The Reason You Built To Explain It

She built it out of good materials, which is why it has held up so well.

Here is how it went. She went without for that specific thing, more than once, seriously, and it did not move. And she is not a woman who can leave a thing unexplained, so she went looking for a reason, and she found one, and it was made entirely of Scripture.

The reason goes something like this. God gives good gifts to His children, and God is not slack concerning His promises, and God knows how to give better than any earthly father. All true. Every one of those is in there.

Therefore, if nothing came, the variable must be on her side. Something in her is not right yet. Something in her is not ready, or not clean, or not surrendered enough, and until it is, this will stay where it is.

She has never written that down. She has taught for years and she would never teach that to anybody else, and she can hear how it sounds now that it is in a sentence. But she has been living underneath it since the second time, and it has quietly become the thing she believes about herself most firmly, more firmly than the gospel she teaches on a Wednesday.

And a woman she loves said, over the pots: sis, fast for it again.

And what moved in her was not hope. It was the reason, updating itself. Here is the next place to look for the fault.

If your disappointment has hardened into a theory about you, come and sit at the end of this table.

Built out of true things, and still wrong

Let us start there, because it is the part that has kept the whole structure standing.

Every brick in that reason is genuine. God does give good gifts. He is not slack concerning His promise. He does know how to give. Nothing in your theology went wrong at the level of the individual sentence.

What went wrong is the shape you built out of them, and the shape is this: if the gift did not come, the fault is in the receiver. That is not in Scripture. It was assembled at home, out of true bricks, by a good mind under pressure, and it has been quietly ruling you ever since.

You are not the variable, and you were never the reason nothing moved. That is not a sentimental correction. It is written that the Lord looketh on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and the Holy Spirit has been reading yours through both attempts and has never once found the fault this theory insists must be there.

God has already ruled on this kind of reasoning

There is a moment at the end of Job that people skip past, and it is the most direct thing in Scripture about explanations like yours.

The LORD said to Eliphaz the Temanite, My wrath is kindled against thee, and against thy two friends: for ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath.Job 42:7

Consider who is being corrected there.

Not the man in the ashes with the honest complaint. The three careful, reverent, theologically respectable men who explained his suffering to him. They quoted true things. They spoke about God's justice and God's greatness and the reliability of His ways. And God says to them: ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right.

Their crime was not bad theology in the sentence. It was building a structure in which a suffering man must be the reason for his own suffering.

You are holding a theory that God has already ruled against, and He ruled in favor of the man who complained. I am not saying that to comfort you at a pot: it is what the text says, by name, in the last chapter (Job 42:7), and it is His Spirit, not this page, who takes the beam out from under a structure you built in good faith.

And your going without bought nothing

Here is the flat sentence the theory cannot survive.

It did not fail. It was never a mechanism, so there was nothing in it that could fail. It did not fall short of a length. It was not spoiled by an impurity in you. It did not almost work and get stopped by something in your heart.

You did not do it wrongly, and the outcome is not a report on your readiness. Scripture is blunt that God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent (Numbers 23:19), which also means He is not a system with an input on your side, and it is His Spirit who makes that a load coming off you rather than a doctrine you would defend in a room.

And nobody here is going to promise it will work next time, because that would just rebuild the machine with a new dial on it.

Now something said in the open here rather than in small print. 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 come in a smaller measure to anybody on account of a body.

And if this week has more in it than a page can carry, if you are frightened for yourself, put this down and ring 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 road around God. That is help He put in the world on purpose.