Nothing Visible Ever Happens When I Pray

She stopped putting her hand up about four years ago and nobody noticed, which is the whole point of the way she did it.

There is a thing at the end in that building. People who want prayer come forward and people who pray for people stand at the front, and it is not organized beyond that, and she has been one of the people who stands there since she was thirty-one.

She is good at it. Not in the sense she would ever claim. She listens properly. She does not pray at people. She has held a lot of hands.

And in twenty years she has never once seen anything happen.

Other people do. She wants to be careful here because she is not describing a place full of exaggeration. She has stood four feet from things she cannot account for and she is not going to pretend otherwise to make herself feel better.

She has just never been the one.

She counted once, which she now thinks was a mistake, and got to something over four hundred people she has prayed for, and could not name one occasion where something visible happened while her hands were on somebody.

And about four years ago she began, very gradually, to be busy at that moment. Stacking something. Talking to somebody by the door. Never once refusing, because nobody ever asked her directly, and that is exactly what made it easy.

And she has not said this out loud to a living soul, because the only way to say it sounds like a complaint about people she loves, and it is not.

And that is you by the door with your coat over your arm, or you would not still be reading.

Who does the distributing, and how Paul ends the argument

Let me put the sentence in front of you that closes the whole discussion, and notice that Paul puts it at the end of the list rather than the beginning.

He has just gone through the gifts. Wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, miracles, prophecy, discernment, tongues, interpretation. A long list, and it is the list that has been causing all the trouble in that church, because they have started ranking it.

And then:

All these are empowered by one and the same Spirit, who apportions to each one individually as he wills.1 Corinthians 12:11

As he wills.

Not: as each one qualifies. Not: as each one is ready. Not: in proportion to how well anybody prays. The apportioning is entirely His, and Paul says so with the plainest possible verb, and he says it precisely because people were about to start reading their own allocation as a verdict on themselves.

You have been reading an apportioning as a report card, and Paul wrote that sentence to stop exactly this. It is written that all these are empowered by one and the same Spirit, who apportions to each one individually as He wills (1 Corinthians 12:11). The Holy Spirit does the distributing, and it has never once been a measure of the person distributed to.

Now let me say the thing about the four hundred, because you counted and I want to look straight at what you counted.

You counted occasions where something visible happened while your hands were on somebody. You got nothing.

That is a real number and I am not going to explain it away, and I am not going to suggest that things were happening invisibly that you can now feel good about, because I do not know that and neither do you and a page that guesses at that is a page that is flattering you.

Here is what I will say.

You are not able to see most of what you have been part of, and neither is anybody else in that building. It is written that we walk by faith, not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7), and sight is the exact category your count was made in. The Holy Spirit does not work only in the parts of a room that can be observed from four feet away.

And the second thing, which is the one that matters more.

You have been graded by a standard that Scripture never applies to a person praying. It is written that the Spirit apportions as He wills (1 Corinthians 12:11), which means a person with visible things happening around them has been given something and not achieved something. The Holy Spirit does not hand a woman four hundred people and then withhold Himself from her hands.

And I am not going to run down what you have stood four feet from. It was real. You said so and you are a careful woman and I believe you.

What I am going to say is that there are two people in that account and only one of them was given something visible, and neither of them earned it.