It Was Never The Thing I Was Asking For

He did it properly, which is why it took him apart.

He wanted to know what an open heaven actually delivers, so he went through the text with a pen and wrote down every occasion in Scripture where the sky opens or something comes down, and what arrived on each occasion, and he did not look at anybody's teaching while he did it.

It took most of a winter. He has the list.

And what is on the list is this. Rain on ground that had been hard for three and a half years. Bread on the floor of a desert, six mornings out of seven, for forty years. Fire, once, on a mountain, in front of a nation that had stopped answering. A word to a man lying under a tree who had asked to die. The Spirit, over a river. The Son, over a town nobody rated.

Nowhere on that list is the thing he has been asking for.

Not because the thing he wants is bad. It is a perfectly reasonable thing and he still wants it. But he had assumed, without ever examining it, that heaven's job was to deliver items, and the text will not support the assumption, and he has been quietly unsettled since February.

If you have gone looking and found something other than what you expected, sit down at this table. Nothing you have been asking for is going to be belittled here.

The unsettling is not a rebuke

Let us take this carefully, because a person who has just had an assumption removed will usually convert it into guilt within the week.

Nothing on that list is a criticism of you. Not one of those passages is written to embarrass somebody for wanting rain or bread or a word. In fact rain and bread are literally on the list, and God sent them to people who were asking for exactly those things and not for anything more elevated.

The unsettling comes from something else: every one of those deliveries turns out to be attached to a Person who came with it, and the attachment is the part nobody mentioned.

You are not being scolded by that list. Nothing you have been asking for has offended the God who fed a nation bread for forty years. I am not saying it to be diplomatic. The written word says your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him (Matthew 6:8), which is Him already holding the practical detail rather than being above it, and the Holy Spirit, not the wording, is the one who makes that hold at a table with a list and a pen on it.

What the man at Bethel actually said

Here is what settled this for me, and it is not a conclusion I would push on anybody.

There is a man asleep outdoors with a stone under his head, running from a family disaster he caused, and the sky comes open over him with a ladder in it and traffic on the ladder. And when he wakes up, look what he says.

And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the LORD is in this place; and I knew it not.Genesis 28:16

Not, surely I am about to receive something. Not, surely my situation has turned. The first sentence out of a man who has just seen an open heaven is about a Presence he had been lying underneath without knowing.

That is the whole pattern in one line. The opening did not deliver an item to Jacob. It disclosed a Person who was already there.

You are standing in a place He is already in, and the Word says a man discovered exactly that and had to be woken up to find it. That is written down in his own words and kept as his own discovery, and it is the Holy Spirit who puts that in the hands of a man at a lamplit table with a winter's worth of notes.

Keep asking for the thing

Something must be said before you overcorrect, because by Thursday you will feel that asking for the specific thing is beneath a person who has read the list.

It is not. Ask for it. Rain is on the list, and bread is on the list, and a word to a man under a tree who wanted to die is on the list, and every one of those is somebody's practical, urgent, unspiritual need answered directly.

You have permission to want the thing and to have the Person, and Scripture has never once required a choice between them. It says in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God (Philippians 4:6), where every thing is deliberately unbounded, and it is the Holy Spirit, and He is the one who has carried your particular request through every month of this winter without once ruling it out of order.

And if this has cost more than anybody at this table 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.