Four Good Men, Four Answers

You asked carefully. That is what makes this so frustrating.

You did not go round the houses collecting opinions until you found one you liked. You picked four people deliberately: one who knows the situation, one who knows you, one who has done something similar, and one who would tell you the unwelcome thing.

All four are wiser than you about something. None of them was guessing.

And you got four answers.

Not four shades of one answer. Two of them are directly opposed. One of them raised a consideration nobody else mentioned and which you cannot now unthink. The fourth said something that sounded like agreement with the first until you turned it over on the way home and found it was not.

So you are worse off than you were three weeks ago, and you have started to wonder whether you asked badly, or explained it badly, or picked wrongly.

You did not. Four thoughtful people looking at one situation from four positions will produce four answers, every time, and the fact that they disagree is not a failure of the process. It is the process working.

The mistake was not in the asking. It was in what you expected the asking to do.

What this page will not do

I am not going to tell you which of them was right. I do not know your situation and I have not met any of them.

I am not going to tell you counsel is worthless. Proverbs is emphatic that it is not, and the four of them have between them raised things you would never have seen, and you are better informed than you were. That is Scripture's sentence and not mine, John 10:27, and it is the Holy Spirit and not this page who makes it true where you are.

And I am not going to name a category of voice to distrust. This whole site refuses that. Nobody here is going to hand you a target.

What I am going to do is separate two things that have been fused in your head for three weeks: gathering counsel, and deciding.

You are not failing at discernment because good people disagreed. Scripture says if any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not, James 1:5, and the giving is direct rather than routed through a consensus, and the Holy Spirit is in that courtyard with somebody holding four answers.

The verse is about recognition, not information

There is a line in John 10 that is short and does something people rarely notice.

My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.John 10:27

Hear my voice. Not receive my instruction, not understand my reasoning. Hear the voice, which is a recognition rather than a comprehension.

That is a different faculty from the one you have been using for three weeks. Scripture stands under that in John 10:27, and the Holy Spirit does the part no sentence can do.

You have been evaluating content: weighing four sets of reasons against each other, looking for the argument that outweighs the others. That is a good faculty and it is the right one for a great many things. It is written, in John 10:27, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes what is written off a page and into a life.

Recognition is not that. It is what happens when you know your own mother's voice on the phone before she has said a word you could analyze. It is not derived from the content; it works on something else entirely.

And notice what the verse assumes. It is stated as ordinary. Not an advanced gift, not something for particular people: sheep hear the shepherd, and that is simply what sheep do.

You are not without the faculty this requires. Scripture says my sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me, John 10:27, and the hearing is described as a property of belonging rather than as a skill to be acquired, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes recognition possible in somebody who has been weighing arguments for three weeks.

What counsel is for

Here is the distinction that will free you, and it takes nothing from any of the four.

Counsel is for seeing. It shows you the considerations, the costs you had not priced, the thing the man who has done it before knows about the second year. Every one of the four has genuinely given you sight.

Counsel is not for deciding. It cannot be, because none of the four has to live in the decision, and none of them has the thing that decides, which is not information at all.

You have been treating them as a panel, waiting for a verdict, and a panel that splits two-one-one gives you no verdict, so you have been standing still. Scripture settles that in John 10:27, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it rather than these words.

They were never a panel. They were four people lending you their eyes.

You now see more than you did. That is what you asked for and you got it. What you did not get, because it was never on offer, is somebody else to decide.

You are not going to be handed a verdict by anybody. Scripture says every man shall bear his own burden, Galatians 6:5, and it stands in the same chapter as bearing one another's, which means help is real and transfer is not, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting for four men to agree before He guides one.

Where the recognition happens

Not in the comparison. That is why three weeks of comparing has produced nothing.

It happens in the quiet, alone, after the material is in and the weighing has been done, when you stop arguing with yourself and ask one question rather than four.

Not which of them is right. That question is unanswerable from where you sit and you have proved it for three weeks. I am not putting my own idea over you; Scripture says it in John 10:27, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it live.

Ask instead: Lord, what are You saying to me about this?

Then stop. Do not answer it on His behalf, which is the thing your mind will do within about six seconds, and which is how the last three weeks have gone.

You may get nothing tonight. That is common and it is not a refusal. What tends to happen is that something settles over some days, quietly, and it is usually not dramatic, and very often it looks like one of the four answers becoming obviously yours in a way it was not when he said it.

You are not required to work it out by adjudication. Scripture says thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, This is the way, walk ye in it, Isaiah 30:21, and the word arrives from behind rather than from a debate in front, and the Holy Spirit is the one who supplies a direction that no comparison produced.