I Will Not Claim What I Cannot Defend

She has a rule and she has had it since she was about twenty-five, and it has served her extremely well in every part of her life except this one.

The rule is: do not say a thing you could not defend.

It is why people trust her. It is why she is the one they send in when something has to be handled honestly. She has never in her adult life told an exaggeration, and she notices other people's, and she has been known to go quiet in a room where a story is getting better as it goes.

And it means she cannot make the list.

She was asked, gently, at a thing in the spring, to name something God had done for her, and she gave an answer that was true and completely bloodless, and the woman asking looked slightly puzzled, and she has thought about it ever since.

Because here is her actual position, and she can state it precisely, which is not always a help.

She could say that a certain thing turned out well. She could not prove it was God. It might have been the person who made the phone call. It might have been the weather. It might have been the ordinary way things sometimes go, and if she said in a room full of people that God did it, and somebody with a sharper mind than hers asked her how she knew, she would not have an answer, and she is not willing to be a woman who says things she cannot stand behind.

So she says nothing.

And she believes, genuinely, that God has been in her life. She would not be able to defend that either. It is just that she believes it.

And you know that exactly, because there is something you are fairly sure of and will not say out loud because you could not prove it.

Whose court is this list for

Let us settle what governs this whole page. Nothing on it is being asked of you, there is no appeal at the bottom, and nobody here is going to make a claim on your behalf.

You are looking at an invitation, and the One being tested inside it is God. Follow the verb in the famous sentence and it lands on Him. He is under examination. He is the one who offered to be found out. It is written, put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts (Malachi 3:10), and the Holy Spirit is the One who lets a reader hear that verb land where it actually lands.

Here it is, in its own room:

Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. And thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need.Malachi 3:10

Said to a nation, in one decade, about one building, where the store room had emptied and the families who worked there had gone home hungry. It is a sentence about people eating, and it was never a lever.

And here is what belongs to this page, and it is worth taking your rule seriously rather than talking you out of it.

Your rule is a good rule. This whole site exists because of people who did not have one. The room you went quiet in was right to make you go quiet, and nothing on this page is going to ask you to loosen up, exaggerate, or start saying warm things you cannot stand behind.

The question is not whether the rule is good. The question is which court you have been applying it in. The Holy Spirit is the One who makes that true in a person rather than merely accurate on a page.

The list you have been refusing to write is not testimony in front of anybody, and nobody is ever going to cross examine it. The instruction in this category is three things, written down, on a piece of paper, that nobody else will read. There is no audience. There is no claim being made to a room. A private note is not a public assertion, and the standard of proof for a sentence nobody hears is not the standard you have rightly applied to everything else in your life. It is the Holy Spirit, not anybody writing, who takes what is written and makes it land in the room you are actually in.

Now the thing your precise mind will actually want, which is the text.

God's own way of doing this is naming rather than proving, and He has never once asked anybody to establish causation. After a hard day at Mizpah, a man set up a stone and called it Ebenezer and said, till now the Lord has helped us (1 Samuel 7:12). He did not argue it. He did not rule out the alternatives. He named a place and stated where he had got to. And after the river, twelve stones were stacked so that a question could be answered later (Joshua 4:6), and the answer prescribed is a plain account of what happened, not a defense of it.

And notice something honest about the psalms, since you are the kind of reader who checks.

Scripture's own remembering is a list rather than an argument, and God preserved it in that form. Psalm 136 is twenty-six lines of things that happened with the same phrase after each one, and not one line of it is a proof. Psalm 77 is a man in a bad night deciding to remember, and what he produces is a list rather than a case. His Spirit is the one who makes that permission rather than a technicality, and it is the answer to the only real objection you have.

And here is the passage for a woman who will not claim what she cannot defend.

He asked them. When I sent you out with no purse, He said, did you lack anything? And they said, nothing (Luke 22:35).

That is not a claim about mechanism. Nobody in that room asserted how it had worked. He asked a factual question about a period of time and they gave a factual answer, and the answer was one word, and it is one of the most honest sentences in the Gospels.

You are not being asked to attribute, you are being asked to notice, and those are two different operations. It is written that you shall remember the whole way the Lord your God has led you (Deuteronomy 8:2). Remembering is not arguing. His Spirit is what makes that a distinction you can actually rest in.

Now the guardrails, and you will approve of them.

Nobody here is going to name your three. Somebody else's items on your page would be exactly the kind of borrowed claim you have spent your life refusing.

And nobody is going to turn them into a pattern, because a pattern would be a prediction and a prediction would be a claim, and you would be right to reject it. Three things that happened. No inference drawn. That is enough.

God proved Himself to you long before anybody asked you to say so, and the finding out is looking rather than establishing. It is written that He is the same yesterday and today and forever (Hebrews 13:8), which is a statement about His character rather than about your evidence, and it does not need you to underwrite it.