He Has Been Driving It Like A Truck

He services the truck every spring and he has never once missed it.

Oil, filters, belts, tires checked cold, and a full look underneath with the light. He does it himself, in the first warm week, and he enjoys it, and the truck is nineteen years old and starts every time in February.

He cannot tell you the last time a doctor looked at him.

He can narrow it down. It was sometime around when his father died, which he would have to work out on his fingers, and the working out itself is the answer to the question.

That is not a confession. He is not sitting out here feeling bad about it. If you raised it he would give you a completely reasonable answer about time and about the season and about how he is fine, and every sentence of it would be true.

Here is what happened last Tuesday.

His boy, who is twenty six and works alongside him now, said something in the yard while they were shifting a gate.

He said, Dad, you look after everything on this place.

And he agreed, because he does. The gate, the fences, the dog, the diesel, the drill that nobody else can get to start. The whole place runs because one man goes round it in a particular order and notices things before they break.

And his boy said, I know. And what about the man doing it.

Then the gate went on the trailer and they talked about something else, and that was the end of it as far as his son was concerned.

He has been thinking about it every day since.

Because when he went looking for what he actually believes about his own body, he found something he had never put into words, and once it was in words it did not stand up.

He believes it is a vehicle. Something he owns and operates. Run it hard, park it, run it hard again, and one day it will start going and there will be a decision to make about it.

He has never once thought that last part all the way through, and out loud it sounds like something he would not say to another living soul.

If you have been servicing everything on the place except the man walking round it, come and sit on the back of the flatbed. There is a flask and there is plenty in it.

Where the prophet puts the strength

There is a passage men like us quote at the end and never read the middle of.

He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength. Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall.Isaiah 40:29-30

Everybody knows the verse after that one. Read these two first, because these two are about you.

Look at where the giving is. He gives the power. He increases the strength. Not a word in that sentence is about a man locating more of it somewhere in himself.

And then look at the next line, which is the one that ought to settle something out here. Even the young men fall over. That is written in as a plain fact of creation rather than as a criticism. The strongest body on any place will run out, and God wrote that down before anybody had a chance to feel bad about it.

You are running on strength that was always being given rather than on a reserve you own. Isaiah 40:29 puts the giving of power entirely on God's side of the sentence, and the Holy Spirit kept the fainting of the young men in the very next line so nobody would take running out as a personal failing, which means the tiredness in your shoulders this evening is written into the book and it is not a report on your character.

An owner and a dweller are two different men

Now the thing your son said, because it is the actual subject and everything else is standing round it.

The trouble with owning a body is that an owner can be disappointed in a thing. An owner can weigh whether it is worth the outlay. An owner keeps a running tally of what it is costing him.

Scripture never once puts a person in that relationship with their own frame. It has God making a body with His hands before any breath goes in. It has the Son taking a body and keeping it, permanently, through the resurrection and out the other side.

You have a body that belongs to God rather than one that belongs to you, and that is better news than it sounds. 1 Corinthians 6:19 says what, know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, and the same Spirit named in that verse dwells in the frame walking round this place at six in the morning, which means the thing you have been operating is not stock and never was.

An owner services a truck because it is worth keeping. A man looks after his own body because it is him, and because it is His.

Nothing here is a prescription

Let us be plain about what this is not, because a man out here will hear a program coming and shut the gate on it, and he would be right to.

There is no diet in this. No regime, no supplement, no schedule, no opinion about anything a doctor has said to you. If you are under a doctor, stay under your doctor, and let nothing on this page get in between. And nothing in this says a body that hurts has been failed by the man living in it. Bodies do what they do, out here and everywhere else, for reasons no one chose.

You are not being handed a standard, and no ache in that frame has ever been read as evidence against you. John 9:3 has the question of whose fault it was refused outright before it could take hold, and it is written down plainly so nobody would carry that question around a field, and it is the same Spirit who comes alongside as the Comforter rather than as an inspector.