Yes, Then The Cost

Simi says yes to God faster than anybody in that building, and then she goes home and runs it past somebody else.

She would be horrified by that sentence. She would also, if you gave her about a minute, agree with it, because she is honest and she has known for a while that something in the sequence is not right.

The yes is real. It happens immediately, in the room, out loud, and it has cost her things before, so this is not a woman who says yes cheaply. There are two or three occasions in her life where she said yes on the spot and it was expensive and she never once complained about it.

But there is a second step, and it happens in the car or the kitchen or at about eleven at night, and it is not prayer.

It is a check. She would not call it that. If you asked her what she was doing she would say she was being wise, being responsible, thinking it through, and every one of those words is a true description of part of what is going on.

What she is actually doing is taking a yes that has already been given and submitting it to a second authority for clearance.

And most of the time the clearance comes through. That is what has kept the arrangement invisible for years: it usually approves. She goes ahead, and the going ahead looks like obedience, and it very nearly is.

But every so often it does not clear, and then something quiet happens. She does not say no. She has never once told God no in her life and she would be unable to. What happens is that the yes gets slower. It gets qualified. It gets scheduled for a better season. And nobody, including her, ever has to register a refusal, because a yes that is merely postponed never shows up anywhere as a no.

She saw this properly on a Wednesday when a friend asked her, quite innocently, why she had not done the thing she had been so certain about in the spring.

And Simi opened her mouth to explain and found that the explanation was a budget.

Now hear me, because this is where a woman starts tearing strips off herself and I am stopping it before it starts.

Simi is not disobedient. She is one of the most obedient people in that church and everyone there knows it. And she is not faithless for having thought about what a thing would cost, because Jesus Himself told a story about a man who built without counting and He did not tell it in the man's favor.

That is not the failure here.

The failure, if we are going to call it anything, is only this: two authorities cannot both be final, and hers have never been introduced.

You have your own version. There is a yes you have given, sincerely, and there is a second desk it has to pass through afterwards, and you have never once named that desk out loud.

Nobody is calling you disobedient. That word does not belong to you today.

But there is a second signature on your obedience, and it has been signing for years.

Joshua does not ask them to feel differently. He asks them to choose today.

There is a line at the end of a long life where an old man puts it in front of a whole nation in one sentence.

Choose you this day whom ye will serve; ...but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.Joshua 24:15

Notice three things, because all three are doing work.

This day. Not eventually, not once the situation improves. A date, and the date is today, which is the only day anybody has ever been able to choose anything on.

Whom ye will serve. Not what you will feel about it. Service is the category. He is asking about the arrangement, not the affection, and the arrangement is the thing a person can actually settle.

And as for me and my house, which he says without waiting to see what the room decides. He does not take a vote.

And now hear what is already settled over you. You are able to choose today. That is not motivational talk: the written word puts the choosing in the imperative, and God does not command a capacity He has not already given, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that live in a woman standing in her kitchen at eleven at night.

And the yes you gave in the spring was heard. It did not expire when it was postponed. The word says God is not slack concerning His promise, and it is the Spirit who keeps a real yes alive in a person rather than filing it away, which is exactly why a friend's innocent question could still find it in one sentence.

Nobody is coming for your good sense

I want to be very plain here, because this is the paragraph where a message like this tells somebody to do something reckless and call it faith, and then goes quiet when the bill arrives.

Nobody here is telling you to stop counting. Counting is not the rival. The Lord Himself put the man who builds without checking into a story as a warning, and if I stood here and told you that thinking about cost is unbelief I would be contradicting Him to make my paragraph land harder.

And nobody is telling you that having less would make you more obedient. That is the same error upside down. A woman with resources is not further from God than a woman without them, and making yourself poor on purpose still leaves the amount sitting in the middle of the room where it does not belong.

The question is not whether you count.

The question is whether the counting is advising you or clearing you, because those are different jobs, and only one of them belongs to a tool.

And you already have one Master. Not once the sequence is fixed: the word says you are not your own, you were bought at a price, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit that this is settled and not pending.

The other one was never paying you anyway. It has never once carried anybody through anything. The written word says riches make themselves wings and fly away, and the Spirit is able to make a woman feel the truth of that without a single thing being removed from her to prove it.