Whom Have I In Heaven But Thee

Six years is long enough that a man stops being able to see his own hand.

The situation is not going to be described here. It is his and it is ongoing and it is the kind of thing that does not resolve neatly, and the details would not help anybody.

What matters is the shape. Six years of asking. Consistently, seriously, and at some points desperately, and it has not changed and there is no indication that it is about to.

And somewhere around year four something happened to his praying which he cannot undo. He lost the ability to tell what he is asking for.

Because he says God's name, and he means it, and he wants God. He is sure of that in the way you are sure of things you have believed since you were young.

And he also wants it to stop. He wants the situation to end, and he would take that ending from anywhere, and if he is completely honest with himself at three in the morning there have been nights where he would have taken the ending over the God.

And now he cannot separate them. Every prayer has both in it and he cannot tell which one is driving, and he has begun to suspect that the whole six years has been a man using the name of God as a lever on a circumstance.

If you cannot see your own hand any more, come and sit down. Nothing in here is going to be measured.

The psalm is written by a man in exactly that condition

Here is a sentence people put on cards, and it is the end of a psalm that spends most of its length somewhere else entirely.

Whom have I in heaven but thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee.Psalm 73:25

Now go and read the first twenty verses of that psalm, because almost nobody does.

It is a man complaining, at length, with real bitterness, that the people who do not care about God are doing considerably better than he is. He says his feet were almost gone. He says he has cleansed his heart in vain. He looks at people with easier lives and he is not gracious about them, and the psalm records every word of it.

That is where the famous sentence comes from. Not from a serene man. From somebody who had spent a long stretch unable to tell whether any of it was worth it, and who says so in writing, in the songbook, for everybody.

And notice the middle of the psalm, where it turns. He says: when I thought to know this, it was too painful for me, until I went into the sanctuary of God.

He did not resolve it by thinking. He tried that and he says out loud that it did not work and that it hurt. What ended it was going somewhere and being with God, in the middle of the unresolved state, without having sorted out his own motives first.

You are in the first two thirds of a psalm rather than outside one, and it was already the shape of somebody God kept. Psalm 73:25 is where that sits, at the end of a poem that spends twenty verses in a bad temper, and the same Spirit who let the whole complaint stay in the collection is the one who lets a man at three in the morning stop auditing himself.

Wanting it to stop is not a rival to wanting God

Now the piece that has been costing him, and it is a false structure rather than a true problem.

He has been treating the two wants as competitors. As though there is a fixed quantity of desire in him and every unit spent on wanting relief is a unit not spent on God, and as though a really spiritual man would have most of it in the second column.

That structure is not in Scripture anywhere. Look at how people actually pray in the Bible: they ask for the thing to stop, constantly, at length, with no embarrassment. Deliver me. How long. Take this cup from me, which is the most concentrated version of it and was said by Christ.

Wanting a hard thing to end is not a lower appetite competing with a higher one. It is what a creature does under load, and God has never once treated it as evidence about somebody's devotion.

And the man in Psalm 73 did not sort his motives out. Read the end again. He is still not saying his circumstances resolved. He says his flesh and his heart fail. What changed was not the situation and not the purity of his wanting. It was that he went and stood in the presence of God with all of it still in him.

You are not required to separate them before you are received, and you were never going to be able to. He promised it, in the invitation to come boldly to the throne of grace to find help in time of need, which assumes a person in need and does not audit why (Hebrews 4:16), and His Spirit does not sort a man's desires into columns before He will listen.

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 any practice, of any kind, at any length, moves God's hand on your situation or makes Him more willing than He already is. If six years of asking has quietly become a mechanism in your mind, that sentence is the most important one on this page.

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 have been fully inside this, and you were never at its edge because of anything your body can or cannot do. Scripture settled that long before you got here (2 Corinthians 8:12), and the Spirit of God is not distributed by anybody's endurance.

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.