Going Through the Motions

She was twenty three and she said it to her friend Dolores in a car outside a diner, and she said it with some heat, because they had just come from a funeral where a man had been praised for forty years of faithful service and everybody in that building knew the man had been a stone.

I am never going to be that, she said. If it ever goes out of me I will stop. I am not going to be one of those people who goes through the motions.

She said it to God too, in the same car, after Dolores had gone in. She meant it as a promise about honesty.

She is fifty two.

And for about nine years now she has been exactly what she swore she would never be. She reads in the morning and takes almost nothing from it. She goes on Sunday and could not tell you afterward what was said. She prays for a list of people, by name, every night, and she does it the way you do the dishes.

Two months ago she stopped.

Not all of it, but the reading and the praying, and she stopped for one reason: she is not going to be a hypocrite. She promised. And a woman who keeps performing something she does not feel is precisely the thing she sat in a car at twenty three and refused to become.

So there is nothing now, and she is not comfortable, and she would tell you that she is doing the honest thing and does not enjoy it.

You may have kept a promise about honesty in a way that has cost you everything else. You may have stopped a good practice because you could not feel it, and called the stopping integrity.

What David did when there was nothing left

I want to take you to about the worst day anybody in Scripture has, and to four words in the middle of it.

David and his men come back to their town and find it burned and their families gone. And then the account says something that is easy to read past: the people spake of stoning him. So his home is gone, his family is gone, and the men who follow him are talking about killing him, all in the same afternoon.

And then this.

And David was greatly distressed; for the people spake of stoning him, because the soul of all the people was grieved, every man for his sons and for his daughters: but David encouraged himself in the LORD his God.1 Samuel 30:6

You are doing on purpose the thing Scripture calls a man's best hour, and no feeling was ever attached to it. 1 Samuel 30:6 describes an action and never once describes a mood, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept you at that action for nine years.

Encouraged himself

Read the verb, because the verb is the whole thing.

He encouraged himself. It is a thing he did, not a thing that happened to him. There is no account of a feeling arriving. There is no visitation, no lifting, no warmth described anywhere in the verse. The text simply says that in a state of great distress, with nothing whatever going for him, he performed an action, directed at God, on purpose.

Now: was that a performance?

Nobody in the history of the church has ever suggested so. It is quoted as the high point of David's character. And yet by your definition it is exactly what you swore never to do, because there is not one word in that sentence about how he felt while he did it.

You are able to do it on purpose with nothing in you, and Scripture calls that the best thing a man did on the worst day of his life. 1 Samuel 30:6 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it out of a burned town and puts it in a kitchen where a woman has stopped reading.

Now let me deal with your promise, because it was a good one and it deserves better than being quietly set aside.

You promised not to be like that man at the funeral. But look at what actually made him a stone. It was not that he did things without feeling them. It was that he was praised for forty years of service by people who had been treated badly by him at home. The gap was not between his heart and his practice, it was between his practice and his life.

That is not your gap. Your practice and your life are the same. You pray for those people by name and then you go and do things for them, dully, and you have for years.

You have been keeping your promise the whole time and prosecuting yourself under the wrong statute. Scripture puts a deliberate act in a state of nothing at the center of David's character, and the Spirit of God has been the one at that table with a woman who took almost nothing from what she read and read it anyway.

The word motions

And now let me be careful, because there is a rule in this house.

I am not going to promise you that the taste comes back. It might. It might not, and there is no schedule for it in my hands or anybody's, and if I gave you one I would be handing you a fresh thing to be disappointed by.

But I want to give you back the word motions, because it has been used against you.

Going through the motions is a phrase for a person hollow inside a shell they are keeping up for appearances. There are no appearances in your case. Nobody sees you read in the morning. Nobody hears the list of names. There is no audience, no reputation being maintained, no forty years of praise coming at any funeral of yours for this.

What you have been doing alone, unrewarded, with nothing in it, is the exact opposite of the thing you refused to become.

You are doing on purpose what a man in a burned town did, and it counts entirely. Scripture says it in so many words, and that is the plain sense of encouraged himself in the LORD his God, and His Spirit has been the one holding a woman upright through nine years of taking nothing from anything.