Why It Cannot Be Done by Trying

Now I have to tell you something that will save you years of exhaustion if you will believe it.

You cannot do this by trying.

You have already discovered this, even if you have never said it out loud. You have decided, some morning, to be more patient — and by noon you were short with someone who did not deserve it. You have resolved to forgive someone, really forgive them, and found the resentment still sitting in your chest a week later like a stone you could not lift. You have tried to love a difficult person by sheer will, and managed, at best, a cold politeness that fooled no one, least of all you. The love I showed you in those rooms — the love that kneels and runs and washes feet and forgives its killers — you cannot squeeze that out of yourself by working harder. It is not in you to give. Not on your own.

And this is exactly where so many go wrong with the very truth this book is about. They hear that they are called to fill the council's empty thrones, that they will judge angels, that they carry the image of God — and they hear it as a promotion. They start to strive. They start to climb. They study the hidden things, they chase the spiritual ranks, they try to make themselves into the great beings they have been told they will become. And the striving produces exactly nothing, because the whole thing has been turned upside down.

Listen. There were people, long ago, who tried to climb. They built whole systems for it — secret names to learn, heavenly doors to pass through, passwords for each gate, a long ascent through the levels of heaven until you could stand, at last, in the council yourself. They wanted to arrive at the throne by climbing. And the terrible irony is that the thing they were straining up toward by ladders, God was, all along, willing to simply give — not to the climber, but to the child.

Because here is how it actually works. The love does not get summoned by your effort. It gets poured into you by Another.

"...God has poured out His love into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us." — Romans 5:5 (NET)

Read that slowly, because it is the most important sentence in this book. The love of God is not a standard you are asked to meet. It is a substance you are given to carry. God does not send you a letter describing how He loves and ask you to imitate it from a distance. He sends His own Spirit — the very love that has passed between the Father and the Son since before the first morning — and pours that love into you, where you live. So that the next time you manage to love someone you genuinely could not love on your own — the difficult parent, the cruel coworker, the one who wronged you and never said sorry — that was not you, scraping the bottom of your thin little barrel. That was His love, the love that was poured in, finding its way back out through you into the world.

This is why the climbers were so badly wrong, and why the children are so quietly right. You do not ascend to carry the love of God. You receive it. You do not earn your way up to the council's empty thrones. You are adopted, by grace, into the family of the One who sits above the council — and the family resemblance grows in you from the inside, by the Spirit, at His pace, in His way, whether you are watching it happen or not.

So if you have been striving — if you have made the high calling of this book into one more weight on your back — put it down. The work is not yours. The pouring is His. Your part is something much smaller and much harder, and I will tell you what it is before the end. But it is not climbing. It was never climbing.

And this is where being a beginner is not a shame but a mercy. A student who thinks he has already arrived stops learning; he defends what he thinks he knows and the lessons stop reaching him. But a student who knows he has only just started stays soft, stays teachable, keeps his hands open. The climbers fell because they thought the school was a ladder and they were near the top. The children rise because they know the school has barely begun and they have everything still to learn. Stay a beginner. It is the safest thing you can be. The moment you think you have graduated from poverty of spirit is the moment you have left the only posture in which the love can keep being poured.