The Checklist She Was Handed

It was A5, printed on yellow paper, and it had a border of small crosses down each side.

Nineteen points. She has never forgotten that there were nineteen because she used to count them going down, and she still cannot see the number nineteen without a small thing happening in her stomach.

Am I in the Word daily. Have I dealt with all known sin. Am I walking in forgiveness toward everyone. Am I sharing my faith. Is my thought life clean. Am I ready, right now, today, if it were to happen this hour.

She was nineteen when she was handed it, at a conference, in a hall that smelled of floor polish, by a woman with a clipboard who was kind and busy and who probably handed out four hundred of them that weekend.

That was seventeen years ago and she has never got rid of it.

Not the paper. The paper went a long time ago. The list runs from memory, usually at night, and she scores herself against it the way you would check a car before a long drive, and she has never once come out with a result that let her stop.

The worst part is that every item on it is a good thing. That is what makes it impossible to argue with. There is nothing on that list she thinks is wrong. The list is not a lie. It is a set of nineteen true things arranged into an instrument she has been failing for seventeen years.

She has never told anybody because it sounds like she is complaining about being asked to take her faith seriously.

Sit down. That list has been doing a job it was never designed for, and there is a verse that takes the grading off you.

Presented, not assessed

Here is the sentence, and it is worth reading with a pen in your hand to notice who is doing what.

He has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him.Colossians 1:22

Every verb belongs to Him. He reconciled. He presents. The means is stated as his body of flesh by his death, which is a very physical way of saying that the work was done somewhere other than in your bedroom at eleven at night.

And the standard named is not a passing grade. Holy and blameless and above reproach is three terms, all of them absolute, none of them achievable by a scoring system, and they are described as the result of the presenting rather than as the entry requirement for it.

You are being presented rather than assessed, and Colossians 1:22 puts the whole standard on His side of the sentence, and the Spirit did not inspire a verse about a threshold.

What the list was actually for

Now the nineteen points, and this is where the damage is.

Every item is good. That is exactly right and it is why the instrument works so well. Those nineteen things are the ordinary shape of a life turned toward Christ, and any of them read on their own on a good day would be an encouragement.

What was done to them was to arrange them into a test with a pass mark, and to attach that pass mark to a question about readiness, and to hand it to a nineteen year old at a weekend conference with no follow up.

Good material becomes a weapon when it is given a scoring function it was never meant to carry. The Bible does contain all nineteen of those things, and in none of the places it discusses them are they presented as a checklist you could fall below and be lost.

You were handed a tool and told it was a mirror. Nothing written anywhere makes those items the basis of anybody's standing, and the Spirit produces them as fruit over a lifetime rather than requiring them as evidence by Thursday.

Why the score never comes out clean

Here is the mechanical part, because the failure has been read as a moral one. The Spirit is not the author of an instrument nobody can pass.

That list has an item on it about your thought life. It has an item about dealing with all known sin, which contains the word all. It has an item about being ready right now, this hour.

There is no state a living human being can occupy in which those come out clean simultaneously. That is not pessimism about you specifically, it is what those words mean. Any honest person running that instrument fails it every time it is run, forever, including the woman who handed it to you.

Which means the seventeen years of never scoring well enough is not information about you. It is information about the instrument.

And it is worth asking what the list was actually for on the day it was printed. Almost certainly it was meant to prompt, once, at a conference, in a room full of young people who had just heard something and needed a way to think about it that week. Handed out four hundred times, it was a nudge. Kept for seventeen years and run nightly from memory, it became something else entirely, and nobody intended that and nobody was there to notice it happening.

There is one more thing worth saying about the item that asks whether you are ready right now, this hour, because it is the hinge the whole list turns on. Readiness, in the sense that question means it, is not something Scripture ever makes a person responsible for generating. You are ready because of what Christ did, and Colossians 1:22 says exactly that, and the Spirit is not standing behind a yellow piece of paper waiting to see whether you can talk yourself into a yes at eleven at night.

You are not failing at something achievable. What is written puts the achieving in Christ's death and the presenting in His hands, and the Spirit bears witness to that rather than issuing you a nightly result.