The Wall After the Primer

For the believer who has spent years preparing a surface and never once put the color on.

You've been standing in that room for a while now with the roller still in your hand.

The primer went on beautifully. Two coats, edges cut in properly, the old marks covered and the plaster sealed. It took most of a weekend and you did it well, and anybody who came in would say the room looks vastly better than it did.

It's also white. Flat, uniform, slightly chalky white, from ceiling to skirting, and it has been that way for eleven months. The color tin is still on the dust sheet by the door where you put it in March.

There's a version of your faith that looks exactly like this room. You've got the corrections done. You know precisely what the old marks were and why they had to be covered, and you could talk anybody through the preparation for an hour without repeating yourself.

What you'd find harder is describing the color. Not because you don't want it. Because nobody ever quite got around to opening the tin with you, and after a while a well-primed room starts to look finished.

You are able to put the color on, and the preparation was never meant to be the room. The written Word describes the faith in a run of positives with nothing to push against, and the Holy Spirit is the one bringing that color into you rather than leaving it in a tin.

Why a Primed Room Looks Finished

Primer is genuinely satisfying, and that's the difficulty.

It covers. It evens everything out. It makes the difference between a room that looks neglected and a room that looks cared for, and it does that in a single weekend, which almost nothing else in a house does.

So you stand back and the change is dramatic, and some part of you files the job as complete. Eleven months later the tin is still by the door, and you've stopped seeing it, and if a friend asks about the room you talk about how bad the plaster was before.

That's exactly what happens to a faith built mostly out of corrections. You know what was wrong with the old surface. You've sealed it. And the thing the sealing was for has been sitting unopened on a dust sheet for a very long time.

A Sentence Made Only of Color

Here's the opening line of a passage written to believers being pulled several ways at once:

There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling.Ephesians 4:4 (KJV)

Read it for preparation. There's none in it. Nothing is being covered, nothing is being corrected, and no clause is dealing with what was on the wall before.

It's all color: one body, one Spirit, one hope. That's a sentence somebody could live in rather than admire the smoothness of, and it was written to people who had every excuse to spend the whole letter on the old marks.

You are held by a description that is color rather than preparation. The written Word states the faith in positives with no correcting in it, and the Holy Spirit is the one putting that color on the wall of you now.

Primer Isn't a Color, It's What Lets Color Hold

Here's what I'd carry out of that room if I could take a single thing away with me.

Primer has no purpose of its own. That's not an insult to it. It exists so that something else will adhere and stay true over time. A wall with good primer and no paint has had every bit of the work, and none of the point.

That's the honest position of a faith made mostly of what it's against. The corrections are doing real work. They seal a surface. They stop old marks bleeding through. And they were only ever meant to hold something.

Which means the question isn't whether your preparation was good. It was excellent, by the look of the room. The question is what it was prepared for, and how long the tin has been by the door.

Everything you corrected was preparation for something you were meant to actually live in. The written Word supplies the color rather than the sealing, and the Holy Spirit is the one bringing it onto the wall, so it holds because of the work already done.

This Isn't a Criticism of Whoever Taught You to Prime

Let me be plain, because there's a version of this message that would wound you and I refuse to write it.

The people who taught you preparation weren't being narrow. They'd usually watched a wall go bad because somebody skipped a step, and the carefulness in their voice is memory rather than suspicion. Most of what they told you about the old marks was accurate.

I'm not asking you to think less of them, and I'm certainly not asking you to strip the room back. Every coat they taught you to put on is still doing its job under whatever comes next.

You can keep every coat of primer and still open the tin. Scripture supplies the color without belittling anyone who taught you to prepare, and the Holy Spirit adds rather than demolishes.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.