Reading God His Own Terms

He keeps the list in the back of the same notebook he uses for everything else, and it is written out in his best handwriting.

Twenty three references. He knows most of them without looking now, but he still looks, because looking feels like doing it properly. He reads them out in the morning, in order, and then he says the thing he is asking for, and then he says amen and goes to work.

It began well. He would want that understood. It began the year somebody taught him that a person can stand on what God has actually said instead of drifting about in his own feelings, and that was one of the best things anybody ever taught him. He can still remember the relief of it.

Somewhere between then and now it changed shape.

He noticed it a few weeks ago, halfway down the list, and the thought that arrived was so clear he stopped reading: I am not talking to Him. I am serving notice on Him.

That is what it has become. Twenty three clauses, read out in the correct order, by a man who has begun to feel that if he assembles them properly enough the other party will be obliged. And the strange fruit of it is that the room has gone cold. He has more Scripture in his mouth than he has ever had in his life and less of God in the room than he had when he did not know any of it.

He has prayed the other way too. He wants that on record. He prayed in the tradition he loves with the old words. He prayed once in a car park with none.

And a friend, entirely well meaning, said over a table: have you considered fasting for this?

He said he would consider it. He has thought of little else. And what he felt, honestly, was the twenty fourth clause arriving.

If your Bible has quietly become a set of terms, come and sit at this table a while.

Nothing here is going to take your Bible away

Let us settle that first, because a man who has just read what he read is now bracing for somebody to tell him that standing on the promises was the mistake.

It was not the mistake. It is right, and it is the difference between faith and mood, and the person who taught it to you did you an enormous favor. Nothing on this page walks any of that back.

You are on solid ground when you stand on what He said, and you were never wrong to want ground. That is not a concession made to keep a reader reading. It is what Scripture itself does constantly, and it is the Holy Spirit who inspired the words you have written out in your best handwriting and who has never once resented you for taking them seriously.

The difference is small and it is total. A promise can be leaned on, or it can be enforced. Leaning is trust. Enforcing is a contract with the wrong party at the other end of it, and a contract is where the cold comes from.

The question nobody has ever answered

There is a line in Romans, quoted out of Job, that God's own book puts as a question because a question closes an argument more completely than a statement.

Or who hath first given to him, and it shall be recompensed unto him again?Romans 11:35

Sit in the silence after it. Nobody has an answer, and that is the point.

There is no creditor in this relationship. Nobody has ever handed God anything He is now obliged to return, and there is no clause in existence that can be assembled into a claim, because a claim requires an obligation running toward you and there has never been one.

You are not owed and you were never in a position to be owed, and that is the doorway back into the room. I am not saying it to catch a careful man out: it is the question the passage itself asks and leaves standing (Romans 11:35), and it is His Spirit, not this page, who makes it a relief instead of a defeat.

That is why the room went cold. A creditor cannot enjoy the company of the one he is invoicing.

What fasting is, kept small

Here is the honest answer, and it is smaller than the twenty fourth clause.

Fasting is not a payment and it is not enforcement and it is not the strongest item on a list. It is the body brought into a prayer that was already being prayed. It is the whole of a person, including the part that gets hungry and tired and reads a list at six in the morning, turning toward God with nothing in his hands.

And the trap for a man like you is obvious enough to name out loud. Do not let it become clause twenty four. A person assembling a case will file anything: sincerity, effort, the right heart, a stricter morning. You are not asked for any of it, and none of it was ever the currency. Scripture says it is not of works, lest any man should boast (Ephesians 2:9), and it is His Spirit who makes that warmth in a room rather than a position in an argument.

Now something said plainly and not in a footnote. Some people must not go without food at all, and being one of them takes nothing away from you. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with eating, if you are underweight, unwell or simply unsure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything, and let their answer be the answer. You are not one step further from God because of a doctor's instruction. Scripture says the Lord is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his works (Psalm 145:9), and the Holy Spirit has never once arrived in a smaller measure on account of a body.

And if this week has more in it than a page can hold, if you are frightened for yourself, put this down and telephone somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anyone near you is in danger tonight. That is not a way around God. That is help He put in the world on purpose.