I Cannot Enjoy A Finished Thing

Here is a small experiment.

Think of the last thing you actually finished in that house. A drawer. A shelf. One end of a counter.

Now notice what happens in you when you think about it. There is a half second where it registers, and then something comes in over the top of it, and the something is the rest of the room.

That is what I want to talk about. Not the unfinished part. The mechanism that makes a finished thing unable to stay finished in your own mind for longer than about a second.

Because you do finish things. You have finished a number of things this year. And not one of them has been allowed to be a finished thing, because as soon as it is done, your attention hands it to a committee that assesses it against everything that is still undone, and the committee always returns the same verdict.

So you get the work and none of the rest. All of the cost, none of the settling.

He rested on the seventh day

There is a sentence at the start of Genesis about the end of the work.

And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. (Genesis 2:2, King James Version)

Now here is what I want you to see, and it is easy to miss because we know how the story goes.

He rested while the world was still going to need everything that came after. He rested before Abraham, before Israel, before the cross, before you. There was an enormous amount still to come, and none of it was finished, and the text says He rested.

You have permission to rest inside something unfinished, and no rest in Scripture has ever once waited for the whole of a thing to be complete. Genesis 2:2 has the work ended and the resting taken with the entire history of the world still ahead, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that ordinary in a half done room.

So resting is not what happens when everything is done. Resting is what happens when a piece of work is done, inside a much larger thing that is not.

And notice He ends the work by declaring it ended. The ending is spoken. It is not a state the world arrives at on its own.

You are permitted to declare a piece of work finished, and Genesis 2:2 has never once made rest conditional on everything being complete. It is written that He ended the work and rested with an enormous amount still ahead, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that ordinary rather than theological for somebody standing in a half done room.

You have been waiting for a condition that Genesis itself does not wait for. The word has a rest inside an unfinished world, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets a person put a thing down before everything else is dealt with.

The committee is not telling you the truth

Now let me deal with the mechanism, because I think it can be named and once named it loses some of its force.

The comparison that runs the moment you finish something is not doing arithmetic. It feels like arithmetic. It feels like an honest weighing of what is done against what is not.

But an honest weighing would report a number. It would say: one drawer done, eleven things outstanding. That would be uncomfortable and it would also be information.

What actually gets returned is a verdict, and the verdict is always the same one regardless of what you did. Whether you cleared a shelf or a whole room, the answer comes back as it is not enough. A process that returns the identical answer whatever the input is not measuring anything. A room is a record of what a hard stretch cost, and it is not a verdict on the person standing in it.

You were never receiving an accurate assessment, and a verdict that never changes has never once been a measurement. Genesis 2:2 ends a piece of work by declaration rather than by comparison, and the Spirit of God is the one who shows a person that the thing judging them has not been reading the input at all.

So tonight we do what the text does. We end the work by saying it is ended.

You are able to call one thing finished tonight, and calling it finished has never once been a lie about the rest of the house. It is written that He ended his work and rested from it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present when somebody declares a small thing done and stops.

Go and look at it and call it finished

So here is the whole of what I am asking.

Go and stand in front of the last thing you finished.

Look at it, and say out loud: this is finished.

Then, and this is the part that matters, do not look at the rest of the room. If your eyes go, bring them back. Give that one thing about thirty seconds of undivided attention.

Then go and sit down and clean nothing.

You are able to give one finished thing thirty seconds tonight, and it has never once required the room around it to cooperate. Genesis 2:2 has the ending spoken and the rest taken, and the Spirit of God is present in thirty seconds of somebody looking at one done thing.