For the musician who arranges everything to stay below a line nobody has enforced in years.
When Jesus read in the synagogue at Nazareth, the people who objected were not strangers. They were the ones who had watched him grow up, and what they said was, Is not this the carpenter's son.
The objection was not about the reading. It was about the ceiling they had already fitted over him. They knew what he was, which meant they knew what he was not, and the knowing came from twenty years of seeing him carry wood through that village.
Now look at the wall above your stand. There's a faint pencil line at about shoulder height, left by somebody at some point for some reason nobody remembers, and you have quietly made it the top of what you put up there.
A ceiling fitted by people who knew an earlier version of you is still in place. Scripture says where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty, while the Holy Spirit is at work in a rehearsal room with a faint pencil line in it.
Where Your Line Came From
Be exact about it, because the line on that wall is not the real one and you know it.
The real line was fitted by people who knew you when you were learning. They are not unkind and most of them are still around. What they hold is an accurate picture of a musician from about nine years ago, which was the last time any of them properly listened.
That picture is not wrong, it is simply out of date, and nobody updates a picture like that without a reason to. So you arrange around it. You bring what fits their version of you, and you have got so used to doing it that you would not call it a decision.
They are holding a nine year old picture, and you have been keeping it accurate for them. The written Word puts liberty where the Spirit of the Lord is rather than in anybody's memory of who you used to be, while the Holy Spirit works with the musician you are now.
Where This Message Does Not Go
There is a version of this that goes back and settles accounts, and it is not coming.
It would name who is holding the old picture. It would make the case about people who cannot see past what somebody was at twenty-two, which is a real thing and one you could evidence at length.
It would also leave you heavier and still arranging under the line, and it would land on people who have done nothing except fail to notice a change that nobody announced.
You can be released from an old picture without prosecuting the people holding it. Scripture rests your liberty on the Spirit of the Lord rather than on anybody updating anything, while the Holy Spirit takes weight off a person instead of handing them more.
Nothing here asks you to raise it, prove anything, or revisit nine years. The room gets lighter, and nobody else has to move first.
What Freedom Does Not Mean at That Stand
There is a second version of this that goes badly wrong, and it is worth refusing before anybody offers it.
That version says you have been working beneath yourself. It says the ceiling comes off now, people will finally hear what you can do, something will follow from it.
That is not on offer and it would only be a different ceiling with better lighting. You might put something harder on that stand and have the room not notice. You might put it up and find it does not suit the group. You might decide, having thought about it freely, that what you have been bringing is exactly right for these people in this room.
All three are free. Freedom is the decision about what goes on the stand becoming yours rather than being made in advance by somebody's memory.
Freedom is the decision returning to you, not the music getting harder. The written Word puts liberty where the Spirit is rather than in an outcome, while the Holy Spirit gives a freedom that is complete before anybody hears anything.
A musician who is free and goes on with exactly the parts she has always taken, in the same small room, for the same nine people, has received the whole of this.
There Is Liberty
There's a short line in the second letter to the Corinthians that says where freedom lives, and it does not put it where we tend to look.
> Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. > 2 Corinthians 3:17 (KJV)
Liberty is located rather than earned. It is not on the far side of proving something to a room, and it is not something that arrives when the people holding an old picture finally update it.
It is where the Spirit of the Lord is, which includes the rehearsal room with the pencil line in it. The liberty was in that room while you were choosing what to bring, and it was in it during every rehearsal for the last nine years.
That changes what this week asks of you. Not the manufacture of freedom by finally taking on something difficult. The use of a freedom that has been standing beside you the whole time.
Liberty is where the Spirit is, which means it was in that room all nine years. The written Word locates freedom in His presence rather than in a room's opinion, while the Holy Spirit is beside that stand already.
That is worth holding against the nine years, because it changes what those years were. They were not nine years of working under a ceiling that was really there. They were nine years of working in liberty while believing otherwise, which is a different and much better account of the same period.
Nothing you wrote in them was diminished by the line. The line was never load bearing. It sat on the wall above a stand and it governed a musician's imagination rather than her music, and the pieces that came out of that room came out of a room the Spirit was standing in the whole time.
Nine people in a small room heard work that came out of liberty, and they have heard it every week, whatever the musician writing it believed about the wall above her stand.
Declare this over yourself
You are in Christ and Christ is in you, so what follows is not a claim made out of your own authority. It is agreement, said back to God in His own words, while the Holy Spirit carries it. How He orders the rest of it is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His own time.
Say these as a woman already claimed, out of a standing she did not audition for. What she writes, and who ever hears it, stays with God.
That limit is not mine and I do not live under it, and a line drawn in a season that ended is not a ceiling over the work I do now. The written Word of God says where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty, which names the room I am already standing in. I refuse the pencil line and I refuse it without laying a charge against whoever drew it. The Holy Spirit is at this stand before I open anything, out ahead of me. The line is off my writing, and I work under an open ceiling now. Nothing has to get bigger for that to be true, and staying small and local is obedience rather than settling. My hand is up and touching nothing, and every part I write is God's.
Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.
This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.
2 Corinthians 3:17
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.
