The Same Man Counted In

The bass player drags the second chorus and the drummer says it before he can stop it, in the voice he has used on bass players since he was seventeen, and the room goes the particular kind of quiet a church side room goes.

Wednesday. Rehearsal. Two amps, a keyboard on a stand that leans, the kit wedged in the corner under the high window where the light comes in gold and lands on the ride cymbal. Five of them. The bass player is nineteen and new and looks at his shoes. The woman on keys says, gently, that it is only Wednesday. And the drummer sits there with the sticks across his knee and hears himself, and the thing he feels is not mainly guilt about the boy. It is older and colder than that. It is: there he is. Same man.

He came to Christ in the spring. Properly, as far as he can tell; he is not going to relitigate that here, and I am not going to do it for him. He had been told, in a dozen sermons and one very earnest book, that he was a new creation, that the old had gone. And what he had privately expected, without ever saying it, was to wake up one morning as somebody gentler. Somebody who did not run hot. Somebody who could hear a dragged chorus and not need to make a nineteen year old look at his shoes.

Five months. He wakes up every morning as this one. Same temper on a short fuse. Same sarcasm that arrives before the kindness does. Same everything, or near enough that the near enough is not worth counting. And tonight, behind the kit, with the room quiet, the conclusion he has been circling for weeks lands and sits down: if nothing about me changed, then nothing happened. A man who is this unchanged cannot have been changed. He counts them back in, one, two, and the same man plays the song.

You have counted yourself back in like that. Whatever your instrument is. You expected to become a different person and you keep waking up as the same one, and somewhere in the sameness a quiet verdict has formed that you would not say out loud in that room: it did not take, because look at me.

He renamed him and kept calling him Jacob

I want to start with the man in the Bible who is my namesake four languages back, because if you want to know what God does with a personality, watch what He did with his.

Jacob was a heel grabber. It was his name and it was his character: he cheated his brother, lied to his blind father, and ran. And one night by a river a Man wrestled him until dawn and put his hip out and told him his name was no longer Jacob but Israel, because he had striven with God and with men and had prevailed. New name. Given by God, out loud, at a river. If there was ever a moment for a man to wake up as somebody else, it was that morning.

Read what happens next. He limps away from the river, the sun rising on him, and Scripture says he was limping because of his hip. And then, for the rest of Genesis, the Book calls him Jacob. Not once by accident. Constantly. God Himself calls him Jacob again, and gives him the name Israel again, and then the text goes right on saying Jacob. Two names, one man, to the last chapter. And he limped to the end.

Here is the pit, named. You were told the old has gone, and you took that to mean the old temperament, and it did not go, and you have concluded that the new never came. But look at the man God renamed. The heel grabber did not evaporate at the river. The name Israel was true from that morning, and the name Jacob stayed true too, and the limp was permanent, and none of it made the blessing a mistake. That is not God failing to finish. That is what it looks like when God does it.

You were received as the man you are, and He did not swap you out to do it, and what He is making He is making out of you. I am not grading your response from a page; that is not mine to do, and I will not. I am reading you what is written about a man God renamed and kept calling by his old name, and it is the Holy Spirit who lays a story from Genesis on a drummer in a side room and says, this is how I work.

Degree by degree, by the Spirit

Now the verse this message stands on, and it is the one Paul wrote to people who had also expected to feel more finished than they did.

And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.2 Corinthians 3:18

Are being transformed. Not were, on a Tuesday in spring, all at once. Are being. Present, continuous, unfinished on purpose. From one degree to another, which is the Bible's own way of saying slowly, and by increments a man cannot feel from the inside, and in an order he did not choose. And then the sentence that matters most for you behind the kit: this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit. Not from you gritting your teeth at a nineteen year old. From Him.

So let me put the two things side by side, because you have been holding them as one and they are two. There is what happened when you came to Him, which Scripture calls being made a new creation, and it is a verdict and a belonging and it happened whether or not you woke up gentler. And there is the transformation, which is the Spirit's slow work on the man, degree by degree, and it is His and it is on His clock. You have been reading the second as the test of the first. It is not. A slow second is not evidence against the first. It is what the first looks like when it starts to grow.

You are being transformed by the Spirit right now, at a degree you cannot measure from behind a drum kit, and the pace is His and not a mark against you. That is 2 Corinthians 3 read plainly, and it is His Spirit who is doing the work while you sit there counting yourself unchanged.

And hear the other half of it, because I will not tell you your conduct does not matter; it does, and the boy on bass deserves better and you know it. But the fixing of your temper is not the ground you stand on. It is what the ground grows. Nobody here is telling you to be content with the fuse. I am telling you the fuse is not the verdict.

You have the Spirit who does the transforming, and you were given Him and did not earn Him by improving first. That is written, and it is Him and not your progress that this whole thing rests on.

The limp is not the proof it failed

I said Jacob limped to the end, and I want to sit in that a moment longer, because it is where you sit tonight.

If you had asked Jacob, three months after the river, whether the night had taken, he would have shown you the hip. And you would have had to decide what the hip was evidence of. He could have read it as proof he had lost. Actually it was proof he had been there. The mark of the wrestling was the mark of the blessing; the same night gave him both. Your unchanged temperament is not the shape of a man God did not touch. It is the shape of a man in the middle of being touched, slowly, from one degree to another, and the limp is allowed to stay while the name is true.

And now the small thing, and it is small, because a man who has just been ashamed of himself in front of four people does not need a big one. Jesus said that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, moves it, and I want you to hear the size of that: smaller than the shame you are carrying, smaller than the fuse. And it is spoken. The mountain in front of you is not your temper; the Spirit is dealing with that in His own time and I am not handing it to you tonight. The mountain is a sentence: nothing changed, so nothing happened. Speak to that. You are in Christ, and He is the one who was raised the same Jesus with the same scars and was not less risen for the marks, so the standing to say who you belong to was given to you in Him and does not wait on your temperament. It is written, and it is His Spirit who makes a man's ordinary voice carry a truth he did not manufacture.