I Lead It And Stopped Doing It

Yolanda could not tell you the last time she did it on her own and that is the whole of the problem.

She does it most weeks. In rooms, at the front, in the middle of things, in the ordinary run of what she carries, and nobody who has watched her would guess anything.

Alone, in her own house, with nobody there, she thinks it has been about six years.

There was no decision. She has gone looking for a moment when she stopped and there is not one; there is a period in her early forties when it thinned out, and then a stretch where it happened occasionally, and then nothing, and she noticed the nothing about eighteen months ago and has done nothing about it since.

She is fifty-one.

And the thing that bothers her is not hypocrisy, which was her first thought and which she has examined and rejected. What she does in those rooms is not fake and she is not performing anything.

It is that she has become, without meaning to, somebody who only does this on behalf of other people. It has become entirely a work function. And a thing that has become entirely a work function has, at some point, stopped being hers.

She has not told anybody. There is nobody in her world to whom that sentence could be said without it becoming a matter.

You may know that gap.

Maybe you also lead it and have not done it alone in years. Maybe you also went looking for the moment and found a gradual thinning instead. And maybe you have not been able to say it anywhere either.

The clause about who is built up

There is a sentence in the middle of Paul's discussion where he draws a distinction, and the half people usually skip is the half for you.

He that speaketh in an unknown tongue edifieth himself; but he that prophesieth edifieth the church.1 Corinthians 14:4

Edifieth himself.

That clause is usually read as a criticism, because the sentence goes on to prefer the other thing in a gathering, and everybody takes the tone of the second half and applies it backwards to the first.

But read what it actually says. It states a purpose and an outcome. The private use of this builds up the person doing it. That is not presented as a defect; it is presented as a fact about what happens, in a chapter where Paul is sorting out which activities belong in which setting.

He is not saying self-edification is a bad aim. He is saying it is not the aim of a public gathering, which is a completely different claim and is the one that has been misapplied to your private life for six years.

Which means the thing you have stopped doing had a stated function, and the function was to build up the person doing it, and you are the person who has not been built up in six years.

And the private use has a purpose and the purpose was you. The written word states plainly who is edified and never once presents that as a fault, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a woman who has read a whole chapter backwards for six years.

And He gave you a way to pray past your own words. The word describes something that operates on the one praying, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than requiring a room to be present for it to count.

Why the private one went first

Now the mechanism, because it is not mysterious and it will keep happening if it stays unnamed.

The public use is scheduled. It has a time and a room and other people, and things with times and rooms and other people do not quietly lapse; somebody notices.

The private use has no schedule, no room, and nobody to notice, and things with none of those lapse constantly in everybody's life without any decision being taken. That is what happened between about forty-two and forty-five, and it happened while you were extremely busy doing the scheduled version.

It is not a spiritual decline. It is the ordinary attrition that removes everything unscheduled from the life of a person who is carrying a great deal, and it takes the thing that is only for you first, every time, in every area, without exception.

And what went was the unscheduled thing rather than your appetite for it. The word says he knoweth our frame, he remembereth that we are dust, and the Spirit is the one who makes that cover the ordinary attrition of a loaded life.

And nothing about you is under review for six years. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a woman who noticed eighteen months ago and has done nothing since.

And nothing here is about the rooms

Let me be plain, because a message like this could be read as a criticism of the public side and it is not.

Nothing here says stop leading it, or that leading it is a lesser use, or that the rooms are the problem. What you do in those rooms is real and serves people and I am not going to complicate it.

And I am not going to adjudicate what should or should not happen in gatherings. That has been argued for a very long time by serious people and this site does not settle it.

The only thing under discussion is that there is a version with your name on it that has not happened since about 2019, and it is available tonight, and it takes about ninety seconds.

And you are permitted to have the version that is only for you. The word names the private effect without apology in the middle of a chapter about public order, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a permission for a woman who has become entirely a function.