it
There is a chapter that settles this, and almost nobody has ever had it read to them slowly.
Leviticus 8 is the consecration of Aaron and his sons. It is a priest being made, and it happens in a fixed sequence in front of the whole congregation, and the sequence is the teaching.
Moses brings them forward and washes them with water. Then he clothes them, coat and girdle and robe, tied on by somebody else's hands. Then he takes the anointing oil and pours it, on the tabernacle and then on Aaron's head. And only after all of that does the blood go on the tip of the right ear, the thumb of the right hand, and the great toe of the right foot.
And he poured of the anointing oil upon Aaron's head, and anointed him, to sanctify him.Leviticus 8:12
Count what Aaron has done at that point in the chapter. Nothing. He has stood still and let things be done to him. He has not offered a sacrifice, taught anybody, judged a case, or lit a lamp. He is washed, dressed and oiled before he has performed one single duty of the office he is being put into.
That order is not an accident and it is not a detail, and it is already the shape you are standing in: you were anointed before the work and not after your review of it. Leviticus 8 puts the oil ahead of every duty in the order it is written down, and the same Spirit who moved a man to record that sequence is the one keeping you from reading it backwards tonight.
And notice what the marks are on.
The ear, so that what he hears has been claimed. The thumb, so that what he handles has been claimed. The toe, so that where he walks has been claimed. That is a whole life named, and every one of those three marks was applied to a man who was standing still with his hands at his sides.
Something else sits underneath the word itself. The idiom behind consecrate in those chapters is about a hand being filled. Not emptied. Filled. Whatever else you thought was happening when you were set apart, the picture in the language is somebody's hands being loaded up with something to carry. Exodus 28:41 uses the same idiom for what Moses was told to do to Aaron, and it is His Spirit, and not a clever reading, that makes an old phrase do anything at all in a person.
Simone had two years of an empty page under the heading of what she had stopped. Nobody had ever told her the heading was on the wrong side.
You have been given something to carry and not only something to leave, and Ezekiel wrote it down centuries before either of us needed it. His Spirit is not asking you to generate the strength for it either, which is the next line and the one that ends the anxiety.
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
Read the last verb. Cause you to walk. Not require, not expect, not monitor. The walking itself is named as something He does in a person, which means the anxious question of whether you can keep this up was answered in a promise long before you thought to ask it.
Then John, writing to ordinary believers who were being told by clever people that they were missing a level.
But the anointing which ye have received of him abideth in you.1 John 2:27
Which ye have received. Past tense, settled, done. Abideth in you. Present tense, continuous, still there this evening whether or not this has been a good week.
So this is yours right now and not pending inspection: the oil is already on you and it did not come off in February. That is what 1 John 2:27 says in the tense it chose, and it is His Spirit abiding rather than my saying so that makes it true while you sit there doubting it.
So here is the turn, and it hands you something instead of asking for something.
You are not waiting for the oil. You have been working under the impression that the anointing is a promotion, awarded after a probationary period, to people who scrub enough pots quietly enough. It is not. It went on Aaron's head before he had done a day's work, and 1 John 2:27 says the one on you was received and is abiding, which is two settled facts in one short sentence; the Spirit named there is not on His way, He is in residence.
And put down the other thing too, the private arithmetic about what you gave up. Holiness was never a subtraction sum. If somebody handed you a life of abstentions and called it being set apart, they handed you half of it, and the half they left out is the half with a face in it. Aaron's ear was marked so he could hear somebody. His hands were marked so he could carry something. His feet were marked so he could go somewhere, to people, on purpose.
You were set apart for Him first, and everything else is downstream of that. Ezekiel 36:26 gives the new heart as a gift with no conditions attached to the giving, and that season you thought you were surviving on your own had His Spirit walking you through it.
Declare this over yourself
Say them out loud with your hands still open, and slowly, because these are not lines to get through. The authority in them is not yours by nature and it is not mine. It is Christ's, delegated, and it is yours because you are in Christ and the anointing has been given to you, so you speak them the way an ambassador speaks a word he did not have to write. And however He answers on any given day, the outcome is His, and He has never once been careless with somebody standing there with their hands open.
- Apron on the rail, you were never a wage, and my name was on your waistband before I had scrubbed a single pot. 1 John 2:27 says the anointing I received of Him abides in me, and His Spirit is the one who put it there and has not taken it back since. In the name of Jesus I am wearing what I was handed.
- Fear that God is standing back to see how I do first, you get out of this kitchen, because the oil went onto Aaron's head before he had performed one duty of the office. Leviticus 8 sets the anointing ahead of the work in the order it is written, and the same Spirit who preserved that sequence is walking me through it now. I am set apart for Him, and the order was never mine to arrange.
- Lord, You gave the new heart first and then said You would cause the walking, and You have never once handed anybody a list and stepped back to watch. Your word says the anointing I have received abides in me, and Your Spirit is the one doing the walking while I am still learning the room. In the name of Jesus my ear and my hand and my foot are Yours, and my hands are open for whatever You are filling them with.
1 John 2:27
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.
