Choose Before You Feel It

He stands at the end of the hall on Sundays with his hand on the frame, not feeling like going in.

The kitchen is right there. He can hear it. Somebody is being loudly wrong about football and somebody else is banging a pot lid for emphasis and there is a child under the table who has been under the table for an hour and will emerge only for food. It is the same as it has been every Sunday of his life.

And he does not feel like it.

That is the whole of his problem and it is bigger than it sounds. He does not feel warm about them today. He does not feel like being pulled in and asked things. There is nothing wrong between him and any of them, and if you asked him whether he loves them he would look at you as though you had asked whether he needed his lungs.

He simply does not feel it today, and he has decided, somewhere along the line, that going in without feeling it would be a lie.

So he stands with his hand on the frame.

Now, here is what his aunt does, and she has been doing it for thirty years without any theory behind it. She comes out, takes him by the sleeve, and pulls. She does not ask about his interior life. She puts him in a chair and puts a plate in front of him, and forty minutes later he is arguing about football with his mouth full and there is a child on his foot.

She has never once waited for him to feel like coming in. She would find the idea baffling.

And the same man who lets himself be pulled into that kitchen every Sunday will not turn to God on a day when he does not feel it, because with God he has decided that the feeling is the qualification.

That is you at the end of the hall.

You have a whole life in which you do the right thing without feeling it, and you call that being a decent person. And in the one place where it matters most, you have decided that acting without the feeling would be dishonest, and so you stand with your hand on the frame.

God asks for a choice and never once asks for a feeling

At the end of a very long book, Moses puts the whole thing in front of a nation in one sentence, and I want you to notice what is missing from it.

I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.Deuteronomy 30:19

Choose life. That is the verb. Choose.

Not feel drawn to life. Not become warm toward life. Not wait until life appeals to you. Choose, which is a thing done by the will, and which any person can do on any day regardless of what is going on in their chest.

You have a choice available to you that requires nothing from your feelings, and the verb in the verse is one you can perform this afternoon, and I am not lowering anything: Deuteronomy 30:19 says choose, in writing, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my saying so who can get that to a man standing at the end of a hall.

I want to say something about my own house here, because it explains this better than an argument would. In my family nobody ever waited to feel like showing up. You went to the thing. You went to the christening and the funeral and the Sunday table when you were tired and when you had had a bad week and when you and your cousin were not speaking. And the going was not hypocrisy. The going was the love, expressed in the only form that is actually available on a bad week, which is the form where your feet do it.

You have been doing this your whole life in every other room, and it was never dishonest in any of them, which is written into the verb God chose rather than into my fondness for my aunt, with the Spirit of God able to carry it into the one room where you have made an exception.

Now look at what Moses puts around the choice, because it is not a cold instruction. That both thou and thy seed may live. The choosing is not tested for sincerity. It is aimed at life, for the one choosing and for the people who come after them, and the whole sentence is God pressing for a particular answer rather than examining the state of the one giving it.

He is not standing at the end of your hall waiting to see whether you feel it. He is doing what my aunt does, which is telling you plainly which way to come and making it obvious there is a chair.

This is a choice and not a feeling, and it is available to you exactly as flat as you are, because Scripture puts the verb in the will, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that down a hallway at midday.