Examined to Pieces

There is a man in her street who took his engine out in 2017 to have a proper look at it.

It is still on the ground beside the car. It is under a tarp now, and the tarp has a brick on it, and every so often he goes out there and takes the brick off and looks at the engine for a while and puts the brick back. He is not a fool. He is actually a very good mechanic. The trouble is that he took it out to check one thing, found a second thing, went looking for the cause of the second thing, and by the time he had finished he had a driveway full of parts, an excellent understanding of that engine, and no car.

Marisol thinks about that engine more than she would like to admit, because she did the same thing to herself, and she did it in 2017 too.

She was taught, and taught well, and she does not blame the teaching. Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith. She took that seriously, the way she takes everything seriously, and she sat down one Sunday afternoon to have a proper look.

She found something. Of course she found something; a person always finds something. And then she went looking for the cause of it, and she found a motive underneath a motive, and then she wondered whether the sorrow she felt about the motive was real sorrow or only sorrow about being the sort of person who has that motive, and by the following spring she had a driveway full of parts.

That was nine years ago and the inspection has never closed. She cannot pray without inspecting the prayer. She cannot enjoy a service without checking, halfway through, whether the enjoyment is the right kind. She teaches the Sunday class. She teaches it well. And she goes home and takes the brick off the tarp.

If this is you, hear me carefully, because I am about to say something that sounds like the opposite of holiness and is not. Your inspection is not going to reach a verdict. It was never able to. It is not built for that, and the reason is not that you are doing it badly. It is that you are the thing being examined and you are also the instrument, and an instrument cannot calibrate itself.

So we are going to go and read a sentence Jesus said, and I want you to look at the tense of it.

Look at the tense

He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life.John 5:24

Is passed. Not is passing. Not will pass when the examination concludes. It is reported as an event that has already happened, and everything after it is described from the far bank.

That matters enormously for a woman with an engine on the ground, because it tells her what kind of question she has been asking. She has been asking a present-tense question, am I in the faith right now, at this second, on the evidence available, and turning it over hourly. The verse is not answering that question. The verse is reporting a crossing.

You have passed from death to life, and it is already done, and the crossing is reported in the perfect tense by the one who did the carrying. I am not being casual with a serious woman's serious question. It is written, in red, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a sentence spoken by Jesus and lays it under a person who has been checking her own hands for nine years.

The examination was never meant to be a residence

Now let me say something about the verse Marisol was taught, because I am not going to let anybody set Scripture against Scripture in this kitchen.

Examine yourselves is real. Paul wrote it. But look at what he was doing when he wrote it: he was writing to a church that was arguing about whether he was a real apostle, and he turns it around on them, more or less saying, never mind me, look at yourselves, Christ is in you, is He not? It is a challenge that expects a yes. It is a doorway, and it takes about a minute to walk through.

Marisol has been living in the doorway since 2017.

An examination is a thing with a beginning and an end. If it has no end, it has stopped being an examination and become a residence, and nobody was ever meant to live there. The mechanic was right to open the engine. He was wrong to move in beside it.

You are in Christ, and it is already true of you, and it does not become more true by being audited more often. Scripture puts it plainly, that if any man be in Christ he is a new creature (2 Corinthians 5:17), and the Holy Spirit is the one who bears witness to that in a woman rather than leaving her to prove it to herself.

Who is doing the holding while you inspect

And here is the part that should make her laugh, eventually, the way you laugh at a thing that has been serious for years.

While the engine has been on the ground, who has been keeping the car? Nobody. That is a picture and pictures break, and this one breaks in the best possible place. Because while Marisol has been taking herself apart, she has not once been un-held. She has been taught, kept, fed, corrected, brought back, and given nine years of the kind of steady grace that a woman only notices when she stops long enough to look up.

The inspection has been going on inside a keeping that the inspection did not produce and could not interrupt.

You have been held the entire time you have been checking whether you were held, and it is already His hand doing it. It is written that He is able to keep you from falling (Jude 1:24), and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been doing that keeping through nine years of a woman looking for it under a tarp.