The Comparison I Make Driving Home

It starts before she has got out of the car.

She has been somewhere else for a weekend. Somewhere bigger, better resourced, with a band that would be paid work anywhere else, and she has had a genuinely good time and she is not being cynical about it.

And on the Sunday, walking into her own building, it begins.

It is not a thought. If it were a thought she could argue with it. It is an instrument, and it is already running by the time she reaches the door.

The sound. Immediately, in the first four seconds.

How many. By the time she has sat down.

That song, done like that. On the first line.

She does not want to be doing it. She has repented of it more than once and meant it and it has not made the slightest difference, because you cannot repent of a measuring instrument, you can only notice that it is on.

And here is the thing that actually troubles her, and it is not disloyalty.

It is that she cannot receive anything in a room she is grading.

You cannot. Nobody can. The two activities use the same part of a person and they will not run at the same time, and she has been running the wrong one at ten fifteen every Sunday for about two years.

So let me ask you.

What are you measuring your own room against?

Paul called it unwise rather than wicked

There is a line in Second Corinthians where Paul is dealing with a group of people who are extremely fond of comparing, and the word he chooses about it is interesting.

We do not dare to classify or compare ourselves with some who commend themselves. When they measure themselves by themselves and compare themselves with themselves, they are not wise.2 Corinthians 10:12

They are not wise.

He does not call it wickedness. He does not call it pride, which is what we would have called it, and Paul was perfectly capable of calling something pride when he thought it was.

He calls it unwise, which is a word about how well a thing works.

And look at what he says the actual mechanism is: they measure themselves by themselves. The whole system is closed. Everything in it is being compared to something else inside it, and nothing in it is being referred to anything outside the comparison at all.

Which is exactly what your instrument is doing at ten fifteen. It is comparing a Sunday morning to a weekend, and both of those are rooms, and God is not in the equation anywhere. He is not one of the variables. The whole measurement can run to completion without Him appearing in it once.

Hear where you stand, two years into a habit you have already repented of.

You are not disloyal to your church. Scripture calls the comparing unwise rather than wicked, and the Spirit has never graded a room before He decided whether to be in it.

And I want to say the thing about repenting, because you have done it and it has not worked and that has been quietly demoralizing.

You cannot repent of an instrument. You can only switch it off, and switching it off is a different action from being sorry about it, and nobody ever told you that.

Being sorry addresses a choice. This is not a choice, it is a calibration, and it runs before you have chosen anything, which is why two years of sincerity has not touched it.

The word says they are not wise when they measure themselves by themselves, and it is a closed loop, and the way out of a closed loop is never to try harder inside it.

But you are not disloyal to your church. Second Corinthians calls the comparing unwise rather than wicked, which is a word about how well a thing works, and the Holy Spirit poured out on all people has never graded a room before deciding whether to be in it.