The Spirit Searches It Out For You

She has the notebooks. Eleven years of them, in a box, and she has looked in the box twice and both times it made her feel worse.

The method was taught properly and she has followed it properly. Observation, interpretation, application. What does it say, what does it mean, what does it mean for me. Cross-references. Word studies, at one point, off a website. A concordance her husband gave her for a birthday and which she has genuinely used.

And what comes out at the bottom of the page, at the end of forty minutes, is almost always something she could have said before she started.

Be kind. Trust God. Do not worry.

She is forty-seven. She is not stupid and she would like that recorded somewhere; she runs a department and she reads properly and she is a careful thinker. This is not a woman who cannot handle a text.

But she was told, and everybody around her says it, that there is depth in Scripture, that there are riches, that you have to dig for them. And she has dug for eleven years, in a disciplined way, with good tools, and has brought up be kind and trust God.

So the conclusion has arrived slowly and it is now settled: the depth is real, other people are reaching it, and she does not have whatever it takes.

Who does the searching

Paul writes about the deep things and says who does the reaching, and it is not the reader.

But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God.1 Corinthians 2:10

Read the verbs and note whose they are.

God hath revealed. That is a disclosure, made by Him, in His own time. Not an extraction performed by a diligent person.

The Spirit searcheth. The searching of the deep things is the Spirit's activity. Not yours. He is described as the one who goes down into them, and the reader is described as the one they are revealed to.

You have been given the searcher's job and you were never issued the equipment, because the equipment does not exist for people. That is not a comment on your capacity; nobody's spade reaches the deep things of God.

You are the recipient in that sentence rather than the excavator, and the searching was never assigned to you. That is not me lowering the bar for you; 1 Corinthians 2:10 gives the searching to the Spirit and the revealing to God, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an apostle's sentence and lays it over a box of notebooks that made a woman feel worse twice.

What be kind and trust God actually are

Now let me say something about what has been coming up at the bottom of your page, because you have been ashamed of it and you should not be.

Be kind. Trust God. Do not worry.

You have treated those as evidence of a failed dig, because they are things you already knew. But look at what they actually are. They are the plainest and most costly instructions in the whole of Christianity, and they are what the deepest people alive are still working on at eighty.

The depth of Scripture is not that it eventually produces complicated things. A great deal of it produces the same handful of simple, immense things over and over, and the depth is in what those things cost to actually do.

You have been discarding the harvest as a failure because it kept being bread. The written word puts the revealing in God's hands and the deep things in the Spirit's search, and the Holy Spirit is not withholding something ornate from a woman who keeps arriving at be kind.

And I want to name what eleven years of that conclusion has done, because it is the injury and the notebooks are only where it shows. It has made Scripture into a place where you are not clever enough, and there are few things sadder than a careful, intelligent woman who has come to feel outclassed by a book that was written for fishermen.

You are not outclassed, and there is no tier of readers here with you outside it. Scripture gives the deep things to the Spirit to search and to ordinary people to receive, and the Holy Spirit has been revealing exactly as much as He meant to, for eleven years, at a kitchen table with a notebook open on it.