He Speaks Twice and I Perceive It Not

He has a fairly precise picture of what would count, and he has never described it to anybody because saying it out loud would make it sound silly.

It would be unmistakable. That is the main criterion. Something that could not be mistaken for his own thinking, could not be explained by mood or coincidence, and would still be obviously what it was at eleven o'clock the following morning when he was cold and skeptical and had eaten.

He is not asking for anything dramatic. No lights. He is a careful man and would distrust anything theatrical.

He is asking for something that could not be argued with.

And here is what he has never quite dared to work out, and it came up sideways in a conversation with his sister last spring.

That standard has almost certainly excluded a great deal.

Because the way he has it set, anything that arrives while he is reading gets filed as reading. Anything that comes through a person gets filed as good advice. Anything that arrives as a settled knowing over three or four days gets filed as him gradually making his mind up. Anything that turns up in a circumstance gets filed as a circumstance.

He is not doing that dishonestly. He genuinely cannot tell. But the effect, over about fifteen years, is a man who has been waiting for one particular sort of thing, and who has been steadily disqualifying everything else as it went past.

The problem is stated in the verse itself

There is a line in Job where somebody makes an observation about how this actually works, and it names the difficulty exactly.

For God speaketh once, yea twice, yet man perceiveth it not.Job 33:14

Read the shape of it. The speaking is not in question. God speaketh. Once, and then again, which is the language of somebody who is not being sparing.

The failure named in that sentence is not on the speaking side. It is yet man perceiveth it not, which is a statement about noticing rather than about volume.

And notice what it does not say. It does not say man is at fault, and it does not say man is being punished, and there is no rebuke anywhere in the clause. It is an observation about how frequently this happens to people, offered without any blame at all.

God is speaking, once and then twice, and the not perceiving is a plain fact about human beings rather than a fault in you. That is what the word actually says, not a criticism I am making, and the Holy Spirit is the One who widens what a careful man is able to notice.

The standard was set by a good instinct

Now let me honor where that criterion came from, because it did not come from pride.

You set it because you've seen people go wrong. You've watched somebody attribute to God a thing that was plainly their own preference, and watched what it cost them and the people around them. That horror is right and it is yours, and it has kept you from a great deal of foolishness.

The standard is not vanity. It is caution, and caution in this area has saved many people from serious harm.

But a filter set that tight lets almost nothing through, and after fifteen years a man can end up with a very careful faith and no correspondence in it at all.

And nothing about your caution has ever offended Him. Scripture puts the perceiving problem on the human side without one word of blame attached, and the Holy Spirit is not withholding from a man who wanted to be careful.

Widening what counts is not lowering the bar

Here is the distinction, and it is the whole practical point of this message.

Nothing here says treat everything as God speaking. That would be the error you've rightly avoided for fifteen years, and it does real damage.

What is being suggested is smaller and much safer: stop discounting things automatically. There is a difference between weighing something and dismissing it before it has been weighed, and your filter is currently doing the second while you believe it is doing the first.

So write three things down. Three things from the last year that arrived and got filed immediately as reading, or advice, or coincidence, or your own mind making itself up. Do not decide about them. Just take them out of the disqualified pile and look at them.

You are able to weigh a thing rather than dismiss it, and weighing is what care actually looks like. He promised to guide His own, and the Holy Spirit is the One who lets a careful man look at what he has been filing away.

And nothing in this article ranks one of those ways above another, or tells you which of the three was Him. That is not mine to say and it is not the point. The point is that they have never once been in front of you at the same time.