All of Them Are Godly

That is what makes this so hard to say without sounding ungrateful.

There is no villain here. The twelve or so voices in your week are, as far as you can tell, faithful people doing serious work. Two of them have got you through periods that nothing else would have. One of them says something roughly every fortnight that you write down.

You are not being led astray. Nobody has taught you anything false.

And you cannot remember the last time you had a thought about God that arrived on its own.

Everything you think about Him now has a source. You notice it happening: something comes up in your day and immediately a phrase arrives, and the phrase is not yours, and you know whose it is, and it is a good phrase and it fits.

That is not a small thing to notice. It means that between you and God there is now a layer of extremely good material, and it is always on, and it gets there first.

When you pray, you catch yourself using somebody's framing. When something happens, you know what the correct response is before you have had your own.

There is no space left in which anything could arrive.

What this page will not do

I am not going to name a voice or a category to distrust. Not one. This site will never hand you a target and you should be suspicious of any page that does.

I am not going to tell you to leave your church or stop listening to teachers. That advice produces people who are alone with their own opinions, which is worse.

And I am not going to tell you the twelve were a mistake. Two of them carried you through something real, and that happened, and it is not undone by anything on this page.

What I am going to do is talk about volume rather than about content, because your problem is not what you have been hearing. It is how much and how continuously.

You are not being disloyal by wanting quiet. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, Psalm 34:18, and nearness is not mediated by anybody's teaching, and the Holy Spirit is on that bench with somebody who has not had an unaccompanied thought in months.

The verse is a word from behind

There is a line in Isaiah 30 with an odd and specific direction in it.

And thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, This is the way, walk ye in it, when ye turn to the right hand, and when ye turn to the left.Isaiah 30:21

Behind thee. Not in front. Not from a platform, not from a page you are looking at. Scripture settles that in Isaiah 30:21, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it rather than these words.

Everything you consume comes from in front of you. You go toward it: you open it, you press play, you read it. It is all frontal, and it is all sought.

The word in this verse arrives from a direction you are not facing, which means it arrives without being fetched, and it arrives while you are walking rather than while you are studying. I am not putting my own idea over you; Scripture says it in Isaiah 30:21, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it live.

And look at when it comes: when ye turn to the right hand, and when ye turn to the left. At the point of movement. Not during instruction; during ordinary navigation.

That is the thing that has stopped happening to you. Not teaching, which you have in abundance. A word from behind you while you are getting on with something.

You are not deaf to that voice. Scripture says thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, This is the way, walk ye in it, Isaiah 30:21, and the hearing is described as something that happens to a person in motion rather than as something achieved by a listener, and the Holy Spirit is not competing for airtime with twelve good people.

Why good input crowds it out

This is the mechanism and it is not moral.

Anything that fills a channel prevents other things from using it. That is true of noise and it is equally true of excellent, edifying, doctrinally sound material.

Your channel for thinking about God is full. It is full of good things, which is why it has never registered as a problem, and it is exactly as full as it would be if it were full of rubbish.

And there is a second effect that is subtler and costs more. Good teaching gives you the correct response quickly. So when something happens, the right frame arrives within about two seconds, and it is a genuinely right frame, and it arrives before you have had time to be confused. That is not my opinion. Scripture stands behind it in Isaiah 30:21, and the Holy Spirit brings it near.

Confusion is not a defect in the spiritual life. It is often the front edge of hearing something, and you have been anaesthetizing it for a year with excellent material.

You are not going to hear anything in a full channel. Scripture says be still, and know that I am God, Psalm 46:10, and the stillness is named as the condition rather than as a spiritual attainment, and the Holy Spirit is not obliged to speak more loudly than twelve faithful people.

Seven days, one voice, nothing in its place

Here is the practical thing and it is smaller than you expect.

Choose one. Not the worst one; the loudest one in your head, the one whose phrasing turns up most often when you pray. That is the one, and you will know which as soon as you ask yourself.

Mute it for seven days.

Then, and this is the part people skip, do not fill the gap. Do not find a replacement, do not add a podcast, do not decide to read a book instead. The gap is the exercise.

You will feel the absence on about day two, and around day four something slightly uncomfortable happens, which is that you will have to have your own reaction to something before a better one arrives.

That discomfort is the space opening.

And do not tell anybody you are doing it, because announcing it turns it into a project, and a project is one more thing arriving from in front of you.

You are not required to fill every gap. Scripture says the Lord is in his holy temple: let all the earth keep silence before him, Habakkuk 2:20, and silence is described as the fitting response to who is present rather than as an absence to be corrected, and the Holy Spirit is at work in a channel that has been left partly empty.