I Know All The Cases Where They Got It Wrong

He could give you the list in about ninety seconds and it is not a short list.

The prophets who said peace when there was no peace. The four hundred who told a king what he wanted to hear. The man who was warned not to eat and ate anyway because somebody else claimed to have a word for him. Miriam and Aaron saying, has the Lord indeed spoken only through Moses? The sons of Sceva. Simon offering money for it.

He knows the shape of the failure in each one. He has taught two of them.

And he is not a cold man, and this is not academic. He learned that list because he took the danger seriously, and he took it seriously because the alternative is what he watched happen to somebody he loved, who followed a confident person off a cliff over about four years.

So he is careful. Extremely careful. Which was the right response.

And in June he had a thought about a young man in his congregation.

Nothing exotic. Go and ask him about his work.

And what happened in him, in the four or five seconds after the thought, was that the list arrived. All of it. Not as an argument, more as an atmosphere, and the atmosphere said: men who are sure of these things do harm, and you know more cases than most.

So he did not go.

And in July he worked out something about himself at this table with the tea going cold, which is that he cannot remember the last time he acted on one. Not because he decided not to. Because the list is faster than the thought is.

And that is you at your own table, or you would not still be reading.

The most careful sentence in the New Testament

Here is what I want to put in front of you, and I want you to read it as a man who knows what the alternatives sounded like.

The council at Jerusalem has just made the most consequential decision of the early church. They write it down. And this is how they phrase the finding:

For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay on you no greater burden than these requirements.Acts 15:28

It has seemed good.

That is the apostles. That is the moment the church decides what the gospel requires of the nations, with the men who walked with Jesus in the room, and the verb they choose is seemed.

Not: the Holy Spirit has revealed. Not: thus says the Lord. It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us.

Now, you know exactly what that sentence is doing, because you know the alternatives. That is a claim made with the smallest possible amount of certainty consistent with acting.

You are not required to reach certainty before you move, and the men who had the most warrant to claim it used the least. It is written that it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us (Acts 15:28), and that is the language of the apostolic council at its most consequential moment. The Holy Spirit was in that decision, and the sentence that recorded it is modest to the point of understatement.

Now the list, and I want to honor it before I say the next thing.

You were right to learn it, and every account on it is a real warning about a real danger. It is written that the prophets prophesy lies in My name, I did not send them (Jeremiah 14:14), and the fact that this had to be said tells you the danger is not theoretical. The Holy Spirit is not offended by a man who took presumption seriously.

But look at what every single case on your list has in common.

Every one of them is somebody speaking on God's behalf to other people. The prophets who said peace, the four hundred, the man at Bethel, Miriam and Aaron, the sons of Sceva. In every case the failure is a claim made out loud, in public, about somebody else, that the hearer could not check.

Not one of them is a man going to ask a young fellow how his work is going.

You have applied case law about public claims to a private kindness, and the two are not the same category. It is written that we are to encourage one another and build one another up (1 Thessalonians 5:11), and there is no case in Scripture of somebody being rebuked for that. The Holy Spirit did not preserve those accounts to stop a careful man having a conversation.

And there is one more, and it is the plainest.

The atmosphere that arrives in the four or five seconds after the thought is not the list making an argument. It cannot be, because the list has no argument against asking somebody about their work. It is a feeling of danger, arriving faster than thought, attached to a category it does not actually cover.

You are able to distinguish, and distinguishing is the thing you are best at. It is written that the Spirit of truth will guide you into all the truth (John 16:13), and guiding is done with a person who is thinking. The Holy Spirit gave you a mind that sorts cases for a living, and it has been asleep in this one area.