Now I Think Everything Is A Trick

It happened once and you got careful, and being careful was right.

Nobody is going to argue with you about that. Something came, you nearly went along with it, and afterward you decided to pay attention. That is not a fault. That is what a sensible man does.

But careful has become something else, and it happened so gradually that you did not see the line.

Now everything gets examined. The message from your daughter that came at an odd hour. The note about the delivery. The one from the man at the club that did not sound quite like him. Every one of them goes through a process now, and the process takes time, and the time adds up.

And in the last few months you have missed things. Real things, from real people, that sat there while you decided.

There was one from your sister that you did not answer for three days because something about it did not sit right, and there was nothing wrong with it at all.

And you are tired. That is the part you have not said to anybody. Not tired of the messages. Tired of the watching.

The peace of God shall keep your hearts

There is a promise about being guarded, and the surprising thing is who is described as doing the guarding.

And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4:7, King James Version)

Shall keep. The word behind it is a military one. It means to stand guard over, the way a garrison stands at a gate.

And the thing standing guard is not the man. It is the peace of God, posted at the entrance of a person's heart and mind, doing the watching.

You are guarded by something posted at the gate that is not you, and no man has ever once been given the job of standing his own watch around the clock. Philippians 4:7 says the peace of God shall keep your hearts and minds, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a man off a duty he was never assigned to.

Notice the phrase which passeth all understanding. That is usually read as meaning the peace is mysteriously large, and it does mean that.

It also means something more practical. The peace does not arrive because a man has worked everything out. It is not the result of successful analysis. It comes while things remain unresolved.

You have never once had to finish the analysis before the peace was allowed to arrive, and no understanding has ever been the price of being guarded. The Holy Spirit is the one who brings the peace before the questions are settled, and it is written that it passes understanding rather than waiting for it.

And notice what comes immediately before this verse in the chapter. Be careful for nothing. Which in the old sense means, do not be full of care, do not carry the anxious watching.

The instruction and the promise are next to each other. Put the watch down, and something else takes it up.

You were never meant to hold both the carefulness and the watch, and no man has ever once been asked to guard a gate that was already garrisoned. The Spirit of God is the one standing where a man has been standing all night, and Scripture sets the putting down and the taking up right beside one another.

What the guarding is costing

Now let me be concrete, because a general reassurance will not switch a watch off.

Count what the watching is actually buying. It is buying a small increase in the chance of catching something bad, and I will grant that it is a real increase and not an imaginary one.

Now count what it costs. Three days of your sister waiting. A friend at the club who has stopped sending things. A general low tiredness that you have not been able to explain to anybody. And the ordinary pleasure of hearing from people, which has quietly gone.

You are paying an enormous amount for a small increase, and no guard duty has ever once been worth what a man pays to keep it running. The Spirit of God is the one who reads both sides of an account honestly, and Philippians 4:7 puts the guarding on the peace rather than on the person.

And here is the part that matters most, which nobody has told you. The suspicion is not making you safer. It is making you worse at this.

A man examining everything cannot examine anything carefully, because attention does not divide that way. The nine ordinary things are using up the attention that the one real thing needed.

That is a gap in the teaching, and it is not a gap in you. Nobody ever explained that a wider watch is a thinner one.

You have been spreading your attention thinner every month, and no watch kept over everything has ever once been as sharp as a watch kept over one rule. The written word posts a garrison at the gate so a man does not have to stand there, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells somebody what their own guarding is doing.

Answer one of them

Now the small thing, and it is one message.

I am not going to tell you to stop being careful. Careful is right, and it will stay right, and nobody here is going to talk you out of it.

Answer one message you have been suspicious of that came from somebody you know.

You are able to answer one message from a person whose voice you have known for years, and one reply has never once been a lowering of anybody's guard. Philippians 4:7 puts the keeping of a man's heart on the peace of God, and the Holy Spirit is the one present when a man answers something he has been circling.

Choose one from an actual person. Your sister. The man from the club. Somebody whose face you can picture.

And answer it plainly, without checking it first, and without asking them to confirm it is really them.

Because that last part is what has been doing the damage. A man asking his own sister to prove she is his sister has crossed from careful into something that costs a family something, and the cost is real and it is being paid on both sides.

You are answering somebody you have known for forty years, and no reply to a person whose voice you know has ever once been a risk worth this much guarding. The Spirit of God is the one who returns the ordinary pleasure of hearing from people, and it is written that the peace stands at the gate so that a man can go and live.