Eight Pairs of Boots

Eight of them in a room with a whiteboard nobody has cleaned properly, sitting on chairs that are all slightly different, holding the paperwork they were told to bring and quietly checking that they brought the right paperwork.

He nearly did not come. Not because of the early start. Because he spent most of Sunday running through everything that is wrong with him as a candidate for anything: the two years off, the reference he was worried about, the fact that he had to look up what a pallet truck actually was. He came in the end because his sister said go, and because there is only so long a man can sit in a kitchen having that argument with himself.

Then the supervisor comes in with a blue crate on a trolley and puts it down with a bang, and starts calling names out.

Eight pairs of boots. Eight vests. Eight lanyards with the names already printed on them, spelled slightly wrong in three cases, and his is one of the wrong ones and he does not care in the slightest. The boots are his size. His actual size, which somebody asked him for on a form three weeks ago and he had forgotten writing down. He sits there with a pair of boots in his lap that were bought for him before anybody in this room had ever seen his face, and he cannot entirely account for what is happening in his chest.

You know this feeling from the other side of it. Whatever the thing is that you believe God is preparing, you have a list of what would have to be true of you first, and the list is long, and you have been working on it privately for years without getting to the end of it. So the readiness question feels like a question about you. That is the part that turns out to be wrong, and it turns out to be wrong in a way that has almost nothing to do with how you are getting on.

The readiness in question is not yours alone

Start with who the promise is actually about, because this is where the whole subject usually goes wrong.

When Scripture speaks about a bride being made ready, it is not talking about a person. It is talking about the church: one people, gathered out of every nation and every century, the whole company of those who belong to Christ. Not you on your own in a kitchen doing an inventory of your faults. A crowd. Millions of them, most of them long dead, most of them ordinary, none of them impressive on paper.

You are in that company, which means the readiness being discussed is corporate before it is ever personal. It is being worked into a whole people, and you are being carried along inside it the way one new starter is carried along in an induction that was organized weeks before he decided to come.

Hear that as a fact rather than a feeling. You are part of a people Christ is preparing, and your name was on the list before you had an opinion about whether you belonged on it. That is not warmth I am generating to move you. It is what stands written in Scripture about His church, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a person able to receive it without immediately reaching for the list again.

It was granted her to clothe herself with fine linen, bright and pure. For the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints.Revelation 19:8

Granted is the whole verse

Read the sentence just before that one and then read this one, and hold the two of them together, because the join is the teaching.

The verse before says the bride has made herself ready. Then, immediately, this: it was granted her. Not achieved, not assembled, not earned by a good run of months. Granted. Issued. Handed over out of a crate by somebody who had already worked out the sizes.

Both halves are true and they are not in competition. Something real is genuinely happening in the church, in ordinary people doing ordinary faithful things, and every thread of it was given. The linen is described as the righteous deeds of the saints and in the same breath as a grant, which means the church's own doing is itself a gift she was handed. You have been given what you have been trying to produce, and it was in your size before you asked. The word says granted, plainly, and it is His Spirit who works it in a people, never the reader working it up in themselves.

Nobody is grading you this morning

Let me be direct about what this page will not do, because most people have met the other version.

There is no checklist here. I am not going to tell you the five marks of a ready believer, I am not going to describe a level to reach, and I am not going to estimate how far along you are, because a page that grades a stranger has understood nothing about what Christ has done. And if you feel entirely unready this morning, that feeling is not a diagnosis. It is a feeling. It has been the standard experience of the church's best people in every century, and it has never once been evidence about anybody's standing.

You are inside what He is preparing at this moment, and no measurement of yours is being consulted. Scripture speaks of the church being made ready by Christ's own act, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying it out, at His pace, in a crowd you are already standing in.

What He does with the two years off

There is a particular thought that runs under all of this, and it goes: yes, but they do not know about the gap.

The two years. The stretch where nothing happened. The reference you were worried about. The version of you that would come out if anybody checked properly. And this is where the crate matters, because the crate was packed by somebody who already had the form with your details on it. Nothing had to be hidden. The size was known. The name was printed. The gap was not a discovery waiting to happen; it was known before the order went in.

You have not been let in on a technicality and you are not here on a misunderstanding. The written word says the whole thing was granted to His church, and the Holy Spirit is the guarantee given to that whole people, which is the strongest way Scripture knows to say that nobody is going to be quietly removed from the list later.