Somebody Used A Shape On Him Once

There was a man, years ago, who ran everything with a system.

The system was the reason and the system was the answer. If you questioned a thing you were questioning the system, and if you questioned the system you were the problem, and by the end of it there was a form for everything and a right way to do everything and nothing at all that was simply yours.

It took him about four years to get out from under it and he does not talk about those four years.

Since then he has not let anything have a shape.

Not a plan. Not a routine. Not a fixed anything, in eleven years, and he has called that freedom, and from a distance it looks exactly like freedom.

Here is what happened last month.

His boy asked what the plan is for the spring.

He said, we will see how it goes.

And his son said, Dad, we always say that.

He was not being smart. He was not complaining. He is twenty six and he works alongside his father and he would quite like, once, to know what is happening in April.

And this man could not give him one. Not would not. Could not. Something in his chest closes when a plan gets written down, and it closes fast, and he has known that about himself for years.

So a twenty six year old goes into a spring with no idea what is happening, because of a man he has never met and never will.

If somebody used a shape on you once, come and lean on this gate. There is a flask and nobody out here is telling you anything.

The word He chose when He could have chosen any word

There is an invitation everybody knows, and the striking thing is the object in the middle of it.

Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.Matthew 11:29-30

Take my yoke upon you.

He is speaking to people who are worn out by religious systems. That is the whole context, and He knows it, and He knows exactly what a yoke is: a wooden shape that goes on an animal's neck and directs where it goes.

He could have said: I will take every yoke off you.

He did not. He offered His own, and then said something about it that nobody had ever said about a yoke before. It is easy. The burden is light.

The problem He was addressing was never the existence of a yoke. It was whose.

You are being offered a shape by somebody who deliberately used that word to people who had been crushed by one. Matthew 11:29 has Christ offering His own yoke rather than a life without one, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept the word yoke in an invitation aimed at the exhausted, which means the thing that closed your chest eleven years ago was never a form as such.

One man is not every shape

Now let us be exact about the last eleven years, because there is a mechanism here and it is worth naming.

You learned something true and then applied it too widely.

What you learned is that a shape in the hands of a certain kind of man is a weapon. That is correct. You have the scars and the four years and nobody is going to tell you it was not real. What happened afterwards is that the lesson generalized. Not because you decided it should, but because that is what a body does with something that hurt it, and it does not consult anybody first.

You are carrying an accurate lesson about one man that has been applied to every shape there is. Psalm 103:14 says he knoweth our frame, he remembereth that we are dust, and it is written as the reason for God's tenderness toward what people carry rather than as an assessment of it, and it is the same Spirit who is called the Comforter, which means what has been closing in your chest is being handled gently and has never been counted against you.

What it is costing somebody who never met him

Here is the part that has been sitting on you since last month, said plainly.

A twenty six year old wants a plan.

That is not a criticism of you and it is not a demand. It is simply a thing he needs, and he has never had it, and the reason he has never had it has nothing to do with him.

You are able to give somebody a shape without becoming the man who gave you one. Matthew 11:30 has Christ describing His own yoke as easy and His burden as light, which means a yoke can be handed over in a way that does not crush, and it is the same Spirit who works gentleness as fruit in a person, so what you would hand your son this spring is not the thing that was handed to you.

Nothing here says you owe anybody a system. Nobody is prescribing a structure, and nobody is going to.