He could give you the definition and he has, more than once, to people who asked him about it kindly and did not know what they were asking.
He knows what the word means. He knows what it cost and who signed it and where the copy is kept, and he has read it, and there is a date on it in his own life that he can produce.
He is thirty nine.
And there is a distance in him between the fact and the chest, and the distance has never once closed.
It is not doubt. He wants that said in the first paragraph, because everybody who has ever tried to help has heard doubt and gone after it, and it has never been doubt. If you asked him whether he belongs, he would say yes without hesitating, and he would not be performing.
It is that knowing it and feeling it are two different rooms and he has only ever been in one of them.
Here is where it shows, and it is small, and it is the only place he has ever noticed it.
At his aunt's house, at the big table, with about nineteen people, somebody says something like: this is our family, all of us, everybody here. And they mean it and they mean him and there is not a person at that table who would exclude him from anything.
And he agrees. And nothing happens in him.
Everybody else has some small internal event at a sentence like that. He can see it in their faces. He has watched for it, which he is not proud of.
He gets nothing. He gets the fact, restated, which he already had.
And in February he said something out loud, in the car, on the way home, in the voice a man uses when he has been thinking for years and finally puts it in words: I know all of it and none of it has ever got in.
You know that distance. Yours may be about something else entirely. But you know what it is to hold a fact about yourself with total confidence and to have never once felt it, and to have stopped expecting to.
A fact about origin, not a feeling to produce
Let me name the pit before we go to the verse, because if this becomes an instruction to feel something it will fail tonight and you will file the whole article.
You are holding a fact about origin, and you were never left a share of it to finish. John 1:13 says nothing about how anybody felt at the time or afterward, and it is the Holy Spirit who did the whole of it.
The pit is not unbelief and it is not ingratitude. The pit is that you have been treating a feeling as the completion of a fact, and the fact does not require completing, and so a man who has everything settled has been carrying it as though something were still outstanding.
Here is the verse.
Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.John 1:13
Read what kind of statement that is.
It is not a statement about anybody's experience. There is nothing in it about how the born felt at the time or afterward. It is a statement about origin: where a person came from, by what means, and by whose action.
And origin is the least feeling dependent fact in the world. A man does not feel where he came from. He is told, and it is true, and it goes on being true in every hour of his life including the hours when he is thinking about something else entirely.
Take that in the car on the way home, and know it is not my reassurance, it is what is written. What you know is a fact about where you came from, and a fact about origin does not wait on a feeling to be finished. John 1:13 rules out every human mechanism and puts the whole of it on God, and it is the Holy Spirit who does that birthing, and He did not leave a portion of it for your chest to complete.
And here I draw the line this site always draws, in the same breath. God is neither male nor female. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, and He is not a woman either; He is spirit. The birth language in John is one of the ways Scripture describes Him with a mother's picture beside a father's, and both are His own, and it does not make the Spirit a woman and it does not make God a goddess.
I will not pronounce on where you stand, because that is not mine to do from a page, and you would be right to distrust anybody who tried. I am telling you what the verse says about the kind of thing this is.
A fact that does not feel like anything is still a fact.
You are holding a fact about origin, and you were not left a portion of it to complete. John 1:13 is a statement about where a person came from and by whose action, and it says nothing about how anybody felt, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the birthing, and He did not leave a share of it for a man's chest.
That is not a consolation prize and it is not resignation. It is the actual category, and getting the category right takes an enormous weight off a man who has been trying to complete something that was never incomplete.
So stop trying to close the distance, which is what you have been doing quietly at that table for years, and say the fact instead.
Out loud, plainly, in the flat voice you would use for anything you simply know.
You were born of God, and that is where you came from, and it is not waiting on your chest to ratify it. That is John 1:13 read as the statement about origin that it is, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the work, and He may give you the feeling one day or He may not, and the fact does not move either way.
And about that table. Nineteen people, and somebody says this is our family, everybody here.
You are holding a fact about origin and not an unfinished feeling, and you were never left a portion of it to close. John 1:13 says born not of the will of man but of God, which is a statement about where a person came from, and it is the Holy Spirit who did the whole of it.
Nothing happening in you when they say it is not evidence that you are not in it. It is evidence that you do not feel your origins, which is true of every human being who has ever lived and which nobody else at that table has ever had cause to notice about themselves.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, sitting. You are in Christ, and the authority to speak over a distance you have never been able to close is delegated to you in Him; it does not depend on your feeling anything tonight. These stand on what is written in John and are carried by the Holy Spirit, not by anything happening in your chest. Whether the feeling ever comes, and when, is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His own timing.
- Distance between what I know and what I feel, you do not decide what is true, and I say so in the name of Jesus. John 1:13 says born not of the will of man but of God, and that is a statement about where a person came from.
- Habit of looking inside at that table to see whether anything moved, you have made this sore for years and you do not get another February. It is written that no human mechanism is in that verse anywhere, and His Spirit is the one who did the birthing, and He left no part of it for my chest to finish.
- Lord, You are neither male nor female, and You give birth by Your Spirit. I say out loud what I know about where I came from, in a flat voice, and I am not checking afterward to see whether anything moved.
John 1:13
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