She can talk about what God does for forty minutes without notes.
Healing, provision, breakthrough, deliverance, restoration. She has seen things and she can describe them, and when she speaks about them people lean in, because she is not making it up and it shows.
Then somebody asked her, in a car, on the way back, a question that has not left her alone since. Not what has He done. What is He like to you.
She said something. She cannot remember what. It was fluent and it was true and it was, she knew even as it was coming out of her mouth, a list of His effects.
And the thought that arrived on the motorway and stayed: I have spent eleven years wanting what He can do, and I could not tell you what wanting Him would even sound like. I do not know if I have ever done it.
She has not told anybody. In her circles that sentence would land like a confession, and she is the one people ask.
If you have got the vocabulary for the works and nothing for the Person, come and sit at this table. Nothing about what you have seen is going to be discounted here.
The works are real and the fluency is honest
Let us settle this before we go anywhere, because you are about to start suspecting eleven years of your own life.
What was seen was seen. The works of God are not a distraction from God, and Scripture never treats them that way, and neither does the Holy Spirit who does them. Jesus points at His works as evidence and tells people to believe them if they will not believe Him. There is no shame in a vocabulary built out of things that actually happened.
What you have noticed is not that the works were wrong. It is that a person can become an expert on the effects of somebody they have not sat down with.
You are not a fraud, and eleven years of that fluency is not a lie. Nothing you have said about His works has to be taken back tonight. I am not saying that to soften anything. The written word says the works that I do in my Father's name, they bear witness of me (John 10:25), which makes the works a testimony pointing somewhere rather than the destination, and the Holy Spirit presses that home in a woman in a car who has just heard herself.
What heaven actually sent
Here is what changed this for me, and it is not a devotional exercise.
Look at what comes down in Scripture and notice how often the answer is not a thing at all.
That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection.Philippians 3:10
Read the order in that verse. Him first, then the power. Paul, who had seen more of the works than almost anybody, arranges the sentence that way on purpose, and then spends the rest of the passage saying he counts everything else loss for it.
Rain came down on dry ground. Bread came down in a wilderness. Fire came down on a mountain. And then the sky opened over a river and what came down was the Spirit, and heaven opened over Bethlehem and what came down was the Son. The traffic runs steadily in one direction: from what He sends toward who He is.
You have been given the Person and not merely the power, and the Word puts Him first in the sentence on purpose. That is written down and ordered deliberately, and it is the Holy Spirit who puts that in the hands of a woman who is fluent about the second half of the verse and quiet about the first.
Do not turn this into a new performance
Something has to go here, or by Sunday you will be trying to want Him properly, which is a new discipline with the same machinery under it.
Wanting God is not a technique and it does not have a correct sound. It usually starts as something far less impressive than the vocabulary you already have.
You are already known by Him, and the knowing was never symmetrical to start with. Scripture says now after that ye have known God, or rather are known of God (Galatians 4:9), where Paul corrects himself mid sentence to put the weight on His side, and it is the Holy Spirit who has known you all eleven years while you were describing His effects.
And if this has cost more than anybody around you knows, if sleep has gone, if the evenings have started to frighten, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.
Now the turn, and it is not a new hunger you are meant to work up.
God Himself is what comes down over your life, and He arrives in person. You are not waiting on a delivery, you are receiving the One who sends it. The written word says the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory (John 1:14), where dwelt is the word for pitching a tent among people, and the Holy Spirit is what makes it true about your actual house rather than about the church in general.
I cannot tell you what God does next, or when. Nobody honest can. What I can tell you is that the question in the car was not an accusation, and that the One you have been describing for eleven years has been in the room for every word of it.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, in your own voice. The standing under these words is yours in Christ, and it was never issued on the strength of how well you can describe Him. Scripture holds it up, and the Holy Spirit is what makes it living rather than merely articulate, and what God does next, and when, is His, whatever He does with it, and no line here pretends to know.
- Fluency I have about the works of God, you are a vocabulary and you are not the same thing as knowing Him. John 10 says the works bear witness of Him, which makes them a signpost and never the destination, and the Holy Spirit has been the one carrying every true word I said. In the name of Jesus I put you back in your place as a witness.
- Fear that eleven years of my life have been about effects, you are not God's word about me and you are not sitting at this table tomorrow. Galatians 4 corrects itself mid sentence to say that I am known of God, and His Spirit has known me through every one of those years. I am asking for Him first tonight, the way Philippians 3 puts it.
- Father, You Yourself came down and pitched Your tent among us, and John 1 says we beheld Your glory. I thank You that Your Spirit was in the room for every word I ever said about Your works. Here is what I actually want, out loud and badly, and here is Your name after it.
Philippians 3:10
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.
