Thirty Years And Never Once

Ross was doing the maths on a Tuesday and it came out at thirty-one years.

Not thirty-one years of nothing. He would object to that framing and he would be right to. There have been answers. There have been things that worked out, and two of them at times that were pointed enough to be worth noticing, and he is not a man who says God has never done anything.

But he has never once watched something happen that could not be accounted for afterwards.

Every single answer in thirty-one years has had a route. A person turned up. A letter arrived. Somebody changed their mind. A test came back better than expected and the doctor had said it might. Every one of them is explicable, and Ross is not a cynic and he does thank God for all of them, and it is also true that not one of them required God.

And what he noticed on the Tuesday, doing the maths, was not the absence.

It was what has happened to his asking.

He went back through what he prays for now compared with what he prayed for at twenty-five, and the difference is not maturity, whatever he has been calling it. At twenty-five he asked for things that would have required something. Now he asks for strength, and wisdom, and for people to be comforted, and for doors to open, and every single item on the current list is a thing that could arrive by entirely ordinary means.

He has lowered the ceiling without ever deciding to. Thirty-one years of small adjustments, each of them sensible, and the aggregate is a man who no longer asks for anything that would need explaining.

He is fifty-six.

You may know that list.

Maybe you have also compared what you ask for now with what you asked for at twenty-five. Maybe you have also called it maturity and half believed it.

What a man does when his own experience runs out

There is a psalm where the writer is in exactly your position and does something specific about it, and the specificity is the useful part.

He has been going over his own life and finding nothing. He says so plainly: he asks whether God has forgotten to be gracious, whether the mercy is clean gone for ever. That is in the text, in the first person, in the middle of the book.

And then he turns, and here is the turn.

I will remember the works of the LORD: surely I will remember thy wonders of old. I will meditate also of all thy work, and talk of thy doings.Psalm 77:11-12

Of old.

He does not go looking harder in his own thirty-one years. He does not manufacture something. He goes outside his own experience entirely, to what is on record, and he deliberately puts his attention there.

Which is a completely different move from the two you have available, and you have probably only had two: either find something in your own life and count it, or conclude there is nothing.

There is a third, and it is what a man does when his own account has run dry, and it is not denial. It is going to the record.

And you are not confined to your own thirty-one years as the whole of the evidence. The written word has a man turn deliberately to what is on record when his own experience returns nothing, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that a real move rather than a consolation.

And He still does this. The word puts the works and the wonders in the past tense as things that happened rather than as things imagined, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than requiring your decade to supply the proof.

What the lowering has cost

Now the ceiling, because that is the actual injury and you found it yourself.

Every one of the adjustments was sensible. That is how it happens. A man asks for something large, and nothing arrives, and next time he asks slightly smaller, and each individual step is reasonable and none of them is a decision.

And the aggregate, after three decades, is a list on which nothing would require God.

I am not going to tell you the large asks would have been answered. I do not know, and I will not manufacture a promise, and you would spot it immediately.

What I will say is that the lowering was not caused by evidence. Nothing in thirty-one years told you that large things do not get asked for. What told you was the accumulation of disappointment, which is a different teacher and a less reliable one, and it has been setting your ceiling without ever being consulted about whether it should.

And you are able to ask for something you cannot arrange yourself. The word says He is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, and it locates the ability in Him rather than making a promise about the request, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a permission rather than a guarantee.

And nothing about you is under review for a lowered list. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a man who did the maths on a Tuesday and did not like the answer.

And I am not going to promise you one

Let me be plain at the place where this category usually cheats.

Nothing here says that if you ask bigger, something will happen. I do not know whether anything will happen and neither does anybody writing anything anywhere.

He still does this. And He is not obliged to do it for you today. Both of those are true at once and the whole of this category lives in holding them together, and a message that drops either half has lied to you.

What is available is not an outcome. It is the difference between a man who expects Him and a man who has quietly stopped, and that difference is entirely in the asking rather than in the answer.

And you can expect Him without putting Him on terms. The word says our God whom we serve is able to deliver us, and then says, and if not, we will not serve other gods, and holds both without collapsing either, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a place a man can stand.