Provoke Unto Love

She goes in level and she comes out behind, and it happens every single week, and nobody in that room is doing anything to her.

That is the part she has had to be honest about. There is no unkind person in there. Nobody is showing off. If anything they are all slightly too careful, in the way a group of decent people is careful, and the carefulness is one of the things she likes about them.

But there is a woman who prays like she is reading out something already written on her, and there is a man who mentioned in passing what he had been doing at five in the morning, and there is somebody who quoted the second half of a verse from memory without making a thing of it.

And she arrives at nine o'clock roughly where she was, and by half past she has an internal ranking, and she is at the bottom of it, and she drives home tired in a way that has nothing to do with the hour.

Eleven weeks. And she keeps going, because she believes in it, and because leaving would confirm something.

If you leave that room behind, come and sit down out here. There is no order in this article.

Scripture says what a gathering is for, and it is one line

Here is the only place in the New Testament that states, plainly, the purpose of Christians assembling, and almost nobody has been told it.

And let us consider one another to provoke unto love and to good works.Hebrews 10:24

Consider one another to provoke unto love and to good works.

Now take that apart, because every word in it is doing something.

Consider is a word about paying real attention. It means to study, to notice, to observe carefully. It is an active verb and it is aimed at other people rather than at yourself.

To provoke is startling in English and it is startling in the Greek too. It is a strong word, closer to stir up or incite, and it is normally used for stirring somebody to anger. He deliberately takes a hard word and aims it at love.

And unto love and to good works is the destination. Not unto improvement. Not unto commitment or seriousness or discipline. Love, and things done for people.

So a gathering, in the one verse that defines the point of one, exists so that people watch each other closely in order to stir each other toward love.

Notice what that purpose cannot produce. You cannot build a ranking out of it. A ranking needs a single scale, and this has no scale in it at all: it has a direction and a person, and every person in that room is a different distance from a different thing.

You are in a room whose stated purpose has no order in it, and it never had one. Hebrews 10:24 is where that sits, in the only verse that says what an assembly is for, and the same Spirit who moved the writer to choose a violent verb for love is the one who takes an internal league table off a woman on a Tuesday.

Where the ranking is actually coming from

Now the honest part, and it is not comfortable but it is freeing.

Nobody in that room is ranking her. She has established that herself and she is right about it.

The scale is hers. She brings it in with her at nine o'clock, and then she populates it with data those people are innocently supplying, and by half past she has a result. The woman who prays a certain way is not competing with her. She is praying. The man was mentioning his morning. Neither of them is on any list except the one being kept in the passenger seat of her own car.

That is not a criticism. It is what a person does when they arrive somewhere without a settled sense of where they stand, and a room full of sincere people is the worst possible environment for it, because sincerity supplies excellent data.

And here is the thing the verse does about it, which is better than telling her to stop. It gives her something else to do with the exact faculty she is already using.

She is already considering them. She is watching those people with extraordinary attention, week after week, and noticing precisely what each of them is like. That is the verb in the verse. She has the equipment and it is running at full power and it is simply pointed at the wrong output.

You have the whole faculty the verse asks for, and you have been using it every week already. He promised it, in the same passage, where the considering is explicitly aimed at the other person's good rather than at your own position (Hebrews 10:24), and His Spirit does not need to install anything in a woman who is already paying that much attention.

The paragraph that outranks the teaching

Before we go on, this outranks everything above it.

Some people must not go without food. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are simply not sure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything and let their answer be the answer. There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule, and there is not going to be one here.

And for a woman who arrives at a ranking by half past nine, this needs saying twice. Nothing on this site can be done well or badly, and nobody who does any of it is further along than anybody who does not. If it ever becomes another column, close the page, and closing it is not a failure either.

Privacy is about audience and never about hiding, too. Telling your doctor is right. Telling your husband is right. Telling whoever cooks in your house is right and it is basic courtesy. None of it fails anything.

You have never been in any order, and you never have been in His sight. Scripture settled that where God is named as no respecter of persons (Romans 2:11), and the Spirit of God has never once been distributed by position.

If today is heavier than a page can hold, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.