The List on the Fridge Door

The fridge is being replaced on Tuesday and everything has to come off the front of it, which nobody has thought about for about seventeen years.

Chloe is twenty-six and home for the weekend and has been given this job because she is the one who is standing there. It takes longer than it should. There are four layers of paper under the magnets and the magnets themselves are a museum: a taxi number, a cartoon frog, a bottle opener from a place nobody has been to.

Out it comes. A shopping list from a February. A dentist card for an appointment in 2019. A school photograph in which she is missing two teeth and looks profoundly untrustworthy. She is enjoying this. She is laughing at the frog.

And then, right at the back, behind everything, held on by the one magnet strong enough to have done it all these years, a piece of paper that has been laminated.

The laminate has gone yellow at one edge and curled at the corner, and there is a list on it, printed and then trimmed with kitchen scissors, and she knows it before she has read a word of it because she has known it since she was nine.

Ten lines. Things we do and things we do not. Some of it is plainly good and she would put it on her own fridge tomorrow. Some of it is oddly specific in a way that makes no sense to anybody now and made a great deal of sense to somebody then. None of it is cruel. It was written by somebody frightened, in a hard year, who loved her.

And underneath the ten lines, in a hand she recognizes: because we are supposed to be holy.

Chloe stands in her mother's kitchen at twenty-six holding a piece of laminate, and she can feel her nine-year-old shoulders come up around her ears.

That is where she got the word. Not from a sermon. Not from a book. Off a fridge door, at nine, in a kitchen, in the year everything was difficult, in ten lines and one explanatory sentence, and it has meant that ever since, in her body, whatever her head has learned since.

She turns it over to see if there is anything on the back.

There is one line, in pencil, faded almost out: so she knows she is ours.

You have that laminate. Yours might not have been on a fridge and it might not have been a list. But you know exactly where you got the word from, and you know your body still hears it the way it heard it then.

Every verb in the verse belongs to Him

Titus is a short letter and this is one of its densest sentences, and the way to read it is to underline who is doing what.

Who gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify unto himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works.Titus 2:14

He gave. He might redeem. He might purify. Three verbs in a row and every single one of them has Him as the subject and us as the object. There is no line in that sentence where the people are doing the purifying, and there is no fridge door anywhere in it.

You have been purified by somebody else's verb, and it is already done and it was never yours to do. That is the written word and not my kindness in your mother's kitchen, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a sentence from a letter to a young man on Crete and lays it on a table covered in magnets.

And then look at the direction the purifying goes. Purify unto himself. Not purify up to a standard. Not purify to a level. Unto Himself, which means the destination of the whole operation is a Person, and a person is somewhere you can actually arrive, and a page on a fridge is not.

And the last clause is a heat word

Now the four words at the end, which are the ones the list never had. Zealous of good works.

Zealous is a temperature. It is the word you would use about somebody who cannot be stopped, who is up early because they want to be, who is warm about it. It is not a fence word and it is not a caution word. Paul reaches for heat to describe what a purified people are like.

Read the ten lines again, in your head, and then read that clause. Almost every list anybody was ever handed is a list of things not done, and it produces a person who is careful. This verse ends on a person who is on fire. Those are not two versions of the same thing.

This is yours, and the word at the end of it is a heat word and never a fence. Titus 2 says zealous of good works in exactly those words, and the same Spirit who gives a person that heat is the one making it a present fact in a woman at twenty-six holding a piece of curling laminate.

Now let me guard this the way it deserves to be guarded, because there is a person behind that list and they are not on trial here.

Somebody wrote those ten lines in a hard year and laminated them, which is a small act of enormous hope. They were not trying to hand you a cage. They were trying to hold a family together with the only tools they could think of, and the sentence on the back of it says what it was actually for, and what it was actually for was belonging.

They got the word wrong. Almost everybody in the last two hundred years got that word wrong in the same direction. But the thing underneath it, so she knows she is ours, is not wrong at all. That is exactly what the word means. It is what peculiar people means: a people belonging to Him, His own possession, and the whole verse is about ownership and not about a threshold.

So you are not throwing anything away this morning. You are keeping the sentence on the back and letting go of the ten lines on the front.