I Became the Enforcer

There is a whiteboard on the side of the fridge and it has been there for six years, and at one point it had verses on it and now it has a chart.

She would not have called it a chart at the time. It was a way of keeping track. But there are names down the side and days across the top and she is the one who fills it in, and her fifteen year old drew a very small face in one of the squares last month that she has not mentioned to anybody.

It began well. It began the year her marriage nearly ended and did not, and in the middle of that she made a promise to God, standing in her own back garden at about eleven at night, that she would lead this family spiritually. Nobody else was going to. She meant it as an act of courage, which it was.

And she did lead. For a while it was genuinely good and the children still talk about one particular summer.

Then leading became reminding, and reminding became checking, and checking became a chart on a fridge. And her two teenagers, who used to talk, have gone quiet in a way that is not ordinary teenage quiet, and she knows the difference, and she has known for about a year.

Six years since the back garden. And the last three of them she has been, in her own house, an inspector.

You may be the one who keeps track. And you may have started out of courage and ended up as an atmosphere, and the people who used to talk to you may have stopped.

Whose conduct the psalm is about

Let me put a verse in front of you, and I want you to look at the pronouns, because they are the entire lesson.

David is writing a psalm about how he intends to conduct himself, and it is a psalm people quote about households, and almost everybody quoting it misses who is being described.

I will behave myself wisely in a perfect way. O when wilt thou come unto me? I will walk within my house with a perfect heart.Psalm 101:2

You are answerable for your own walking in that house and for nothing that happens inside anybody else's chest. Psalm 101:2 puts every verb in the first person, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been in those rooms without a single inspection.

Count the I

I will behave myself. I will walk. Within my house.

Three first person verbs and a location, and not one word about anybody else in the building. In the whole verse there is no instruction to a household, no expectation stated of a wife or a child or a servant, and no mechanism of oversight.

He is describing what he is going to be like in his own hallway.

And then, dropped into the middle of it, a line that does not belong in a resolution at all: O when wilt thou come unto me. That is a man who has just made a serious commitment about his own conduct and immediately admits, in the same breath, that he cannot do it unaided and is waiting on God to turn up.

You are responsible for how you walk in your own house and for nothing else in it. Psalm 101:2 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it off a page of resolutions and puts it in front of a whiteboard on a fridge.

Now let me say the hard thing, because this is the landing category and its rule is absolute: nothing in this article is exercised over another person's will, and that includes a fifteen year old's.

You have authority in your house. Real authority, and it covers bedtimes and screens and how people speak to each other. It does not cover the inside of anybody's chest, and the chart has been an attempt to get at the inside of a chest by way of the outside of a week, and it has not worked, and the small face in the square is what it produced.

You are released from a job you invented in a garden in the dark. Scripture puts the perfect heart inside the walking of the one who is speaking, and the Spirit of God has been in that house through six years of you keeping score.

What the courage was

And I want to be careful with the back garden, because a lot of preaching would treat that promise as the problem and it is not.

You were standing in the middle of the worst year of your marriage and you decided that somebody had to carry something. That was courage and it was not misplaced, and God heard it, and the summer the children still talk about came out of it.

What happened after is what happens to a person carrying something alone: it got heavy, and heavy things get systems, and systems need compliance.

You did not become controlling because you are controlling. You became controlling because you were carrying it by yourself and you were never meant to.

You are standing in this covenant and you are not carrying it alone. The word puts it plainly, and that is what it means that the psalmist asks when wilt thou come unto me in the middle of his own resolution, and His Spirit is the one who has been the other half of it the entire time.