Start with the thing that has to be established before anything else, because every later idea in this course is misread without it. Being used by God is a genuine good. It is not a beginner’s prayer that mature people grow out of, it is not naive, and the desire underneath it — to be given to something larger than your own life — is one of the better things a human being can want. The vocabulary is not a modern distortion of something purer. Paul writes to Timothy using the image of a household vessel and lands on the word useful, set apart and prepared for good work. So the argument ahead is not an argument against the prayer, and any sentence that seems to be making one should be read against this paragraph.

What the book examines is not the prayer but a road the wanting can quietly become. And the word quietly is carrying weight. Nobody has ever stood at the start of this road and chosen it. Every step on it was taken by somebody who loved God, and most of them were praying the whole way — not cynically, not as cover, but with a wet face and nothing held back. That is what makes the material worth twelve modules instead of a warning label. If the people on this road were frauds you could spot them at a distance. They are not frauds. They are ordinary believers, further along.

Now the term. Spiritual objectification is relating to God mainly for what He gives rather than for who He is. Here is the picture the book uses, and it is worth having before the God-sized version. Imagine a neighbor you have lived beside for twenty years. Every autumn you knock and borrow his ladder, and he is always glad to lend it, and he always asks how the family is, and you always say fine and take the ladder. Twenty years of that. You could describe the ladder in detail. You could not tell a stranger one thing about him. Nothing dishonest has passed between you, he has never once been unwilling, and if you moved away tomorrow what you would miss is the ladder.

That picture comes out of the earlier books in this series, which described the same operation between people and called it compression: a whole person pressed down into the one part of them we use. A woman who has cut your hair for six years, of whom you are genuinely fond, whose mother’s name you do not know. The reason compression usually corrects itself with people is that there is somebody standing there, fully assembled, who eventually says something that does not fit the compressed version — I had surgery in March — and the correction arrives from outside you because there is somebody outside you to send it.

God does not, as a rule, interrupt that way. He is not less real than the friend from choir, but He does not usually tap somebody on the shoulder in the middle of a transaction to point out that they have not asked Him anything in eleven months. Which means the compression can run for decades with nothing to stop it, and the person running it will experience those decades as faithfulness — because from the inside, faithfulness and a well-maintained supply arrangement feel remarkably similar. Both involve showing up. Both involve real feeling. Both involve prayer. That is not a reason to despair; it is the reason a book exists that looks at this on purpose.

So here is the inventory, and the naming is most of the work. When people go to God, they are mostly going for one of six things. Access: the ability to approach, the open line, the sense that we may come and will not be turned away. Answers: direction, wisdom, a next step, which door. Protection: safety for ourselves and for the people we would lie down in traffic for. Power: capacity to accomplish something we cannot accomplish alone. Provision: the rent, the treatment, the work, bread in the ordinary sense. Spiritual status: standing — the sense of being in good order with God, and, less often said out loud, of being seen by other people as being in good order with God.

Now notice what that list is. Every single item on it is a real good. Access is the achievement of the cross. Answers are promised to people who ask for wisdom. Protection is prayed for all over the Psalms by people God did not rebuke for praying it. Power is given, provision is commanded to be asked for daily, and the desire to be right with God is not vanity but the beginning of everything. This is not a list of sins. It is a list of gifts. The whole book turns on a single hinge laid across it: each of these becomes objectification at the point where it is wanted instead of Him rather than from Him.

Work that hinge on one example, slowly, because four words are doing all the labor. Wanting provision from God is faith — a person brings a real need to somebody real and asks. Wanting provision instead of God is a supply arrangement with a religious vocabulary: the need is brought, the request is made, the goods arrive, and the relationship is no different afterward than it was before. Both look identical from outside. Both often look identical from inside, which is the difficulty. The same test runs on answers: asking God for direction is obedience looking for its instructions; wanting direction instead of Him is consulting an oracle, and the Hebrew Bible has a great deal to say about people who consulted oracles, none of it warm.

The road has six stages and the first three are ordinary. One: the prayer is prayed sincerely, out of love, by somebody who wants their one life to count for something outside its own boundaries. A great many people stay here their whole lives and are frequently the best people you know. Two: the desire to be useful slowly becomes the shape of the whole relationship — availability becomes the offering, fruitfulness becomes the evidence, being used becomes the proof that things are well. Three: usefulness becomes identity, and the shift is grammatical and almost nobody notices it. I serve becomes I am the one who serves. God spoke to me about this becomes I am the one who hears. A thing you do can be paused or corrected or handed to somebody else. A thing you are cannot.

Here is a constructed case for stage two. Tavo is forty-one and runs a recovery group at a church of about four hundred. He came in sideways eleven years ago because he needed the room himself, and two years after that he was setting out the chairs, and four years after that he was leading it. He is very good at it. Somewhere in there the prayer changed — not the words, which are identical, but what the words were reaching for. At thirty he prayed use me and meant I am yours. At forty-one he prays it and means, without ever having decided to, keep me useful. He would not recognize that description, and he would be right that the group has real fruit in it and that he can name six men whose lives are different.

Stages four and five are where the road stops describing ordinary believers and starts describing harm, and the logic is airtight, which is the trouble with it. Four: identity becomes entitlement. If being the one who serves is not what I do but what I am, then anything threatening my usefulness threatens me — not my role, me — and at that point correction changes category. It stops being information and becomes an attack. Not because the person is arrogant; arrogance is not required. Because a person defending their existence and a person defending their position look identical from outside and feel entirely different from inside. Five: entitlement becomes license, and the reasoning is never said out loud — the work is important — after which the cost of the work to individual people becomes a rounding error nobody keeps a running total of.

The sixth stage is a single verse written in the eighth century BC by a man from a country town watching the capital city work, Micah 3:11. Read its two halves separately. The first half is an inventory of paid religion: three legitimate offices, all of them ordained, all now running on money, so that nobody can any longer tell whether they are being told a thing because it is true or because it pays — including the person saying it. The second half is the part that stops people. They have not left. There is no atheism in that verse and no cynicism; these men are leaning, which is a dependence word, and the sentence they say while leaning is a true one out of Israel’s own story. Everything transactional, the language perfectly intact, the confidence undimmed.