I Cannot Justify An Hour On Something Pointless

You have an hour.

It is a real hour. Nobody needs you, nothing is burning, and the thing you would do with it is sitting there. And you will not spend it, and you have not spent it for a long time, and if somebody asked why you would say you cannot justify it.

That word is the whole article. Justify. To whom?

Because there is somebody you are answering to about your hours, and I do not think it is God, and I do not think it is anybody in your house. There is an auditor you carry around, and it goes through your day looking for time that did not produce anything, and it has a special interest in anything you might enjoy.

And the way you have learned to get past it is to find a use. If the thing you make could be a present, then the hour is allowed. If it might get sold one day, it is allowed. If it counts as winding down so you work better tomorrow, it is allowed. You have to smuggle every hour past the auditor in the costume of something useful.

I am not going to help you smuggle it. That is what most encouragement about this does and it leaves the auditor in place.

I want to go at the auditor.

To devise cunning works

There is a passage where God is describing a man He has filled with His Spirit, and what He fills him for is worth reading slowly.

To devise cunning works, to work in gold, and in silver, and in brass. (Exodus 31:4, King James Version)

To devise cunning works.

That is a man being filled with the Spirit of God in order to make beautiful things. Not to preach, not to lead, not to organize anybody. To devise, which means to think something up that was not there, and cunning work, which in that English means skilled and intricate and lovely.

And you should know what he was making. He was making the fittings of the tabernacle: the clasps, the lampstand, the woven work, the pomegranates on a hem. Enormous care went into details that most people would never look at closely and many would never see at all.

You are made in the image of somebody who spends care on a hem, and it is already settled in Exodus 31:4 that the Spirit filled a man for exactly that. His Spirit is the one who calls unnecessary beauty a purpose rather than an indulgence.

None of that was efficient. A tent could have been made without a single ornament and it would have held the same air.

So beauty, made with hands, at cost, for its own sake, is not a concession God makes to human weakness. It is the first thing He fills a man with His Spirit to do in that book.

You have a whole afternoon of pomegranates and clasps standing behind you, and it is already settled that God spent care on details nobody was going to inspect. Exodus 31:4 puts the filling and the intricate making in one sentence, and His Spirit is the one who refuses to call that inefficient.

You are made in the image of someone who fills people with His Spirit to devise cunning works, and it has never once had to be efficient to be His. Exodus 31:4 names skilled and intricate making as the purpose of that filling, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land on a person who has been auditing their own hours.

The auditor is not God

Here is the thing I want seen plainly, because the opposite has been quietly assumed for a long time.

The voice asking you to justify an hour is not the voice of God. It has never once sounded like Him and it does not use His vocabulary. It does not mention grace and it does not mention rest, and it has no category for delight at all.

And notice how it treats you. It is never satisfied. You give it a productive hour and it does not thank you, it moves on to the next hour and starts again. Nothing you produce ever closes the account. That is not how God deals with anybody. He gave people a whole day off and put it in the law.

What you are living under is not conviction. Conviction is specific, it names a thing, and it ends when you deal with it. This never names anything and never ends. What comes out of an hour is not a measure of you, and that voice has been using it as one.

You were never handed an account that stays open forever, and this is yours: an accusation that cannot be satisfied was never issued by God. The written word gives a filling for making rather than a ledger for hours in Exodus 31:4, and the Holy Spirit is the one who closes what will not close itself.

You are not being audited by God, and He has never once asked you to defend an hour to Him. The written word describes God filling a man with His Spirit to make intricate and beautiful things, and the Spirit of God is the one who tells the difference between conviction that ends and an accusation that never does.

Twenty minutes, and it must be useless

So here is the assignment, and the uselessness is not incidental. It is the entire point.

Spend twenty minutes making something with no use at all.

Not a present. Not a prototype. Not a sample of what you could do if you ever did this properly. Something nobody needs, nobody has asked for, and that has no plan attached to it, and ideally something that could not be given to anybody without an explanation.

I am asking for that specifically because the auditor can absorb almost anything else. Give it a present to point at and it will let the hour through and stay exactly where it is. Give it twenty minutes that produced a genuinely useless object and it has nothing to hold on to.

And I know that will feel worse rather than better while you are doing it. That is what it feels like when something you have obeyed for years is being disobeyed. It passes.

Exodus 31:4 puts skilled making at the center of what the Spirit fills a person to do, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in twenty minutes that yield nothing anybody could use.

You are allowed to make something that serves no purpose, and it has never once needed a use to be permitted. Exodus 31:4 names cunning work as a thing God Himself fills people to do, and the Spirit of God is the one who is in the room while a person makes something useless on purpose.