I Thought A Limited Body Meant Something

You have been going through your own history for about nine years.

Not obsessively. It is a background process. But it runs, and it has run for a long time, and what it is doing is looking for the cause.

Something in your twenties. A period where you were not walking closely. A thing you did that you have never told anybody. A stretch where you knew what was right and did the other thing for about eighteen months.

And you have found several candidates, and none of them quite fits, and the search continues.

Nobody taught you this directly. Nobody stood up and said that a body which does not work is a report on the man inside it. It arrived by implication, over years, out of a hundred small things: testimonies where the healing came after the repentance, prayer meetings where somebody asked whether there was anything to deal with, the general shape of how these things get talked about.

And it has done two things to you that are worth naming.

The first is that you cannot pray about your body without the prayer turning into an inventory.

The second is that you have never once been able to receive prayer from anybody without wondering what they are thinking, and so you have stopped asking.

Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents

There is a scene in John where the disciples ask exactly your question about somebody else, and the answer is a flat refusal of the premise.

Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him. (John 9:3, King James Version)

Neither has this man sinned, nor his parents, but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.

They ask who sinned, this man or his parents. The question assumes that somebody did and that the condition is the receipt.

You have a passage where that exact assumption is refused outright, and John 9:3 has never once allowed a body to be read as evidence about anybody. The answer is neither, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a question off the table rather than answering it.

You are able to see how thorough the refusal is.

He does not say the sin was smaller than they thought. He does not say it was somebody else. He does not offer a more complicated version of the same framework.

Neither. The whole apparatus is dismissed in one word, and He does not explain what it is doing in the disciples' heads or where they got it.

And the men asking were not fools or cruel. They were His disciples, asking a question their entire culture asked, in good faith, about a man in front of them.

You are able to have asked a wrong question in good faith, and John 9:3 has never once rebuked the ones who asked it. The Spirit of God is the one who is present with a man who has been asking it about himself for nine years, and the verse dismisses the premise without dismissing the person.

The audit is not humility

Here is the thing to put down, and it will resist being put down because of what it looks like.

The searching feels like humility. It has all the outward marks of it. That is why nine years have gone by without anybody, including you, calling it what it is.

You have been doing something that looks like self examination and works like a court, and John 9:3 has never once required a man to establish a cause before he is dealt with. It is written neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents, and the Holy Spirit is the one who ends a search rather than concluding it.

Real self examination has an end. It is specific, it deals with what it finds, and then it is finished and the person gets up.

This is not that. It is a permanent open investigation with no possible verdict, because the thing it is looking for may not exist, and an investigation that cannot conclude does not stop, it just runs quieter.

And there is a cost you may not have counted. Nine years of that has trained you to relate to God primarily as an examiner. Not deliberately. But every conversation about your body begins with an inventory, which means the posture is always the dock, which means something has quietly gone wrong in how you come to Him about anything.

You are able to stop an investigation that cannot conclude, and stopping it has never once been the same as claiming there is nothing in you to deal with. The Spirit of God is the one who is present with a man who is not in the dock, and John 9:3 refuses the question rather than answering it in his favor.

Ten minutes without looking for a reason

So here is the assignment, and it is the smallest possible practice of the thing.

Do ten minutes with somebody without looking for a reason for your body first.

You are able to move without the inventory running, and ten minutes with nothing being examined has never once been the same as ten minutes without God in it. It is written but that the works of God should be made manifest in him, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is out on a road with a man who is not being assessed.

Take your brother in law, or your wife, or whoever is there. Walk for ten minutes.

And here is the whole of it: when the search starts, and it will start, at about minute two, notice it and do not follow it.

You do not have to argue with it. You do not have to establish anything. Just do not go where it is going, the way you would decline to open a drawer.

That is a small act, and it will be needed about six times in ten minutes on the first day, and about twice by the end of the month.

You have permission to leave a question with God rather than answer it, and leaving it there has never once been the same as being incurious about your own life. John 9:3 puts the reason with the works of God rather than with the history of the man, and the Spirit of God is the one who holds what He has not explained.