I Nod In The Meeting And Look It Up Later

You nod. Everybody nods.

The word goes past and you nod, and you make a small note of the sound of it, and then in the car afterward or at home that evening you look it up and find out what it meant.

You have been doing this for eleven years. You are good at it. You have never once been caught.

And the fear has grown rather than shrunk, which is the part that surprises people who have never done it. Eleven years should have made it easier. Instead every year adds to what you would have to admit if the moment ever came.

That is the real weight. Not the not knowing. The accumulation.

Because at year one, not knowing a word is ordinary. At year eleven, in a room where people assume you have known it all along, the same question would be an unmasking. So the price of asking goes up every single year, and so you never ask, and so the price goes up again.

I want to break that arithmetic today, because it is the arithmetic and not the ignorance that is costing you your sleep.

The ear of the wise seeketh knowledge

There is a proverb about who does the asking, and it puts the wise person on the side you would not expect.

The heart of the prudent getteth knowledge; and the ear of the wise seeketh knowledge. (Proverbs 18:15, King James Version)

The ear of the wise seeketh. Not the ear of the ignorant. Not the ear of the junior. The wise.

In that sentence, seeking is not the thing a person does before they are wise. It is the thing that identifies them as wise.

You are the one in that room whose ear has been seeking for eleven years, and Scripture has never once put the asking on the side of the fools. Proverbs 18:15 says the ear of the wise seeketh knowledge, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land on a man who has been treating his own seeking as a shameful secret.

Notice both halves. The heart getteth. The ear seeketh. Two organs, two verbs, and both of them are active.

Nobody in that proverb is receiving anything passively. The wise are described as reaching.

You have been doing the exact thing the verse calls wisdom, and looking it up in a car afterward has never once been anything but the seeking that verse names. The Holy Spirit is the one who renames a private shame as the very thing Scripture praises, and it is written that the wise ear seeks rather than assumes.

And there is something worth saying about the word prudent. It means careful, calculating, aware of cost. The prudent person in that verse is somebody who thinks about consequences.

Which is exactly what you have been doing for eleven years, in the car, on your own.

You were never lacking in prudence, and eleven years of careful private work have never once been the behavior of somebody getting away with something. The Spirit of God is the one who reads a man's habits accurately when he has misread them himself, and Scripture attaches the getting of knowledge to the prudent heart.

What the room actually is

Now let me be concrete, because a general reassurance will not survive the next meeting.

Consider what is actually true about a room like that. There are always several people in it who do not know the word. Every time. It is one of the most reliable facts about meetings.

And all of them are doing what you are doing, and all of them believe they are the only one, and not one of them will ever find out otherwise, because the silence is what maintains itself. Nobody ever told you the word, and a gap in the teaching is not a gap in the man.

You are sitting in a room full of people running the identical private arrangement, and eleven years of assuming you were the only one has never once made it true. The Spirit of God is the one who breaks a silence several people are keeping separately, and Proverbs 18:15 puts the seeking ear on the side of wisdom.

And here is the fact nobody has ever told you. In most rooms, the person who asks what a word means is not marked down. They are quietly thanked, by three or four people, sometimes afterward and out loud.

That is not a hopeful theory. It is what actually happens, and the reason is that the asker has just done something everybody wanted and nobody dared.

You have never once been the only person in that room needing the answer, and a room full of nodding has never been a room full of knowing. The written word puts the seeking on the side of the wise, and the Holy Spirit is the one who shows a man what is actually in a room he has been afraid of for a decade.

Seven words in a meeting

Now the small thing, and it is seven words long.

I am not going to suggest announcing anything about the last eleven years. That would be an occasion, and this is not that, and an occasion is exactly the thing being dreaded.

Ask one plain question in one meeting this week.

You are able to ask one question in one room, and seven words have never once undone a man's standing anywhere. Proverbs 18:15 names the seeking ear as the wise one, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in the two seconds before a man speaks in a room.

Here is the shape of it. Sorry, what does that mean exactly. Or better, without the sorry: what does that mean exactly.

Four words. Said flatly, without apology, in the voice you would use to ask what time something starts.

And do not soften it with a joke, and do not add that you have never known, and do not say it has probably been explained before. Every one of those turns a normal question into an admission and asks the room to reassure you.

You are asking for information and not for absolution, and four flat words in a meeting have never once been a confession of anything. The Spirit of God is the one who takes the apology out of a man's question, and it is written that the wise are the ones whose ears go looking.