I Decided God Took It From Me

You worked it out about four years ago and you have never told anybody what you decided.

The decision was that this was done to you on purpose. That somewhere behind you there is a thing, or a period, or an attitude, and that what happened to your body is the answer to it.

You did not arrive there wildly. You are not a superstitious man. You got there the way a careful person gets anywhere, by lining up what you knew about God and what you knew about yourself and drawing the line that seemed to follow.

And it has been sitting in you ever since, and it has done something specific that you may not have named.

It has made you unable to pray honestly.

Because if this is a correction, then asking for anything about it is arguing with the sentence. And if it is not, then you have spent four years accusing God of something. So you stay off the subject entirely, and your prayers have quietly become other people's business only, and you have not said the word body to God in a long time.

I am going to do one thing in this article and it is a narrow thing. I am not going to tell you what it means. I do not know and neither does anybody who tells you they do.

What I am going to do is show you that the verdict is not yours to give, and that nothing has to be settled before you can move today.

Shall the clay say

There is a line in Isaiah that goes at exactly this, and it does not come out where people expect.

Shall the clay say to him that fashioneth it, What makest thou? or thy work, He hath no hands? (Isaiah 45:9, King James Version)

Shall the clay say to the one who forms it, what are you making? Or shall the work say, he has no hands.

That gets used to shut people up, and that is a misuse of it. Read what the clay is actually doing in that sentence.

You have a verse that stops a certain kind of speech and it has never once been aimed at a man asking God an honest question. Isaiah 45:9 has the clay pronouncing on the work rather than asking about it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can tell the difference between a question and a verdict.

You are able to see the distinction once it is pointed at. The clay in that verse is not asking. It is telling. It is issuing a finding about what the potter is doing and about whether the potter is competent.

That is a judgment, delivered by the material, about the maker.

And here is why that matters here, and it is the opposite of the way this verse gets used. There has been no arguing with God in this house at all. Something else has been happening, which is a man passing sentence on himself on God's behalf.

You took His seat. Quietly, respectfully, four years ago, and you issued a verdict, and the verdict happened to be against yourself, which felt humble at the time.

You are the clay in that verse right now, and issuing a finding against yourself has never once been a more acceptable version of the same act. The Spirit of God is the one who knows what He is doing with a man's life, and Isaiah 45:9 leaves that entirely with the potter rather than with the material.

A humble verdict is still a verdict

Here is the thing that has hidden this from you for four years.

It felt like humility. That is why it never got examined.

You have mistaken self condemnation for submission, and Isaiah 45:9 has never once put the pronouncing in the hands of the thing being made. It is written that the clay does not say to the one who forms it, what are you making, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a gavel out of a man's hand without shaming him for having picked it up.

If you had decided that God had wronged you, somebody would have noticed. Someone would have sat you down. That kind of conclusion gets challenged.

But a man who decides quietly that he had it coming looks like a man with a good attitude, and nobody challenges it, and it can sit in a person for a decade doing damage in the dark.

And notice what your verdict actually claims. It claims you know the cause. It claims a mechanism. It claims you can read a body and derive a reason from it, which is precisely the thing the friends of Job did for thirty seven chapters and were rebuked for at the end.

You were never given the office of deciding what God has done and why, and putting it down has never once been the same thing as declaring yourself innocent. Isaiah 45:9 gives no seat to the clay in that question, and the Spirit of God is the one who holds the reason for a thing without owing anybody an explanation of it.

Putting the gavel down does not settle the question. It leaves it open, with Him, which is where it was always sitting.

Move today without deciding

So here is the assignment, and the wording of it is precise.

Go outside and do ten minutes of something with one of them, without deciding first what it means.

You are able to move today with the question still open, and God has never once required a verdict from you before He would meet you. It is written in Isaiah that the clay does not pronounce on the potter, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present with a man who has stopped trying to explain his own life.

That is harder than it sounds for a man like you. You want the accounting done. You want to know whether this is discipline or weather, because knowing how to behave seems to depend on knowing which one it is.

Ten minutes does not require you to know. That is why the assignment is ten minutes and not a resolution.

Take one of your children or your wife, go outside, and move, in the body that is actually here, with the question unresolved and sitting where it belongs.

You have a God who has been waiting for you on the subject you stopped raising, and four years of silence about it has never once put you outside the conversation. The Spirit of God is the one who was present through the whole four years including the part you did not pray about, and Isaiah 45:9 leaves the making with the maker.

And tonight, say the word body to Him. Not a request. Just the subject, out loud, after four years off it.