Try the Spirits Is Not an Insult

She is sixty one and she has been handed a great many words in her life.

Some over a chair at the front of a room. Some in a car park. One from a visiting man who did not know her name, at a meeting in 1987, that shaped roughly the next decade of her decisions.

She took all of them. Every one. She wrote them in the back of a notebook, and she has kept the notebook.

That is what she was taught. She was taught that weighing a word was the same as doubting the God who might have sent it, and that the humble thing, the safe thing, was to receive and to hold and to wait for it to come to pass.

Some of them did.

Several of them did not, and one of them cost her something she is still carrying, and she has never once permitted herself to conclude that the word was simply wrong. She has concluded instead, quietly, over thirty years, that she must have failed it somewhere.

Here is the sentence she has never said out loud.

She has been more careful of the words than of the God who gave the standard for judging them.

Read who this was written to

There is a line in John's first letter, and it is not addressed to elders, leaders or a panel of examiners. It is addressed to ordinary believers, and it is an instruction, not a permission.

Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.1 John 4:1

Try the spirits.

He calls them beloved in the same breath. This is not a rebuke to a suspicious church. It is a father putting a tool into the hands of people he is fond of, because he knows what is out in the world and he would rather they were equipped than trusting.

And believe not every spirit is remarkable when you sit with it. Not every one. Some, then, are not to be believed, and the deciding is placed on the ordinary reader rather than reserved for anybody special.

Your weighing is an instruction to you personally rather than rebellion against God, and 1 John 4:1 hands the trying to the beloved by name. That is what the word actually says, not permission I am extending to you, and the Holy Spirit is the One who never asks a person to switch off what He gave them.

Receiving everything is not humility

Now the plain part, and I say it as somebody who has sat with women your age and heard the same notebook described more times than I can count.

What you learned was not humility. It was a rule made by people who found it easier to speak into a room that did not weigh anything, and I do not need to assume bad intent to say that the rule served them and cost you.

Real humility is quite willing to be examined. Paul told a whole church to let others judge what was said, and told the Thessalonians to prove all things and hold fast the good, which is a sorting instruction, not a swallowing instruction.

And notice what the swallowing did to you. When a word failed, the only place blame could land was on you, because the word itself had been made unquestionable. Thirty years of that leaves marks.

And nothing about weighing a word has ever put you outside His pleasure. Scripture tells you to prove all things and hold fast that which is good, and the Holy Spirit is not diminished by a woman who tests.

Go back to one of them

Here is the practical piece, and I want it to be one, not the whole notebook.

Take a single word. Probably the 1987 one, though you will know. Write it out plainly, the way it was actually said rather than the way you've carried it.

Then lay it beside what is written. Does it fit the character of God as He has revealed it? Does it lift up Christ? Does it produce the fruit the letters describe, or does it produce fear, urgency and dependence on the person who gave it?

And then let it go or hold it, deliberately, as an adult, in front of Him.

I am not giving you a mechanism that guarantees a verdict on every word. No such thing exists, and anybody who offers you one is doing to you what was done to you at nineteen. I am giving you the measure God gave and the freedom to use it.

You are able to weigh what was spoken over you, and the tool was placed in your hands by the letter itself. 1 John 4:1 commands you to try the spirits, and the Holy Spirit is the One who steadies a woman opening a notebook after thirty years.