The Verse He Cannot Underline

He is on his ninth highlighter. The dead ones are in a coffee can on the shelf with the batteries, because throwing away a pen that has read the whole Bible feels wrong to him and he has never examined why.

Five forty in the morning, the recliner, the lamp with the crooked shade, the dog asleep against the footrest with one ear up. The reading plan is printed on a sheet of paper folded into the front cover, eleven of them now, each year's checkmarks in a different pen. He does this the way other men run: not because it is thrilling, because it is the thing he does.

He has a rule about the highlighter, and it is his own, and nobody taught it to him. He marks a line when he can say amen to it and mean it. That is all. It is not a system for finding favorites. It is closer to a signature. Over eleven years his Bible has become a map of everything he has honestly been able to sign, and there is a lot of yellow in it. Psalms is almost solid. Half of Romans. Nearly all of James, which surprised him.

The plan puts the second letter to Corinthians in early November, when it is dark past six and the furnace comes on while he reads.

And the page he reaches this morning is yellow above and yellow below, and there is one clean line running across the middle of it, untouched for eleven years.

Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.

He uncaps the highlighter. He always uncaps it. He holds the felt tip about a quarter inch off the paper, and he reads the line again, and he runs the honest check he has run every November since he was thirty four: if his wife were asked what is different about him now, what would she actually say. If his brother were asked. If he were asked, out loud, with somebody waiting.

He can never get an answer he would sign.

So he caps the highlighter. It clicks. The dog's ear goes down. He turns the page and keeps reading, because the plan says fourteen chapters and he is not a man who quits a plan, and he leaves the one clean line where it has been since 2015.

You know that line. Yours might be a different verse, or a chorus you go quiet during, or a question at a men's breakfast that you have learned how to answer without answering. And you know the check you run, and you know that you are not being dramatic and not fishing for anybody to reassure you. You just cannot sign it.

What the sentence is actually claiming

Look at where that verse puts its weight, because it does not put it where the honest check puts it.

Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.2 Corinthians 5:17

The first clause is a location. In Christ. Everything after it is a consequence of being in that place, and the verse never once asks a man to survey his interior and report back before the clause is allowed to stand. That is not because feelings do not matter. It is because the sentence is not about them. It is a statement about where a person is and what happened there, and the maker of the new creature is named in the same breath: it is a creation, and creating is not something people do.

You are reading a sentence that makes its claim about Christ before it makes any claim about a man's inventory. 2 Corinthians 5:17 puts in Christ at the front of the line and everything else behind it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who wrote it in that order, which was not an accident of style.

So the honest check is not dishonest. It is aimed at the wrong target. It takes a sentence about a location and a creation and asks it to account for a list, and then, when the list comes up short, the man concludes something about the verse, or about himself, and caps the pen.

You have a verse that locates the newness in a place, and the place is not the inside of your chest. His word says in Christ, and it is His Spirit who joins a person to that place, so the reality of it never rested on how much of it a man can feel at five forty in the morning.

A verb God conjugates

Now let me put the other letter beside it, because Paul says the same thing in a way that shows the working.

That ye put off concerning the former conversation the old man; And be renewed in the spirit of your mind; And that ye put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.Ephesians 4:22-24

There are two different kinds of verb in that passage and everything depends on telling them apart. Put off and put on are yours. They are what a man does with his hands and his mouth and his Tuesday. But is created, sitting in the middle of the last line, is not yours at all. It is passive, and God is the one doing it, and it is finished before anyone is told to wear anything.

You are looking at a verb God conjugates and not one you do. Ephesians 4:24 says the new man is created, after God, in righteousness and true holiness, and the Spirit of God is the one who performs what that participle describes, on His own initiative and on His own clock.

Which reorders the whole morning. A coat is made first and worn afterward, and the wearing is visible and the making is not. What a wife would notice, what a brother would list, what a man himself could sign, all of that belongs to the wearing. The making happened somewhere else, in a workshop nobody was invited into.

You were never told to manufacture the new man, only to put him on. It is written in that order, made and then worn, and it is the Holy Spirit who renews the spirit of the mind in a man who is still learning where the sleeves are.

The clean line down the middle of a yellow page

I want to say something about that highlighter rule, and I want to say it plainly, because a man who has kept it for eleven years has been given no credit for it by anybody, including himself.

He will not mark a line he cannot mean. Do you know how rare that is. There are people who highlight a whole page because it was a good service. He signs nothing he cannot stand behind, and he has held that in the dark, alone, with a dog and a lamp and nobody checking.

You are an honest man with an honest highlighter, and the honesty was never the thing in your way. Scripture has no use for a signature that means nothing, and the Spirit of truth is not offended by a man who declines to say amen to something he does not yet understand.

Here is the one thing I would move, and it is small. The pen stopped being a reading tool somewhere around year three and became a verdict. Uncapped means it happened; capped means it did not. Eleven Novembers of holding a felt tip a quarter inch off the page, running a check the verse never asked for, and delivering a ruling on himself in a room with the furnace coming on.

You have permission to leave a line unmarked and go on reading it every year for the rest of your life. His word does not require your endorsement to be true, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a sentence living for a reader, which He has evidently been doing every November whether or not the pen came down.