Four Hundred Pages About Him

There are eleven of them and they are numbered on the spine in her own handwriting.

She started the first one at twenty-three because she was tired of hearing things about God she could not check. She is not a suspicious person. She is an exact one, which is different, and the difference has served a lot of people over the years, because when she says a thing is in the Bible it is in the Bible and when it is not she says that too.

Notebook seven is the Holy Spirit. Most of eight as well, and a section at the back of eleven.

She got them out on Saturday morning, all three, because somebody had asked her something and she wanted to be accurate. And she found what she needed inside about four minutes, which is not unusual, because the system works.

And then she did not put them away.

She sat on the floor with her back against the sofa and went through the whole of seven, page by page, and then most of eight, and by about half past ten she had noticed the thing she has not been able to un-notice since.

Every single page is about Him.

Headings. Sub-points. References checked against two translations, and the year she went through the whole of John's gospel underlining every occurrence, and a two-page table she is still rather pleased with.

Four hundred pages, more or less, over twenty years.

And not one line addressed to Him. Not one.

She looked. She went back through and actually looked, because she thought surely, somewhere, in twenty years. And there is nothing. There is a lot to God the Father in the margins, a fair amount to Jesus. Nothing to Him.

And she said out loud, to an empty front room with three notebooks open on the carpet: I have been keeping a file on a Person.

And that is you on your own floor, or you would have shut this page four paragraphs ago.

He has thoughts of His own, and Paul says so in passing

Here is a verse for a woman who checks things, and I want you to look at what it assumes rather than at what it argues.

For who knows a person's thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.1 Corinthians 2:11

Paul is not making a case for the personhood of the Holy Spirit. That is exactly what makes it useful to you.

He is arguing about something else entirely, and he reaches for an illustration, and the illustration only works if the thing he is illustrating with is true: there is Somebody who knows the mind of God from the inside, the way you know your own thoughts and nobody else does.

Knowing. Comprehending. Searching, two verses earlier: the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.

Those are not the verbs of an influence. An influence does not search anything.

You have been studying Somebody who has thoughts of His own and has had them the whole time you were writing about Him. It is written that no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God (1 Corinthians 2:11), and comprehends is a verb that requires a mind behind it. The Holy Spirit was in the room while you filled notebook seven.

Now let me deal with the thing you have been sitting on since Saturday, because I know what an exact woman does with a finding like that.

You are building a case against yourself.

You are not being charged with anything and the notebooks are not evidence. It is written that there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1), and twenty years of careful work has never once been counted as a coldness. The Holy Spirit did not spend two decades in a front room being catalogued and resenting it.

And the notebooks are not the problem. I want to be plain about that, because the tempting move here is to feel that the study was the wrong thing and it was not.

You have not wasted twenty years and none of it needs undoing. It is written that Jesus called Him the Spirit of truth (John 14:17), so a woman who insists on accuracy has been reflecting His own character back at people for two decades. The Holy Spirit is not more pleased by a vague sentence than by a checked one.

What is missing is not better material. It is one line in the second person.

That is all. Not a new discipline. Not a twelfth notebook with a different system in it. One line, said out loud, to Somebody who is in the room.