Nothing Happened, And I Cannot Tell

It was about four in the afternoon on a Sunday and the thought was completely ordinary.

Go and see him.

A man two streets over. Not a close friend. Somebody he has known for eleven years in the way you know people who are always at the same things, and who he had not thought about specifically in months.

He was doing something at the time, and he cannot now remember what, which annoys him.

And he did the thing everybody does. He thought: I will go in the week. And then he thought: he might not want anybody on a Sunday. And then, and this is the one that finished it, he thought: I have probably just made this up because I was thinking about the road.

He did not go.

That was a fortnight ago and he has seen the man twice since, at the usual things, and he is completely fine. Nothing had happened. Nothing was happening. There was nothing to arrive in the middle of, and if he had gone he would have had a cup of tea and come home.

And that, unexpectedly, is the thing he cannot put down.

Because he had assumed, without ever putting it into words, that this was how you found out. That if it was Him, you would go and there would be a reason, and the reason would be the proof.

And there is no reason, so he is left with a fortnight of turning over a completely uneventful Sunday afternoon, and no way at all of telling whether Somebody spoke to him or whether he was thinking about a road.

And that is you with your own fortnight, or you would not still be reading a piece about a cup of tea that did not happen.

What the promptings in Acts were actually for

Let me put one in front of you, because it is short and it does not go the way people remember.

And the Spirit said to Philip, "Go over and join this chariot."Acts 8:29

Everybody remembers what happened next, which is a conversation, and a man reading Isaiah, and a baptism at the side of a road.

Now notice what the sentence itself contains.

It contains an instruction to go and stand near somebody. That is all. Go over and join. There is nothing in the prompting about what will happen when he gets there, and Philip is not told the reason, and he does not know the reason until he is already walking.

The reason came after the obedience, and it came from God, and it was never the test of whether the voice was real.

You are not required to produce a reason to establish that Somebody spoke. It is written that the Spirit said to Philip, go over and join this chariot (Acts 8:29), and the whole content of that prompting was a direction and a person. The Holy Spirit does not attach the justification to the front of it.

Now let me deal with the thing you have been doing for a fortnight, gently, because it is a trial and you are running both sides of it.

You are trying to use the outcome to test the prompting.

It cannot be done. It could not be done in Acts either, because Philip did not have the outcome until afterwards, and if the chariot had been empty he would have had a walk.

You are not able to grade a prompting by its result, and nothing about that Sunday was a test you failed. It is written that as many as are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God (Romans 8:14), and led is a description of a life and not a scoring system for individual afternoons. The Holy Spirit is not running an examination in which two streets over was the question.

And here is the thing I most want to take off you, because I think it is underneath the whole fortnight.

Nothing bad happened. And you have been carrying that as though it were evidence against you, when it is the plainest possible mercy.

You are not holding a consequence and there is nothing here that went wrong because you stayed in. It is written that the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases and His mercies are new every morning (Lamentations 3:22-23), and a man who did not make a visit on a Sunday has not spent anything he cannot get back. The Holy Spirit did not have one plan for that afternoon which is now permanently unavailable.

That matters more than working out whose voice it was. If you go away from this page still uncertain about the Sunday but no longer carrying it as a debt, that is the right result.