What The Quilt Was Made For

For the believer whose faith has become too precious to put on a bed.

Nothing in a house gets ruined faster than the thing everybody has agreed is too good to use.

You know the sort. It goes in the airing cupboard on the top shelf, wrapped, where the light can't reach it. It comes out twice a year to be looked at and admired and put back. Because nobody ever uses it, nobody ever washes it. After fifteen years the folds have gone permanent, and the whole of it smells faintly of the cupboard.

Meanwhile the ordinary blanket, the one that's been on the sofa through four winters and two illnesses, is soft in a way the good one will never be again.

She's got a quilt like that. Her aunt made it in 1988, and it's been on the top shelf since the day it arrived, and her aunt died in March.

She also has a faith like that, though she'd never have used the word until this week. Careful. Preserved. Talked about in the right tone. Almost never actually put on anybody.

You were made for use, and the preserving was never what any of it was for. The written Word says you are His workmanship created for good works to walk in, and the Holy Spirit is the one walking you into them rather than keeping you folded.

How a Good Thing Gets Put Away

Nobody decides to stop using something. It happens through respect, which is why it's so hard to see.

You're given something valuable by somebody who loved you. Using it would wear it, and wearing it feels like carelessness toward them, so you protect it. Protection means the cupboard, and the cupboard means it's out of sight, and being out of sight means fifteen years go by in what feels like three.

The same instinct does the same job to a faith. The convictions you were handed are precious, so you keep them carefully, and keeping them carefully turns out to mean keeping them indoors. You'd defend them instantly. You'd struggle to say when you last put one over somebody who was cold.

That isn't hypocrisy, and it certainly isn't a lack of love. It's what reverence does when nobody tells it what the object was for.

Made For Something, Not Just Made

Here's the line Paul uses about what believers actually are:

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.Ephesians 2:10 (KJV)

Read the second half of that. It doesn't stop at workmanship. It says created unto something, and then it says those works were prepared ahead of time for us to walk in.

Walk in. Not admire, not preserve, not keep properly. The verb is the plainest, most daily, most wearing-out word he could have chosen, and it's the word that finishes the sentence.

You were made toward a use that was ready before you got here. The written Word ends the sentence on walking rather than on making, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the walking in you today.

The Wear Is the Point, Not the Damage

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

A quilt that's been used is not a damaged quilt. It's a finished one. The softness is the whole intention of the maker, and you cannot get it any other way. Every wash, every winter, every night somebody pulled it up under their chin is what turns fabric into comfort.

The one on the top shelf isn't in better condition. It's in unfinished condition. It has been protected out of ever becoming the thing it was cut out to be.

Her aunt sat with that fabric for months in 1988 imagining somebody warm under it. Not a shelf. A person, asleep, on a cold night, in a house.

What you've been calling wear was always the making being completed. The written Word puts the good works ready in advance to be walked in, and the Holy Spirit is the one wearing you soft through them.

This Isn't a Criticism of How You Were Raised

Let me be plain, because there's a version of this message that would wound you and I won't write it.

The people who taught you to be careful weren't wrong to be. They were usually guarding something at a time when guarding it cost them, and the carefulness you inherited is love under pressure rather than coldness or fear.

I'm not asking you to think less of them, and I'm not asking you to go back and put anybody right. You can honor every bit of that reverence and still take the quilt down off the shelf.

You can keep every ounce of reverence and still put it on a bed. Scripture supplies the use without belittling anyone who taught you to preserve, and the Holy Spirit does the unfolding rather than the discarding.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.