He Reads It and Feels Absolutely Nothing

He does it most days and has done for about seven months, which is longer than he has kept up almost anything else.

It is not a chore exactly. It takes twelve minutes. He sits in the same place and he reads a chapter and he does not skim it.

And nothing happens.

Not confusion. He follows it. He could tell you what he read. It is more that it goes in and lands nowhere, like reading a manual for a machine somebody else owns.

What makes it worse is a woman at his job who talks about a verse the way people talk about a phone call from somebody they love. He has watched her do this twice and both times he sat there wondering what is wrong with the equipment on his end.

So the question he has now is a practical one, and he has not asked anybody. Is there any point doing something for twelve minutes a day that does nothing to you while you do it.

God compares it to two slow things

There is a line in Jeremiah where God says what His word is like, and both pictures are worth sitting with.

Is not my word like as a fire? saith the LORD; and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces? (Jeremiah 23:29, King James Version)

A hammer that breaks rock.

Nobody breaks rock in one swing. A man who splits stone hits the same spot repeatedly, and for most of those swings nothing visible happens at all, and then it opens.

If you filmed a stonemason and watched only swing number forty, you would conclude the work was pointless.

Fire is the same. It does most of its work before there is anything to see.

You have been swinging at the same place rather than achieving nothing. Jeremiah 23 picks two slow images on purpose, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old comparison stop feeling like a consolation.

The promise is about the outcome, not the feeling

There is a sentence in Isaiah about what happens to the words after they go out.

So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it. (Isaiah 55:11)

It shall not return unto me void.

Read what is promised there and what is not. He undertakes an outcome. He says nothing at all about the reader's experience along the way.

That is not a technicality. Most people who give up on this are not giving up because the outcome failed. They are giving up because the experience did, and they had been told, without anybody actually saying it, that the experience was the measurement.

You are not the instrument this is being measured on. Isaiah 55 promises the accomplishing and never promises the sensation, and it is His Spirit rather than a mood who does the accomplishing.

Two men only worked out what had happened afterwards

There is a walk in Luke where two men spend hours with Jesus and do not know it.

He explains the whole of Scripture to them on the road. They do not recognize Him. They arrive, they eat, He breaks bread, and then He is gone.

And they said one to another, Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the scriptures? (Luke 24:32)

Did not our heart burn within us.

That is said afterwards. In the past tense. They are reconstructing it.

Whatever was happening on that road, they were not able to identify it while it was happening. They worked it out later, in a room, comparing notes.

You are not required to identify it while it is going on. Luke 24 has the recognition arriving after the walk, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a delayed realization feel like the normal shape of it rather than a failure.

The seed grows and the man does not know how

There is a short parable Jesus tells that is almost entirely about not being able to see anything.

And should sleep, and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how. For the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself; first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear. (Mark 4:27-28)

He knoweth not how.

The man sows it and goes to bed and gets up and goes to bed, and the process runs without him watching it or understanding it.

And the sequence is given. Blade, ear, full corn. Nobody sees any of that happening in the moment. You see it by comparing a field to how it looked three weeks ago.

You are looking at a process that does not report on itself. Mark 4 has the growth happening while the man sleeps and says he knoweth not how, and it is His Spirit who is at work in somebody long before anything is felt.

Hebrews says it is doing something while nothing seems to be

There is a sentence in Hebrews that describes the activity level of the thing.

For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. (Hebrews 4:12)

Quick means alive. That is what the old word meant.

And the verbs are all active. Piercing. Dividing. Discerning. None of them are things a man does to a book, and all of them are things it is described as doing.

Nothing in that sentence depends on how it felt to the person holding it.

You are handling something described as alive and working. Hebrews 4 puts every verb on the word's side of the sentence, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that stop being an abstraction on a flat Tuesday.