He is designing the whole thing himself and it is taking him about eleven hours a week.
How to pray. What a morning should look like. What to do with a hard day. How to read a difficult chapter. What is reasonable to expect. Where the line is between discipline and self-punishment.
Every one of those, from first principles, alone, with a notebook.
And here is the thing you have to understand about him. He is good at this. He genuinely is. The system he has built over six years is thoughtful, and it works, and if you saw the notebook you would be impressed.
He has also reinvented, badly and at enormous cost, about nine things that were settled long before he was born.
He would say he did not want to just take somebody's word for it. And there is something right in that and I am not going to sneer at it, because a man who has thought his own way to a conviction holds it differently from a man who was handed it.
But six years is a long time to spend rebuilding a road.
And what it has really cost him is not the hours. It is that he has done the whole thing without anybody, and a man who has invented his own practice cannot be corrected by anyone, because there is no one else who uses it.
So let me ask you.
Why are you drawing a map of a road that is already on the map?
The instruction is to ask
There is a line in Jeremiah that reads like a set of directions, and I want to take it as literally as it was written.
This is what the LORD says: Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls.Jeremiah 6:16
Stand. Look. Ask. Walk.
Four verbs, and the third one is the one you have never done.
Jeremiah 6 puts asking in the middle of the sequence as a required step rather than an optional courtesy, and the Spirit who gave that word did not tell the man to work out where the good way was, so the six years you have spent deriving it have never once been the instruction.
And notice the adjective. Ancient paths. Not new ones, not better ones, not ones designed for his particular temperament.
The premise of the sentence is that a road already exists and that it is old and that somebody can tell you where it runs.
Now, plainly, because you are a serious man and you deserve to be spoken to seriously.
Your instinct not to take somebody's word for it is a good instinct in the wrong place. It belongs to what you believe, and there it will serve you well.
It does not belong to how you get up in the morning. Nobody derives that from first principles. A man who insists on doing so is not being rigorous, he is being alone in a way that looks like rigor from the inside.
Jeremiah 6 says ask where the good way is, and the Spirit put a question in the middle of the route, which means every hour you spent inventing what was already worn smooth was an hour that road had been waiting for you.
And look at what it promises at the end, because it is not achievement.
You will find rest for your souls.
Rest. Not mastery, not a better system, not a more defensible position. The end of the ancient path is that you stop having to hold it all up.
Jeremiah 6 offers rest as the outcome of walking a road somebody else laid, and the Spirit was in that promise rather than in any private construction, so eleven hours a week of building has never once been the price of getting there.
Now the move, and it is one act of asking.
Take somebody's word for something.
One thing. A practice you have been designing, that people have been doing for centuries, that you could simply do the way it has been done, without first satisfying yourself that it is optimal.
You are not surrendering your judgment. You are declining to rebuild a road.
Jeremiah 6 puts asking in the sequence between looking and walking, and the Spirit was in that instruction, so receiving a way from somebody who went first has never been the same as being uncritical.
Six years with a notebook. One question.
Declare this over yourself
Say these where you can hear yourself. Know what holds them up. This authority is not yours by nature, it is Christ's, and in Christ it has been given to you, so you speak as one representing the King. And you speak under His will, never over it. However He answers, and in whatever way He comes, the outcome is His.
- Scratch, you are where I started and the road was already worn smooth when I got to it. Jeremiah 6 says ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and asking is the third of the four verbs.
- Six years of deriving from first principles what was settled before I was born, you look like rigor from the inside and you are being alone, and in the name of Jesus you are finished. The Spirit did not once tell that man to work out where the good way ran.
- Lord, Jeremiah 6 promises rest for the soul at the end of a road somebody else laid, and rest is not mastery and it is not a better system. I am taking somebody's word for one thing today, and I am putting the notebook down.
Jeremiah 6:16
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