The Rule I Made At Twenty-Four

He made it in a car park, which he thinks is appropriate, and he has kept it for twenty years.

He was twenty-four and he had just watched somebody he trusted tell a young couple, with complete confidence, that God had told him something about their lives. It was specific. It was said in front of other people. It was wrong, and it took about two years to come apart, and by the time it had come apart the couple had made a decision they could not unmake and the man who said it had moved on and was saying things somewhere else.

He is not going to name it further than that. It was a long time ago and the people are still alive.

But he sat in a car park afterwards and made himself a rule, and the rule was this: I will never act on an impression. If it is God, He can arrange it some other way.

And it has held. Twenty years, and it has held.

He would tell you it has served him well and there is a case for that. He has never once told anybody that God said something to him. He has never put a decision on a stranger. Two people he knows have come badly unstuck by being sure, and he has watched from the side and thought: I made the right rule.

And then in June he had a thought about somebody at work.

Nothing spiritual sounding. Just: he is having a hard time and nobody has asked.

And the rule came up, automatically, the way it has for twenty years, and filed it, and he did nothing.

And three weeks later he found out, from somebody else, in an ordinary conversation, that he had been right. Not about anything dramatic. Just that the man had been having a hard time and nobody had asked.

And what he has been sitting with since is not guilt exactly. It is a specific and uncomfortable question: what if the rule I built to stop me doing harm has been stopping me doing anything.

And that is you in your own car park, or you would not have read this far.

The rule was right, and it was built too wide

Let me start by saying the thing nobody has said to you about this, which is that you were correct.

What you saw at twenty-four was real damage. A person used the sentence God told me to put weight on somebody else's life that was not his to put there, and the weight stayed after he had gone. You were right to be appalled, and you were right that something needed to change in you, and a great many people who saw what you saw learned nothing at all from it.

You were right at twenty-four, and the caution you built was a real protection of other people. It is written that we are to test everything and hold fast what is good (1 Thessalonians 5:21), which is an instruction to do exactly what you did. The Holy Spirit is not offended by a man who decided to be careful with other people's lives.

Now the problem, and it is a problem of engineering rather than of heart.

You built one rule to stop one thing, and the rule you built is much wider than the thing.

What went wrong in that room was not that a man had an impression. It was that he announced it as a message from God, to people who could not easily argue with him, about a decision that was theirs to make.

Your rule does not distinguish between that and he is having a hard time and nobody has asked.

You are led, and being led is not the same as making pronouncements over other people. It is written that all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God (Romans 8:14), and led is a quiet word about a life going somewhere rather than a loud word about announcements. The Holy Spirit has been leading you for twenty years while your rule filed the evidence.

Now here is what I want to put in front of you, and it is the distinction your rule has never had.

The thing in June asked you to notice somebody. It did not ask you to tell anybody what God had said. It did not put a decision on a stranger. It did not require you to be certain about anything. It asked you to have a conversation you could have had anyway, for reasons you could have given without mentioning God at all.

That is the entire category your rule was never built for.

You are able to move on something small and kind without ever once claiming to speak for God. It is written that we are to encourage one another and build one another up (1 Thessalonians 5:11), and none of that requires a person to announce a source. The Holy Spirit does not need you to say His name over a cup of coffee for the coffee to be His idea.

And I want to be careful, because I am not undoing your rule and I am not going to.

Keep the part of it that protects people. Never put a decision on somebody. Never tell a person what God has said about their marriage or their money or their calling. Anything that would frighten, corner, expose or direct another human being goes slowly and goes past somebody wiser first.

That was always the right rule. It is just that it was never supposed to cover asking a colleague how he is.