You Cannot Make Yourself Want It

You could teach this. That is what makes it so strange from the inside.

You know the passages. You know the arguments and the counter-arguments and where the strong version overreaches and where the weak version goes thin. Somebody asked you a hard question about it at a table two years ago and you gave an answer that a man came back to you about six weeks later, still thinking about it.

You believe it. Not in a nominal way. If you were pushed on it, on a bad day, under pressure, you would still say yes.

And you cannot want it.

Seven years, near enough. You can trace it back to a period rather than a moment, which is worse in some ways, because a moment can be dealt with and a period cannot.

There is no rebellion in you. That is the part that would be almost easier. If you were fighting God about something there would be a live wire somewhere and you could take hold of it.

There is nothing to take hold of. The conviction is entirely intact and the appetite is simply not there, the way a sense goes and everything else about the meal is the same.

And what you have concluded, quietly, over seven years, is that the missing appetite is the real report and the conviction is just furniture.

The psalm records the answer as a quotation

There is a half verse in Psalm 27 that has an unusual structure, and the structure is the whole gift for a man in your position.

When thou saidst, Seek ye my face; my heart said unto thee, Thy face, Lord, will I seek.Psalm 27:8

Read the order of the speech.

God speaks first. Seek ye my face. And then the psalmist reports what happened next, and he does not report it as a decision. He reports it as a thing his heart said back.

My heart said unto thee.

He is describing the appetite arriving as an answer rather than as an achievement, and he is describing it as caused by a prior word from God, which means the wanting in that verse is a response and not a work.

So take this now, seven years in. You have been trying to generate something the written word describes as an answer. Scripture puts God's call first and the heart's reply second, and the Holy Spirit is the one who wakes an appetite, and there is no verse anywhere that asks a man to manufacture one.

And notice what the psalmist is not doing. He is not congratulating himself on the reply, and he is not being asked for it in advance.

The missing appetite is not the true report

Now let me deal with the conclusion you have drawn, because I think it is wrong and I think it has been quietly costing you for years.

You have decided that the wanting is the honest instrument and the believing is the performance.

That is not how a person works, and it is not how the book treats it either. In the psalms an appetite goes and comes back and goes again, sometimes across a single psalm, and the man writing is the same man throughout, and nobody in that book concludes that the dry stretch was the accurate one and the wet stretch was self-deception.

A missing appetite is a symptom and it can have half a dozen causes, and most of them are boring and physical and situational. Seven years is long enough for it to have started with something that has nothing to do with God at all, and to have simply stayed.

And here is the thing about a period rather than a moment. A period usually means something was slowly emptied, and a person can be emptied by work or grief or a stretch of years where nothing came in.

What has gone is not your faith. His word describes the wanting as a reply to a prior call, and the Holy Spirit is the one who issues that call, and a man with intact conviction and no appetite is describing a tiredness and not a verdict.

What was actually promised in the plain hall

In 1895 a man named Phineas Bresee opened a hall near the middle of Los Angeles and would not let anybody rent a seat, and this doctrine is what that room was built to preach.

And it was preached there as a gift, not as an achievement, which is the whole thing for a man like you.

A gift can be received by somebody who has nothing to bring, including somebody who cannot bring an appetite. That is the entire logic of the free seat: the person who arrives with the least is the one the room was arranged for.

If wanting it were the price, that hall would have been empty, because people came in off those streets exhausted and numb and were given something they had not managed to want first.

Nothing in this requires you to arrive hungry.

The written word puts the call before the reply, and the Holy Spirit is the one who calls, and the room this all comes from was built for people who could not manufacture anything.