They Are Spirit and They Are Life

The word he uses about it, when he is honest with himself, is behind.

He is behind on it. That is how it sits in him. He has a plan, and the plan has dates, and he is currently in the second week of March according to a scheme that says it should be the last week of April, and there is a whole feeling attached to that which he recognizes from work.

It did not start like this. Eight years ago somebody gave him a plan because he asked for one, and it was a kindness and it helped, and for a good while it was simply a structure.

Then, somewhere, it became the measure. And once it was the measure, everything that followed was inevitable. He got behind. Getting behind produced guilt. Guilt made the book harder to pick up, and not picking it up put him further behind, and he has been going round that particular loop for about three years.

He is forty-two. He manages people. He knows what it looks like when somebody is under a target they cannot hit, and he would spot it in a member of his team in a fortnight, and he has not spotted it in himself in three years.

So he opens it now the way you open a laptop on a Sunday evening knowing what is in the inbox.

What Jesus says His words are

Jesus makes a statement about His own words, and it puts them in a category that has nothing to do with tasks.

It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.John 6:63

They are spirit, and they are life.

Not information to be got through. Not material to be covered. He is not describing a body of content with a completion date; He is telling you what kind of thing His words are, and the kind of thing they are is living.

And look at the clause before it. The flesh profiteth nothing. That is Jesus saying, in the same breath, that human effort is not what makes this work. He puts it in the negative deliberately, so nobody could mistake the arrangement.

You are handling something that is life rather than something that is work, and effort was never the mechanism. That is not me softening the discipline; John 6:63 puts the profit outside the flesh and calls His words spirit and life, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that and stands it beside a man in the second week of March.

What a plan is for and what it became

Now let me be fair to the man who gave you the plan, and to the plan.

A structure is a good thing. It gets a person to the book on the mornings they would drift, and it stops a man reading his four favorite chapters for twenty years. Nobody did anything wrong here.

What happened is that a scaffold became a specification. The dates were built to serve the reading, and at some point the reading started serving the dates, and once that flipped there was a target and a man under it, and the whole thing acquired the emotional temperature of your working week.

You have been keeping a schedule at a table where nothing was ever due. The written word calls His words spirit and life rather than a body of material, and the Holy Spirit does not run a completion date on a relationship.

And I want to say something about the loop, because you would name it instantly in someone else. Behind produces guilt. Guilt makes the thing harder to approach. Harder to approach produces further behind. That is a spiral, and it is not a character flaw and it is not a spiritual decline. It is what happens to any conscientious person under a target they cannot hit, and the correct response is not more discipline. It is removing the target.

You are not behind, and there has never been a schedule you could be behind on. Scripture puts life in the words themselves rather than in a quantity of them, and the Holy Spirit has been present in three years of a man opening a book with dread.