Sign It Blank (Food For Your Soul)

Bishop Ron C. Hill, describes a transaction he believes every Christian eventually has to make. You take a pen, in the spiritual world, he specifies, and put your signature on a covenant between yourself and God. The page is blank. Then you hand it back.  

"Father, you fill in all the particulars," he says. "You fill in the do's and don'ts and the wherefores and where nots. You fill in what I'm going to get and what I got to give up to get it. I'm signing it." 

Anyone would sign for the first half. It's the second half, what it costs, that people can't put their name to. Everything else Hill has to say follows from that.

The Man Who Went Away Sad

He keeps returning to the rich young ruler who asked Jesus what he had to do to receive eternal life. The man had kept the commandments since his youth. Jesus told him to sell what he had, give the proceeds to the poor, and follow. The man left grieving.

Hill's reading is unsentimental. The young ruler wasn't asked for too much. He had simply already decided what he valued most. He placed a higher value on his possessions than on a right relationship with God, and the question only forced him to find out.

A lot of people, Hill says, are in that same fix. They care more about what they wear than about their walk with God, more about money, fame, popularity, and a position of authority in the church. Few, in his estimate, are driven by wanting to be in God's will.

He doesn't exempt the pulpit. "That's why we've got so many sad preachers," he says. "They don't want to give their sins up." He extends the diagnosis to the whole American church, which he calls pitiful, dry, and powerless, with no demons cast out and no miracles, because pastors are preaching to disobedient people.

Which leads to his central inversion: walking by faith is not first about what you're going to receive. It's about what you're willing to give up.

You Are Not Your Own

Hill is preaching into a moment he describes as upheaval: violence in public places, trouble in government, and church leaders failing publicly enough that some people have sworn off church for good. On that last point he is blunt: every preacher in America can backslide, but God hasn't done anything wrong to you.  

His defense against a bad leader isn't a better leader. "To avoid being deceived by a false prophet, don't you be a false member." Don't depend on a pastor to do your studying, your praying, and your fasting for you, then show up Sunday wondering what he'll say.

He applies the same logic to how people account for their own lives. You own your body, your money, your time. You're in charge, and then, when being in charge takes you somewhere you don't like, you blame God. "Your decisions have brought you to where you are right now."

So you get mad and stay home. You stop praying, stop reading. Mad at the denomination, mad at the bishop, mad at the preachers. Hill names what he thinks is actually underneath it: you're mad at God, because you don't want to give Him what He's asking for. His grounding is scriptural: your body is not your own; it was bought with a price.

"Bishop, That Wouldn't Be Right"

If the cost is real, so is the self-deception that hides it. Pride, Hill says, is so deceptive it's almost imperceptible in a man's heart. You can be driven by it, and rejected by God because of it, without ever noticing. Full time in ministry since 1972, he says he's watched how easily the drift happens. 

His safeguard is other people, specifically people willing to contradict him. Leaders who surround themselves with yes-men and yes-women, he warns, are asking for trouble. He tells about a young man he mentors. Something happened, Hill announced what he intended to do about it, and the young man told him, "Bishop, that wouldn't be right." 

Hill stopped in his tracks. If he'd answered the way he planned, he'd have been acting exactly like the people who provoked him. He confessed it as pride.

That's why he audits his motive before he prays, checking for self-promotion, competition, jealousy, envy, all of them pride under other names. His sharpest version of the test: make sure you're not asking God to make you great in the eyes of the people instead of making God great in the eyes of the people. The preparation of the heart, he says, matters as much as the prayer.

Peace Like a River

Hill makes no effort to soften the terms. Submitting to God's will will cost you stretches of discomfort. It may cost pain. It will cost suffering. You can't walk with God, he says, without giving up something you previously enjoyed a great deal. 

He frames the friction structurally. You pick up biblical principles and start living them out in a world running on the opposite, walking the other direction from nearly everyone around you. Of course you'll run into problems. To the believer who wants blessing without any of that: "Are you out of your mind?"

What he reports from his own side of the signature isn't triumph. Being in God's will hasn't made him popular, rich, or famous, and he says he doesn't care. He has peace like a river. He sleeps well. He and his wife have a great time together. He has a roof, food, clothes, and considers that enough. 

"It's wonderful," he says, "not to be fearful, not to be bitter, not to hold grudges, not to hate leaders or followers."

That's the return he's describing: not better terms than the ones he signed for, but what turned out to be on the other side of signing.