That I May Win Christ

He got it in March and he has not told anybody how it landed.

Four years of asking. It was specific, it was written down, and there were long stretches where it was the first thing he thought about in the morning and the last one at night. He told two people about it and one of them prayed with him about it more times than either of them counted.

And it came. Exactly. Not a version of it, not something adjacent, the actual thing, and it arrived in a fairly undramatic way on an ordinary Thursday.

And he felt, and he has been very honest with himself about this, roughly what you feel when a delivery arrives.

There was gladness. He is not saying there was nothing. He rang his wife. There was a good evening, and there is a real improvement in their life which is ongoing and which he would not give back.

But he had assumed something would happen in him. Four years of asking builds a chamber inside a person, and he had expected the thing to go into that chamber, and it did not, and the chamber is still there and still empty and he has now added a new worry to it, which is what kind of man gets what he asked for and feels like this.

If an answer landed flat on you, come and sit down. Nobody here is going to tell you to be more grateful.

Paul does the arithmetic out loud

Here is a man who had a considerable amount and wrote down what he made of it, and the useful thing is that he does not pretend.

Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord.Philippians 3:8

Read the shape of it. It is a comparison, and the first side of it is real.

The things he is counting are not imaginary. He lists them a few verses earlier and they are genuine: his lineage, his standing, his record, his rigor. Those were substantial assets in his world and he had all of them and they were worth having, and he does not sneer at them.

He puts them on one side of a page. And then he puts one thing on the other side, and says the second one is of a different order.

Now here is what matters for a man in March. Paul is not saying his assets were worthless in themselves. He is saying they could not do the thing he needed done. They were good at what they were good at, and there was a chamber in him that they were structurally incapable of filling, and he found that out by having them.

Which is exactly what happened on that Thursday.

You have just discovered by experiment what Paul concluded, and it was already true before you got the thing. Philippians 3:8 is where that sits, in a comparison whose first side is fully acknowledged, and the same Spirit who moved Paul to name his assets honestly before setting them down is the one who lets a man read his own flat March without shame.

The flatness is information, not ingratitude

Now let me deal with the new worry, because it is doing more damage than the flatness is.

He thinks the flatness might be a moral fact about him. That he is ungrateful, or spoiled, or that four years of asking has revealed something unpleasant underneath.

It is none of those. The flatness is a reading from an instrument, and the instrument is working correctly.

Here is what it read. It read: this thing, though genuinely good and genuinely wanted and genuinely given, is not the size of the space it went into. That is not a complaint about the thing. It is a measurement of the space, and the space turns out to be considerably larger than a four-year request, and that is not a defect in him. It is a fact about human beings that most people go their whole lives without ever getting a clean reading on.

Most people never find out, because most people never get the thing. They keep asking, and the chamber stays notionally fillable, and the question is never settled.

He got it. Which means he now knows, at first hand, something that cannot be learned any other way.

You have been given information rather than exposed, and it was already the more useful outcome of the two. He promised it, in the sentence about a God who has set eternity in the human heart so that nothing under the sun quite reaches (Ecclesiastes 3:11), and His Spirit does not read a flat Thursday as ingratitude.

The paragraph that outranks the teaching

Before we go on, this outranks everything above it.

Some people must not go without food. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are simply not sure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything and let their answer be the answer. There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule, and there is not going to be one here.

And nothing on this site is a lever. Nothing here suggests that four years of asking, or any amount of going without, moves God's hand or produces an outcome. What came in March was His, given as He gives, and nothing you did operated a mechanism, and there was never a mechanism to operate.

Privacy is about audience and never about hiding, too. Telling your doctor is right. Telling your wife is right. Telling whoever cooks in your house is right and it is basic courtesy. None of it fails anything.

You are fully inside this, and you were never at its edge because of what your body allows. Scripture settled that long before you got here (2 Corinthians 8:12), and the Spirit of God is not distributed by anybody's persistence.

If today is heavier than a page can hold, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.