I Can Do The Thing And I Do Not Trust It

She knows exactly where the room turns and she can get it there in about four minutes.

That is not arrogance. It is the plainest possible description of something she has done several hundred times, and if she were describing anybody else you would call it competence and think nothing of it.

She knows when to stop talking. She knows the difference between a silence that is working and one that has gone slack. She knows that if she says a particular kind of sentence, quietly, in a particular part of a song, something happens in a room, and she is right about it, and it happens.

She has been doing this since she was twenty-three.

And what she cannot do any more, and has not been able to do for about three years, is tell whether any of it is Him.

That is the whole problem and it does not have another part.

She is not accusing herself of faking. She would know if she were faking, and she is not, and she still means every word. It is that the machinery of doing it well and the presence of God have become, from the inside, entirely indistinguishable, and she cannot get behind her own hands to look.

And she cannot ask anybody, because there is no version of the question that does not sound either like false modesty or like a woman having a crisis, and she is not having a crisis. She is in a room every week doing a thing that helps people, and she goes home and lies awake wondering whether she is a very effective set of techniques.

And that is you lying awake, or you would not still be reading.

Paul had the same problem and solved it in the opposite direction

Here is a man who could speak, writing to a church about how he deliberately did not.

And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power.1 Corinthians 2:3-4

Now, read what he is contrasting.

He is not contrasting sincerity with insincerity. He is contrasting two things that both work: plausible words of wisdom, which is skill, and demonstration of the Spirit, which is not.

And notice the position he puts himself in. Weakness. Fear. Much trembling. That is a man deliberately arriving in a state where he could not rely on his own competence, precisely because he had enough of it to be worried about it.

You are not the first capable person to become suspicious of your own capability, and Paul was worried about the same thing. It is written that his speech and his message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power (1 Corinthians 2:4). The Holy Spirit is the demonstration in that sentence, and Paul does not claim to be able to identify Him from inside his own performance.

Now let me say the thing that will actually help, and it is not a way of telling the difference.

There is not one. That is not a failure in you.

You are not equipped to audit this from the inside and you were never meant to be. It is written that the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick, who can understand it (Jeremiah 17:9), and the question in that verse is rhetorical because the answer is nobody. The Holy Spirit did not give you a gauge on your own motives, and the three years you have spent looking for one have been three years looking for a thing that does not exist.

Which means the question you have been lying awake with is not a hard question. It is the wrong instrument, and no amount of honesty will make it work.

And here is where it turns, and it turns on something in the passage you have probably never noticed.

Paul says his speech was not in plausible words of wisdom. But read the letter. He is being enormously skillful in the very sentence where he says it. The rhetoric is superb. He is a trained man using every bit of his training to say that he is not relying on his training.

He did not stop being able. He stopped putting his weight on it.

You are able to keep every bit of your skill and put your weight somewhere else, and that is what Paul is actually describing. It is written that he came in weakness and fear and much trembling (1 Corinthians 2:3), which is a description of where a competent man was leaning rather than of what he had lost. The Holy Spirit does not require you to become worse at your work.