Auditioning With Disciplines Nobody Asked For

Nobody asked him for any of it. That is the sentence he arrived at in a car park last spring, and it has not left him since.

The early hour. The particular fast on the particular day. The reading plan that he keeps ahead of, always slightly ahead, because being level with it has never felt like enough. The giving he does not tell anybody about, which is the only part of this he is sure is right.

Not one item came from an instruction. Not from Scripture directly, not from a pastor, not from anybody who knows him. He assembled the whole thing himself over eleven years and he keeps it faithfully.

And he can now say what it is for, having refused to look at it for a decade. It is an audition. It is a bid. Every element of it is a piece of evidence in a case he is making to somebody who has never asked him to make one.

The disciplines are good. That is what makes this so hard to get at. A bad practice can be dropped. A good practice doing the wrong job just sits there looking like devotion.

If your rule of life is a submission, come and sit at this table. Not one of your disciplines is going to be criticized here.

What an audition assumes

Let us name what is underneath the arrangement, because the disciplines themselves are innocent.

An audition assumes a decision that has not been made yet. That is what an audition is. It assumes somebody is watching, forming a view, and could go either way, and that the performance is what tips it.

So the practice is not the problem. The premise underneath the practice is: that the verdict is pending. And a man who believes that will build good things and use them badly for eleven years.

You are not being assessed. Nothing in your rule of life is evidence in a case, because the case was closed before you started building. I am not saying it to take anything away from you. The written word says he hath made us accepted in the beloved (Ephesians 1:6), which reports a completed act rather than a pending one, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps it true in a man in a car park at the end of a long spring.

Where your life actually is

Here is what changed this for me, and it is not a lighter rule.

Paul writes one of the strangest and most restful sentences in the letters, and the location it names is the point of it.

For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.Colossians 3:3

Hid with Christ in God. Not on display. Not on the table. Not out where anybody, including you, can assess it week by week.

An audition requires visibility, because the whole thing depends on being seen and judged. And this verse says your actual life is not in the visible place at all. It has been put somewhere else, in Christ, in God, out of reach of the panel entirely, including the panel in your own head.

You are hidden in a place no assessment can reach, and the Word puts your life there deliberately. That is written down as a location, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes it register in a man who has been submitting evidence for eleven years.

Keep every one of them

Something has to be said very clearly, because a man like this will now consider stopping, and stopping would be the audition running in reverse.

Keep the hour. Keep the fast. Keep the reading plan and stay ahead of it if you like. None of it was ever wrong, and dropping it to prove a point to yourself is the same machinery with the sign changed.

You keep them now as somebody already accepted, and the change is entirely in what they are for. Scripture says now are we the sons of God (1 John 3:2), where now closes the question of timing and leaves nothing pending, and the Holy Spirit is the One who has been at every early hour of eleven years without once taking a note.

And if this has cost more than anybody at this table knows, if sleep has gone, if the evenings have started to frighten, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.