I Have Them On Paper And I Feel Foolish

It is on paper and you feel foolish about it.

Those are two separate facts and only one of them is true. The paper is real. The foolishness was handed to you by somebody else and you have been carrying it as though it were yours.

Let us take the paper first, because the paper is doing extremely well.

It has never failed. Not once. It does not run out of power, it does not need anything from anybody, it does not stop working when something else stops working, and you can read it in the dark with a flashlight. In eleven years it has never once let you stand in front of something unable to get in.

Show me a system with that record.

Now the foolishness, which is the part worth spending an afternoon on.

Somewhere along the line, somebody found out and made a face, or said something with a laugh in it, or told you what you should be doing instead in a voice that assumed you would already know. And you agreed with them, on the spot, because that is what a person does when they are outnumbered.

And you kept the paper anyway, because it works, and you have been carrying their opinion on top of it ever since.

I cannot go with these; for I have not proved them

There is a moment before a famous fight where a young man is dressed in somebody else's equipment, and what he says is one of the wisest sentences in Scripture.

And David said unto Saul, I cannot go with these; for I have not proved them. And David put them off him. (1 Samuel 17:39, King James Version)

I have not proved them. Not, they are bad armor. Not, I am too good for this. He says he has not tested them, and therefore he does not know what they will do, and therefore he is not going out in them.

And then he takes them off, in front of a king, in front of an army.

You are entitled to say out loud that you have not tested a thing, and no man has ever once been called foolish by God for refusing to fight in equipment he did not know. 1 Samuel 17:39 says I cannot go with these; for I have not proved them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that sentence available to somebody who has been apologizing for their own method.

Notice whose armor it was. It was the king's. The best available, offered generously, by somebody who genuinely wanted to help.

And it was still wrong, and being wrong had nothing to do with its quality and everything to do with whose body it was made for.

You have been handed good equipment made for somebody else's body, and no method has ever once been the right one purely because it works for the person offering it. The Holy Spirit is the one who tells the difference between a good thing and a good thing for you, and it is written that the armor was the king's own and was still put off.

And what he went with was what he had proved. Five stones and a sling, which anybody watching would have called inadequate, and which had eleven years of daily use behind it.

Proved is the word. Tested by use. Known.

You were carrying something proved by eleven years of use, and no record like that has ever once been correctly described as inadequate. The Spirit of God is the one who counts what has been tested rather than what looks impressive, and Scripture puts the proving above the equipment on purpose.

What the paper actually is

Now let me be concrete, because a general reassurance will not lift eleven years of somebody else's face.

Here is the honest accounting, both columns. The paper can be lost, and it can be found by somebody in your house, and those are real. I am not going to pretend they are not.

And here is the other column, which nobody has ever read out to you. It cannot be reached from anywhere else in the world. It does not stop working. It never needs anything. It does not depend on remembering a different thing in order to get to it.

Every method has a column of problems. Yours has been the only one anybody ever recited to you.

You have been shown one column of a two column account, and no method on earth has ever once existed without a list of its own troubles. The Spirit of God is the one who reads both columns out loud, and 1 Samuel 17:39 has a man declining the impressive option without apologizing for it.

And here is the part nobody has ever told you. The people who recited that list to you are using something too. All of them. There is no person alive doing this out of their own head.

Theirs has different problems, and nobody has ever made a face at them about it, and that is the entire difference between you and them.

That is a gap in the teaching. It is not a gap in you.

You have never once been the only person using a method, and no arrangement has ever been shameful purely because somebody made a face at it. The written word has a young man refusing the king's own armor in public, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells a person what everybody else is quietly doing.

Choose where it lives

Now the small thing, and it is not a change of method.

I am not going to tell you to stop using paper. It works, it has always worked, and nobody here is going to take away the one thing that has never failed a person.

Put the paper somewhere you have chosen on purpose, and say out loud that you chose it.

You are able to choose where your own arrangement lives, and one deliberate decision has never once required anybody's permission. 1 Samuel 17:39 has a man putting off what did not suit him and taking up what he had proved, and the Holy Spirit is the one present while somebody decides.

Choose properly. Not the first place that comes to mind and not where it happens to be now. Somewhere you decide, for a reason you could say out loud if anybody asked.

Then say the sentence. I chose this. I put it here on purpose.

Because the shame is not in the paper. It is in the sense of having drifted into something rather than decided it, and a deliberate choice cannot be drifted into. Choosing where it lives converts an embarrassment into a decision, and nobody is embarrassed by a decision.

You are converting a drift into a decision in about two minutes, and one chosen place has never once been beneath anybody's dignity. The Spirit of God is the one who returns to a person the deciding of their own affairs, and it is written that David put the armor off and chose what he took instead.