Question six is on the back of the page and there is a whole half page of lines underneath it.
The front was easy. Name. Address. How long have you attended here. Are you willing to complete a background check, yes. Would you be able to commit to Wednesday evenings, mostly.
Then she turned it over.
In a few sentences, describe how following Jesus has changed you.
She writes: I stopped drinking. Four years in March.
Then, because the first made room for the second: I stopped listening to the voicemails from my ex-husband over and over in the car.
Then she starts numbering, because a list is easier than sentences and it is twenty to ten and the form is due Sunday.
Three, quit smoking. Four, stopped the credit card thing. Five, stopped talking about Denise at work the way she used to. Six, stopped the show she was watching alone every night until two. Seven, stopped saying that word around her son. Eight, stopped skipping. Nine, stopped a friendship that was not a friendship. Ten, stopped going to her mother's house looking for something that was never in it. Eleven, stopped lying about small things, which was the hardest and which nobody could have caught.
Eleven. Two thirds of the space filled. And for four seconds she is genuinely pleased, because eleven is a lot and every one of them cost something.
Then she reads it back.
Every line begins with stopped, or quit, or no longer. Eleven doors, all shut, all shut for good reasons.
She looks for a line about what is in the house those doors are in.
She turns the page over as though the rest of the question might be on the other side. It is not.
The pen is from a bank. The coffee went cold an hour ago and she drinks some anyway.
She sits there for six minutes and writes nothing.
Then, at the bottom, in smaller handwriting, mostly to herself and not to the committee: I know what I am not.
And you know that sentence, because your list is different and it ends in the same place. Yours has four things on it, or twenty, and they are honest ones, and they cost you. And underneath them there is a half page of lines and a question nobody quite asks out loud: what am I actually turning into.
A list of stops is a fence, not a house
Her eleven lines are not nothing. Four years off drinking is not nothing, and stopping the small lies nobody could check is something most people never get near.
But a fence is not a house. A person can build an excellent fence around an empty lot and stand in the middle of it and still be standing on dirt.
You are being made into something and not merely out of something, and that is the actual sentence Scripture uses. Romans 8:29 says God foreknew people in order to conform them to the image of His Son, which is a positive shape and not a subtraction, and the Spirit of God is the one doing the conforming while a woman sits at a kitchen table with a bank pen.
For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.Romans 8:29
Read what the destination is. Not a cleaner life. Not a shorter list of faults. The image of His Son: a face, a particular Person who walked around Galilee and had a way of doing things.
You have a destination with a name on it, and it was settled before you ever stopped a single one of the eleven. That is what is written in Romans 8:29, conformed to the image of His Son, and the Spirit who inspired the line is the one carrying out the conforming, so the shape being made is not being assembled out of your subtractions.
The likeness has a face
Here is the trouble with the word Christlike. It has been used for so long as a synonym for well behaved that most people hear it as a mood. Quiet. Nice. Unbothered. A person who does not do things.
So look at Him instead. He is not a mood, and the Gospels are full of what He is actually like.
He stops in the middle of a crowd for one woman who touched His clothes, with an important man's dying daughter waiting, and He will not move on until she has told Him the whole story. He notices a widow putting in two coins that nobody else in the treasury noticed. He cooks breakfast on a beach for the men who ran out on Him, and He does not open with the failure, He opens with, come and eat. He asks questions He already knows the answers to, because a question hands a person their dignity back. He cries at a grave He is about to empty.
That is the image. Attention. Nerve. Tenderness that is not soft. A way of being with people that leaves them larger than He found them.
You are being formed into that, in the middle of a Tuesday, with a background check form on the table. His word says the destination is the image of the Son, and the Spirit does that forming from the inside out, which is why the changes He makes are so hard for the person they are happening to to see and so obvious to everyone at the birthday party.
And notice what is not on that list. Not one item of it is a rule. He is not describable as a set of things He avoided, and neither is anyone He is making.
You have already been given the pattern, and it is a Person rather than a policy. Scripture calls Him the firstborn among many brothers and sisters, Romans 8:29, and it is the Spirit who takes the things of Christ and shows them to us, John 16:14, so what is being formed in a person is family resemblance and never a compliance record.
The fruit is not a checklist either
Somebody always reaches for Galatians here. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self control. That is not a scorecard with nine boxes to tick on a Sunday night. It is a description of what a particular Person is like, growing on a branch grafted into Him. Nobody has ever strained an apple into existence.
And if the quitting is the live issue tonight, hear this before the rest. If one of the eleven is not staying quit, if the four years is holding by a thread this week, if the not-drinking is costing more than it did, that is not a faith problem and it is no verdict on your character. See a doctor, because withdrawal, sleep, pain and depression are physical facts with physical answers. See a counselor, and get in a room with people who know this road, because help arriving through human beings is one of the things God is doing here and never a replacement for it. And if the hours after the house goes quiet have moved past regret and into a settled idea that your son would have an easier life with somebody else raising him, do not sit at that table on your own. Call or text 988 tonight, or a crisis line, and get one person to come and sit down with you.
You are held while all of that is true, and you were held through every one of the eleven. His word says nothing separates us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, Romans 8:39, four verses down from the conforming, and it is the Spirit who bears witness with our spirit about whose we are, so a hard week is not a change of address.
So leave question six unfinished for a minute. It will still be there.
This is yours tonight, at the kitchen table, with a bank pen and eleven honest lines and half a page of nothing. The word promised that the ones He foreknew are being conformed to the image of His Son, and His Spirit is the one doing it, so what you are becoming is not waiting on your ability to describe it in a few sentences by Sunday.
And here is the mercy in the whole arrangement. Nobody is being asked to generate a likeness. A family resemblance is not achieved. It shows up, on a face, in a way of answering the phone, and the people who see it first are always other people.
You were being made like Him through the four years you would have described as white knuckling, and you have no obligation to feel like a saint before the resemblance is allowed to be real. It is written that we all with unveiled faces beholding the glory of the Lord are changed into the same image, 2 Corinthians 3:18, and the Holy Spirit is named right there as the one who does the changing, which leaves nobody at that table responsible for the sculpture.
Then, if the form still needs an answer, write a short one. Not eleven lines. One: I am being made like Jesus, and I am not in charge of it.
Declare this over yourself
Speak these over the form, out loud, before the pen goes in the drawer. Every ounce of standing in them comes from Him and never from eleven quits or a clean four years: Christ made a woman at a kitchen table His ambassador, and what an ambassador says carries because of who sent her. What God has written is the ground these three lines stand on, and the power in them is the Holy Spirit and never the delivery, so tired counts, and flat counts, and shaking counts. Then I hand the whole of it over on the terms Jesus set in the garden: not my will, but Yours.
- Eleven lines on the back of the page, you are true and you are not the answer to the question. Romans 8:29 says I am being conformed to the image of the Son of God, and a fence is not a house, and the house is what He is building here.
- Suspicion that I am only a list of stops, leave this kitchen. You have had the back of every form and every quiet drive home, and tonight you are evicted, in the name of Jesus. His word calls Jesus the firstborn among many brothers and sisters, and the Holy Spirit is making the family resemblance in me whether or not I can see it in a mirror.
- Father, You are the one forming this, and the likeness is Your work and not my achievement. I thank You, because You promised to conform me to the image of Your Son and never once asked me to assemble Him out of the things I gave up, and Your Spirit is at work in the half page I could not fill. My hand is over the list and the pen is down.
Romans 8:29
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