The Back of a Hymn Book

She wrote it on the inside back cover because it was the paper that was there.

Vonnie was sixty-six and it was a Tuesday and there was nobody in the building but her, and she was putting hymn books back in the racks, and she stopped, and she thought: I would like to see it written down.

Not for anybody. She has never been asked to give an account of anything in her life.

She just wanted to know what it looked like, all of it, in one place, in her own hand.

So she borrowed a pencil off the window ledge and she wrote what she believed on the inside back cover of one hymn book, and then she sat in the third pew and read it.

It came to eleven lines and it did not fill half the page.

And she sat there quite a while.

Because Vonnie has been in that building fifty-one years. She was baptized in it. She has cleaned it, cooked in it, sat with people in it, and buried both her parents and one child out of it. If you had asked her on the Monday she would have said her faith was the whole of her life, and she would have been telling the truth.

Eleven lines.

She rubbed it out before she left. Carefully, with the end of the pencil, and then she went over the page with her sleeve, and put the book back in the rack third from the end where it belonged.

Nobody knows she did it. She is seventy-one now and she has never told a living soul.

And the reason she rubbed it out was not that anything in it was wrong. Every line was true and she would write the same eleven today.

The reason was that she thought somebody would find it and think that was all she had.

And you may have done that. On a page, or in your head at two in the morning. And you may have been carrying the number of lines ever since.

Micah puts the whole requirement in three items

Take this off before we go a step further, because you have carried it five years and it was never yours.

Eleven lines is not a shortfall. It never was. Scripture takes the whole question of what is required of a person and answers it in one sentence with three items in it, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the length of anybody's account, who makes a life. Set it down here on this step. It is heavy and it has been in a pew with you since a Tuesday.

Now hear it, and hear that it is put as an answer to somebody asking what is required.

He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.Micah 6:8

Three.

The question in the verses just before that one is a person offering more and more: burnt offerings, thousands of rams, ten thousand rivers of oil, and then something no one should offer. The escalation is the point. The answer comes back shorter than the question.

And notice the first four words. He has shown you. Past tense, already done, before anybody wrote anything down.

You have been shown, and what was required was three things. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who walks a person humbly, and He has never once counted the lines.

Now let me be careful here, because there is a ditch on this side and I have no intention of putting you in it.

Nothing here says that a longer account is a false one. It is not. Some people have been given a great deal to hold and they hold it faithfully, and Scripture is long and God gave it all and none of it is spare.

And nothing here says stop learning at eleven. If more comes, take it. God adds to people all their lives and He has added to you already, and some of what you would write today you could not have written at twenty.

The point is only about what you concluded in that pew, and Scripture answers the whole requirement in three items, and His Spirit is the one who has been doing all three in you for fifty-one years without asking you to write them down.

Here is the tender part, and Scripture is gentle with it. You did not rub it out because it was wrong.

You rubbed it out because you were protecting your own life from being measured by a page, and the life was never the page. His Spirit was in every one of those fifty-one years and He has never once needed them summarized.