Why He Asked For A Practice

She can teach it. That is what makes it strange to say out loud.

Ask her about grace and she will give you the whole of it, properly, without notes, and she will show you where it comes from and where people get it wrong and why it matters. She has taught it to teenagers and to a room of adults twice her age and to her own children in a car.

And she gets to Tuesday afternoon and none of it reaches her.

Not doubt. She wants to be clear about that, because people hear this wrong. She has not stopped believing a single thing. It is more that the believing sits in one room of her and the Tuesday sits in another, and the door between them is not something she can open by thinking harder about the door.

She has prayed. Of course she has. She prays well, out loud, in front of people, and she prays badly in the car, and both are real.

And a friend said, over juice on a veranda: you ever fast about it?

She said she would think about it. And what she actually thought was a question, and it is a good one, and it is the question this whole page exists to answer: why would God ask for something done rather than something believed? She already believes it. What is a practice supposed to add to a woman who has the doctrine cold?

If the door between the room where you know it and the room where you live is stuck, come and sit out here a while.

The verse is an instruction and not a mood

Here is the sentence, and the grammar of it is the answer to your question.

Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you.James 4:8

Draw nigh is a verb. It is something a person does with themselves, and James gives it in the imperative, which is the mood of a thing you can begin whether or not you feel like it.

He does not say feel nearer to God and He will feel nearer to you. He does not say understand more about God. He says move, and He puts the second half of the sentence in the hands of God: and He will draw nigh to you.

You are handed a verb, and the drawing near from His side was never conditional on your mood. I am not saying that to make a teacher feel better on a Tuesday: it is the plain shape of the sentence James wrote (James 4:8), and it is His Spirit, not this page, who makes the second half of it actually happen rather than merely being promised.

Why a practice reaches what a conviction cannot

Here is the part your question deserves, and it is worth taking slowly.

A conviction lives in one part of you. A practice involves the rest. God did not make people as opinions with bodies attached, and He has never once related to anybody as though He had. The whole of Scripture is full of Him asking for things that get done: build this, walk here, wash there, take bread, take a cup. Not because the doing earns anything, but because a person is a body and a mind and a will together, and something known in one part travels when the rest of you is asked to move.

That is what a practice is for. It is not a way of feeling more. It is a way of the rest of you arriving in a room where only your opinions have been standing.

You are one person, and the whole of you is invited into the room you have been teaching about. Scripture says present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service (Romans 12:1), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a door between two rooms rather than a doctrine of the will.

So what is fasting, kept small

Here is the honest answer, and it is not a technique for opening a stuck door.

Fasting is not a payment and it is not a method and it is not a way of feeling more. It is the body joined to a prayer that was already being prayed. It is the whole of a person turning toward God, including the part that gets hungry and tired and stands on a veranda at four in the afternoon.

And there is no plan on this page. No length, no kind, no schedule, nothing to work toward and nothing to complete. A woman with your capabilities would master a plan inside a month and be exactly where she started, in the room with the doctrine, holding a new thing to be good at.

Now something said in the open here rather than in fine 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 anybody near you is in danger tonight. That is not a road around God. That is help He put in the world on purpose.

The practice you can start this afternoon

Here is where the verb becomes available, whatever your body is able to do.

There is the reach for the phone in the first quiet second. There is the wanting to be told you did well, which for a teacher is a particular and constant one. There is the pull toward the reply that would settle the argument, the second look, the noise you put on so the house is not silent.

Every one of those is a small movement of the whole self, and every one of them is a verb you can do at four in the afternoon without a plan and without a single new thing to be good at.

You already have a dozen chances a day to draw nigh, and the moving is the whole of your part. The word says a man does not live by bread alone but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God (Matthew 4:4), and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an ordinary veranda the place it actually happens.