As His Master, Not As His Best Student

The kitchen is the whole house on a night like this, and the table is being laid by about four people who all have different ideas about where the forks go.

Somebody's mother is in charge and is not doing anything.

He is sixty-four.

For forty years his Christianity had a shape and the shape was doing. He drove the van. He ran the men's breakfast for nineteen years. He was the one you called when a family needed moving on a Saturday, and he moved about two hundred families, and he was good at it and he loved it and none of it was for show.

Five years ago the doing stopped, over about eight months, and it stopped completely.

And here is the part he has never said out loud, at this table or anywhere, and he has thought about it a great deal.

He does not know what he is now.

Not in a dramatic way. He knows he is still a Christian, he is not in doubt about God, and if you asked him he would give you a straight and orthodox answer. But every measurement he ever had for how he was doing was an output measurement, and the outputs are all zero, and he has no other instrument and never needed one.

If your faith had a shape and the shape was doing, you know the question, and you know that nobody at your table would understand why you cannot answer it.

He says what a finished disciple looks like

The weight first and whole, because on this site the honest paragraph comes before the good one and it never gets shortened.

What this costs is not the van or the breakfasts, though nineteen years of a men's breakfast is a real thing to lose. It is the instrument. It costs you the only way you ever had of knowing how you were doing, which for forty years was reliable and quick and which now returns nothing. It costs the two hundred families, in the sense that they are behind a line. It costs you a straight answer to a question you would once have answered without thinking. And it costs you a silence at your own table, because there is no way to raise this that would not alarm people.

I am not calling that small and I am not putting it beside anybody else's, because on this site there is no ranking of what people carry and there never will be. Any word from God that needs your five years made lighter first is not one Scripture speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.

And plainly, before we go on: if not knowing what you are now has gone somewhere darker, as far as thinking this kitchen would be simpler without you sitting in it, tell one living person today. Your doctor, whoever is arguing about the forks, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Scripture asks no man to hold that alone, and the Holy Spirit has always moved through people who lay a table badly and cheerfully.

Now, Luke 6, and read what Jesus says a completed disciple ends up looking like.

The disciple is not above his master: but every one that is perfect shall be as his master.Luke 6:40

Every one that is perfect shall be as his master.

The word behind perfect there means fully trained, finished, brought to completion. Jesus is describing the end state of an apprenticeship, and He tells you what it is.

It is not a better worker. He does not say that a fully trained disciple produces more, or serves more capably, or carries a heavier load. He says the finished disciple is like the master.

Likeness. That is the stated end of the whole process, from His own mouth, in a sentence about training.

You are being trained toward a likeness rather than toward an output. Luke 6:40 names the end state as being as his master, and the Holy Spirit is the one named all through Luke as the one who does the work in a person.

Now, why that matters to a man who ran a men's breakfast for nineteen years. Every apprenticeship has outputs along the way and they matter and they are real. Nobody learns a trade without producing things. But the outputs are not the point of the apprenticeship, and no master craftsman assesses a finished apprentice by counting what they made in year three.

What you have lost is the visible production. What Jesus names as the object of the training is the other thing, and He named it before there was a van.

You have an end state that was never described in terms of what you produce. That is written into Luke 6:40, and His Spirit in you is the one who does the conforming toward that likeness.

Now let me be exact about what this does not say, because five years of kind sentences have already been said in that kitchen.

It does not tell you the doing comes back. It says nothing about your body or your capacity, and I will not predict either, because what God does there is His, in His own way.

And it does not grade you. Luke 6:40 sets no bar you are under and no rate you are behind, and the Holy Spirit has never once run a schedule you fell off. Being like Him is described as where the training goes, not as a standard you are currently failing, and the forty years of doing are not being marked either.

And the likeness is not compensation for the output. It is not a trade and it is not a consolation prize handed over when the van keys went.

You were never being assessed on production by the one doing the training. Scripture names likeness as the end of it, and the same Spirit who works in a person is the one who carries that into a kitchen where four people are laying one table.