The Study, and Every Book Answered

Eleven at night, one lamp, and about nine hundred books on the wall behind him that he has actually read, which is a thing he would not say out loud but which is true.

It is a good room. He built the shelves. There is a chair he has had for twenty-two years and a desk that was his grandfather's and a lamp that is not good enough and that he has never replaced.

And he is very good at this.

That is not immodesty, it is a description of a skill. Bring him a question about God and he could take it apart properly. He knows which difficulties are genuine and which are only difficulties because somebody phrased them badly, and he can tell you what four traditions have said and which has the better of it. People bring him questions and he does not disappoint them.

And at about ten past eleven tonight, sitting in the chair with a book he was not really reading, he noticed something and cannot now un-notice it.

There is one question he has never been able to answer.

He has never framed it either. It has never been a question in the proper sense, with terms and a shape. It is something more like a hunger that has been sitting in this room with him for twenty years, and he has been treating it, without ever deciding to, as an intellectual problem that has simply not yielded yet.

That is what he does with things. He reads about them. And he has read, at a rough estimate, forty books that were adjacent to it, and none of them touched it, and it did not occur to him until ten past eleven tonight that this might be because it is not that kind of problem.

You cannot read your way to being fed. He knows that. He could produce three arguments for it and quote two people who said it better. And he has spent twenty years in a room doing exactly that anyway, because reading is what he has, and a man uses what he has.

And you know that room. There is a hunger in you and you have been applying your best instrument to it for years, and the instrument is a genuinely good one, and it does not do this job.

So take this in before we go a step further. You are not a fraud in this room and the years of reading were not wasted. Psalm 139:6 says such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it, and the man who wrote it was not complaining, and the Holy Spirit is in this study with you and is not embarrassed to be here.

The measure is the supply, not the need

There is a promise at the end of the Philippian letter that gets quoted constantly, and one preposition in it is doing all the work.

But my God shall supply all your need according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus.Philippians 4:19

According to his riches.

Not: out of his riches. There is a real difference and it is not a technicality. Out of would mean the supply comes from a large store, which would be true and would still leave the size of the response determined by the size of the request. According to means the supply is proportioned to the store rather than to the need. The measure being used is the wealth of the one giving.

That is a strange and useful thing for a man who has spent twenty years failing to specify a problem. Because you have been trying to define the need, on the assumption that a properly defined need is a prerequisite for an appropriate response, which is exactly how it works with every other problem you have ever solved in this room.

The verse does not work that way. The response is not sized to the definition. It is sized to Him.

You are met by a supply measured against His riches rather than against your ability to state the problem. The written word says according to rather than out of, which puts the measure entirely on His side, and means the twenty years you have spent failing to frame this have not held anything up; and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into a study at eleven at night with one bad lamp on.

And look at who Paul was writing to and why. He is thanking a small church that sent him money while he was in prison. It is not a theoretical promise dropped into a treatise. It is a man with nothing writing to people who had almost nothing, about a supply neither of them controlled.

The instrument is good and it does not do this

I want to say something precise about the twenty years, because you are going to be tempted to write them off tonight and that would be a serious mistake.

The reading was not avoidance. You did not retreat into books to escape a hunger. You are a person who understands things by reading about them, and that is not a defect or a substitute for anything, it is a genuine and fairly rare capacity, and a great many people have been helped by the fact that you have it.

The trouble is narrower than that. It is that you applied a good instrument to a case outside its range, and you did it for a long time without noticing, because the instrument gives feedback that feels like progress. Every book taught you something. None of them was nothing. And so there was never a moment at which the failure declared itself, because there was never a failure, only a long series of small genuine gains that were all in a slightly different direction from the thing.

You were not hiding, and a good instrument outside its range gives no warning. Isaiah 55:9 says as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts, and it is a difference of category rather than of degree; His Spirit is the one who bridges that, and He is not marking your library.

And here is the second half, and I will be exact. I am not going to tell you what this hunger is about. I do not know, and you have been at closer quarters with it for twenty years than any writer at a distance could get in an afternoon, and the trade of explaining a man to himself in print is a bad one that has done considerable damage.

What is true is that it is real, that it has resisted the best instrument you own, and that it does not need to be framed before it can be supplied.

You are not required to specify it, and the specification was never the bottleneck. Romans 8:26 says the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered, and the phrase deliberately names something that does not reach words; the same Spirit who had that written is the one who has been in this room through every one of those forty books.

Say it badly

Here is the practical thing, and it is going to be uncomfortable for a man with your standards.

Say it badly.

You are the one person reading this who is most likely to postpone until the formulation is right, because you are capable of a right formulation about almost anything and it has never once been acceptable to you to say something imprecise. That standard has served you extremely well for twenty years in this room and it is the exact thing standing between you and the next five minutes.

So say the crude version. The one you would never write down. The one with no terms in it and no distinctions and nothing that would survive a seminar.

There is something I have wanted for twenty years and I do not know what it is. That will not do as a proposition and it is entirely true, and truth outranks precision here, which is a sentence you would ordinarily resist and which is the whole of tonight.

You are allowed to bring it unframed, and the frame was never the requirement. Scripture says my God shall supply all your need according to his riches in glory, and need there is unqualified and unexamined; the Holy Spirit is the one who let you notice at ten past eleven with a book you were not really reading.

So the study is not a room where twenty years went nowhere. It is nine hundred books that were all worth reading and a chair of twenty-two years and a lamp that should have been replaced, and a man in it who has finally found the one question that does not answer that way.

And if this is heavier than a page can carry, find a real person this week. If it has gone darker than tired, call or text 988.