Forty Years of Good Advice

He has three men he rings, and he rings them in order.

The first one is for the practical shape of a thing, because he sees the mechanics before anybody else does. The second is for whether it is wise, which is different, and he has been right about that four times when nobody else was. The third is the one he rings last and least often, and it is the one whose answer he usually takes.

This has served him for forty years. It has kept him out of two bad partnerships and one very bad piece of ground.

He is not a man who cannot decide. He decides all day. He runs a business and a family and a great deal of land, and people bring him things.

Here is the sentence he could not have said at fifty and can say now.

He has never once, in forty years, sat down on his own and asked God about anything and waited.

He has prayed. Plenty. He prays over meals and over sick animals and over his grandchildren by name, and he means it, and none of that is what he is talking about.

He means: put the question in front of God, and then be quiet, and wait, and be prepared to hear something he had not already worked out. Not once. Every single genuinely difficult thing in four decades has gone to those three men first, and he has never got as far as the fourth call, because by the time he has rung three he has an answer.

The psalmist stops and states what he is about to do

There is a line in the eighty fifth psalm that reads like a man interrupting himself.

I will hear what God the Lord will speak: for he will speak peace unto his people, and to his saints.Psalm 85:8

I will hear what God the Lord will speak. That is a decision announced out loud, in the middle of a psalm that has been asking questions.

He does not say it as though hearing were a special event. He says it the way a man says he is going out to look at the weather, and then he does it, and then he reports back what was said.

And notice the confidence in the second half. For he will speak. The waiting in that verse is not a hopeful vigil against long odds. It is the ordinary posture of somebody who expects the God he belongs to to say something.

God speaks to His own and you are one of them, and the expectation in that verse is ordinary rather than exceptional. That is what the word actually says, not encouragement I am giving you, and the Holy Spirit is the One putting that in front of a man who has taken counsel for forty years.

Three good men are not a fault

Now let me be careful, because this message could easily insult a wise habit.

Those three men are a gift. Scripture is full of the value of counsel, and a man who takes it is not weak, he is sensible, and the two bad partnerships you did not enter are the evidence.

Keep them. Ring them.

The issue is the order, and the order was never decided. It just settled, the way things do, and by about year fifteen the three calls had become the whole process, and God had quietly been moved from the source to the ratifier. You pray about the answer you already have. That is a different act from asking.

And nothing about taking counsel has ever put you further from His voice. Scripture honors the wise friend and never once made him the substitute, and the Holy Spirit is not competing with three good men for a place in your week.

Ask Him first, once

Here is the practical thing, and it is small enough to do this week and hard enough to be worth doing.

The next genuinely difficult thing that arrives, ask Him before you ring anybody.

Not instead of ringing them. Before. Sit down somewhere on your own, put the actual question into words out loud, and then be quiet for two minutes without answering it yourself, which for a man like you will be the whole of the difficulty.

Then ring the three. You will very likely still take the third man's advice and it will very likely still be right.

You are able to put a question to God first and wait, and the waiting has never once been an advanced discipline. He promised that He will speak to His people, and the Holy Spirit is the One who holds a decisive man still for two minutes.