Auditioning For A Part You Already Have

She does a check every night without ever having decided to.

It happens between putting the light out and going to sleep, and it takes about forty seconds, and it is a full review: what she said to her mother, whether she was short with the girl on the till, the twenty minutes she meant to spend reading and did not, whether today was, on balance, a day God would have been pleased with.

Some nights it comes back yes and she sleeps well. Most nights it comes back not really, and she says sorry, and she means it, and she goes to sleep with the low hum of a person who is behind.

Eleven years of nightly reviews. And if you asked her, plainly, whether God is pleased with her, she would go quiet, and then she would say something careful about how He loves everybody.

She has never once heard Him say it about her. That is the thing. Not in eleven years of asking, in a hundred different arrangements of words.

So she has kept auditioning. And what nobody has ever told her, in all that time, is that the part was cast a long time ago, and it was not cast on the strength of the audition.

If you do that check at night too, come and sit down. There is something said out loud over an open sky that I want you to hear as being about you.

The sky opened once and Someone spoke

There is one place in the Gospels where the heavens come open and a voice is heard, and what gets said is the shortest and most important sentence about approval in the whole book.

Jesus has done no public ministry. No miracles yet, no sermons, no cross. He comes up out of the water at the very beginning of it all, and the sky opens over Him, and the Father speaks before the work starts.

And lo a voice from heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.Matthew 3:17

Look at the timing, because the timing is the doctrine.

The pleasure came before the ministry, not after it. Nothing had been achieved when that was said. If the Father had been operating the way you have been operating, that sentence would have come at the end, in a review, on the strength of the work, and it did not, and Matthew put it at the beginning where you cannot miss it.

You are not auditioning. The part was cast, and it was cast before your work, not because of it. That is not my encouragement to you, it is what the written word puts at the front of the story on purpose, and the Holy Spirit, not the wording, is the one who makes that land in a woman doing a nightly review with the light already out.

And now hear who that sentence covers

Here is the move that changes the nights, and it is not positive thinking.

You are not being asked to earn your way toward that sentence. The Holy Spirit is telling you that you are inside the One it was spoken over.

To the praise of the glory of his grace, wherein he hath made us accepted in the beloved.Ephesians 1:6

In the beloved. Not near Him. Not aspiring toward Him. In Him. The whole of what was said from that open sky lands on the ones who are in the Son, and being in Him is not a status you climb into on good days and slip out of on the days when you were short with the girl on the till.

You are accepted in the Beloved, and the acceptance is not renewed nightly. The written word says there is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1), and now is a word about tonight and not about a better version of you next month, and the Spirit is the one who makes that hold at half eleven with the light out.

What the nightly review is actually doing

Let me name the mechanism kindly, because you did not build it on purpose.

The review feels like humility. It is not. The Holy Spirit never convened it. It is a court, and you are the defendant and the prosecution and the judge, and you have been running the case every night for eleven years, and you have never once given the verdict that God already gave.

I am not going to tell you to stop examining your life. Scripture does ask people to look at themselves honestly and there is nothing wrong with that. What I am telling you is that the verdict is not up for decision in your bedroom, because it was handed down over an open sky before the work started.

You are not on trial tonight, and the case does not need to be heard again. It is God that justifieth; who is he that condemneth (Romans 8:33 and 34), which is Paul asking a question with no answer available, and it is the Holy Spirit, and He is the one who quiets a court that has been sitting nightly for over a decade.

And if the low hum has been more than a hum lately, if the reviews have got heavier or you are not sleeping or you are frightened for yourself, please ring somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight. That is not a lack of faith. It is one of the ways God keeps people.