It Does Not Come Back Empty

He runs a small business and he thinks in results, and that is the whole of the problem in one sentence.

Every morning, twenty-five minutes, before anybody else is up. And every morning at the end of it, without any deliberation at all, something in him closes the ledger on it. Good morning or nothing morning.

The criterion is not complicated. Did anything happen in his chest. That is it. That is the whole instrument.

For about two years the answer has been no. Which means, by his own accounting, that he has spent roughly six hundred mornings on an activity with a nil return, and he is a man who would have shut down a line producing nothing after a fortnight.

He has not shut it down. He gets up. But the way he thinks about it now has changed, and the change is corrosive: he has started to think of the twenty-five minutes as a cost. As something he pays, out of discipline, with no expectation of anything coming back.

He is fifty-one. He would not describe himself as discouraged. He would describe himself as realistic, and that is a harder thing to talk a man out of.

Where Isaiah puts the accomplishing

Isaiah has a sentence about God's word going out, and it is worth reading as a man who thinks in results, because it is written in exactly that register.

So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.Isaiah 55:11

Notice who is answerable in that sentence.

It shall accomplish. The word accomplishes. The word prospers. The word does not return void, and the guarantee against emptiness is given about the word itself and its Sender, and not one clause of it is about the person it lands on.

And notice who the return is made to. It shall not return unto me void. The reporting line is to God. The word goes out from Him and reports back to Him, and the man at the kitchen table at half past five is not the auditor of the transaction, and never was.

You have been auditing a process you are not the auditor of. That is not me excusing six hundred mornings; Isaiah 55:11 puts the accomplishing on the word and the accounting to God, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that and lays it over a man closing a ledger every morning before six.

What your instrument can actually read

Now let me be direct with you the way somebody would be in your own line of work.

You have one instrument and you have been treating its output as the whole result. The instrument measures what you felt in your chest between half past five and six. That is a real reading and it is honest and it is also, as an indicator of what a word has accomplished, nearly worthless.

Ask what it cannot see. It cannot see what a sentence does over eleven years. It cannot see the thing you said to your son in March that came out of something you read in a winter you have written off. It cannot see what has not happened to you because of what went in on a morning that felt like nothing.

You have been reading a gauge that was never wired to the outcome. The written word gives the accomplishing to the word rather than to the reader's response, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the work in a man who has recorded six hundred nil returns.

And I want to say one plain thing about the word cost, because that is the shift that worries me most. Twenty-five minutes with God is not a payment. There is no toll here and no transaction, and the moment it becomes one, a man is buying something from God, which is a different religion and not this one.

You are not paying for anything, and nothing about this has ever been an exchange. Scripture puts the sending and the prospering and the reporting all in God's hands, and the Holy Spirit has been the one carrying that through two years a man has written off in full.