I Have Never Felt What They Describe

She was nineteen in a room where everybody was crying.

It was a good room. She wants that understood, because it would be easy to tell this as a story about manipulation and it was not that. Nobody was worked up. It was quiet and it went on a long time and people were undone in a way that was clearly real.

And she stood there and felt nothing.

Not numb, not resistant, not distracted. She was paying complete attention and she wanted it and she was entirely present, and what happened in her chest was nothing at all.

She went home and made a decision that has governed twenty-one years.

She decided that hers must be a defective version. That other people receive something and she has received an idea about it, and that she is running the whole of this on comprehension while everybody around her is running it on contact.

She has never said that to anybody. What she says, if it comes up, is that she is not a very emotional person, which is true and is not the same statement at all.

She is forty now. She has taught more people than she could count. She is the one who explains things and she is good at it in a way that gets remarked on.

And every so often, in a room like that one, she checks. And it is still nothing.

Written so that you may know

Let me put the doctrine on the table, because you are a woman who takes doctrine seriously and that is the door.

You have been assuming there is one faculty for receiving this and that yours is broken. But Scripture does not use one word for it. It uses several, deliberately, and the one it uses for assurance is not the one you have been auditing.

Now hear this and take it as already settled rather than as consolation: you are not running a defective version, and there is a verse that names the faculty this was written to produce. That is not sympathy talking, it is what stands written near the end of First John, and the same Holy Spirit who was in that room when you were nineteen is the one who has kept you teaching for twenty-one years.

Read it, and look at the verb.

I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life.1 John 5:13

So that you may know.

Not so that you may feel. He does not say the letter was written to produce an experience in your chest, and this from the man who leaned on Him at a table and who writes about love more than anybody else in the collection.

He writes a document. A document is aimed at knowing. And the whole letter turns out to be a set of tests you can apply with your mind: do you love your brother, do you keep His commands, do you confess the Son.

That is not a lesser track. That is the track he chose to give people who wanted assurance.

So take this now rather than after something finally happens in a room: what you have is not comprehension standing in for contact, because the written word says plainly that it was written so that you may know, and the Spirit of God is the one who has been producing that knowing in you since a night when your chest reported nothing.

And I will guard it, because the opposite error is just as expensive.

Nothing here says the people in that room were faking or that feeling is beneath a serious believer. It is not. God made the whole person, the crying is real, and I have seen a woman meet Him and shake, and I am not going to explain that away to make you comfortable.

What is written simply never makes the felt experience the proof, and the Holy Spirit gives different people different weather over the same ground.