The Question I Left Blank

There were six lines on the sheet and he filled in five of them.

It was that kind of evening. Eight people in somebody's front room, mugs on the floor, the good biscuits out because it was the first week of something new. And they handed round a sheet, printed at somebody's work by the look of it, and said not to worry, nobody was going to read them out.

He did the easy ones. Where you grew up. What you do. Something nobody here knows about you, which he answered honestly and which got a laugh later when he chose to say it.

And then the third line down.

Write one time you have known God to be good to you.

And he sat there with a biro in a room full of people he likes, and nothing came.

Not a wrong answer. Not a small answer he was embarrassed by. Nothing. The way a name you definitely know will not come at the exact moment you need it.

He is fifty-two. He has been in and around this his whole life. He could tell you what he believes about most things and he would not be bluffing.

And the third line stayed empty, and after a while he folded the sheet over so the person beside him would not see it, and put it in his coat pocket, and joined in with everything else, and was good company.

It is still in the coat. That was nine days ago.

And you know that exactly, because there is a question you have been asked in a friendly room that you could not answer.

The blank is not the truth about your life

Let us settle what governs this page. Nothing on it is being asked of you, there is no appeal at the bottom of it, and nobody here is going to write your answer for you.

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 the one 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 the thing about it that belongs to this page and to nothing else on this site.

God had already been faithful to those people for eight hundred years before He ever invited them to test Him, and He has already been faithful to you long before anybody handed you a sheet. The invitation in that verse arrives at the end of a very long book, addressed to people whose entire national story is a list of things He had already done. The test was never the beginning of His faithfulness. It was an invitation to notice something that was already there. It is the Holy Spirit, and not this page, who takes that and gets it into a coat pocket.

Now the blank, and it needs handling honestly rather than kindly.

The blank is not ingratitude. Nobody on this page is going to suggest that it is, and if anybody has ever implied that to you they were wrong and it was unkind. A man can be deeply grateful and still not be able to produce an item on demand in a room with a biro in his hand.

The blank is a memory problem, and Scripture treats it as one, without a hint of scolding.

Forgetting is the ordinary condition of a human being, and God has never once been surprised by it. It is written, bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits (Psalm 103:2), and you do not tell somebody not to forget a thing they are in no danger of forgetting. It is written, I will remember the deeds of the Lord, yes, I will remember Your wonders of old (Psalm 77:11), and that is a man in the middle of a very bad night deciding to go looking rather than waiting to feel something. The Spirit is the one who makes that read as permission rather than as a duty.

And look at how the whole business is treated by Jesus Himself, because this is the passage for a man with an empty third line.

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

They did not volunteer it. It had not been sitting at the front of their minds. He put the question and they went and looked and came back with an answer, and the answer was there the whole time, and He asked them because it is a thing people do not do on their own.

You are not being asked to feel grateful, you are being asked to go and look, and those are two completely different things. It is written that we should remember the whole way that the Lord your God has led you (Deuteronomy 8:2), and remembering in that sentence is an action with feet on it. His Spirit is the one who makes it a walk rather than a mood.

Now the guardrails, and they are the reason this page is shorter on advice than it might be.

Nobody here is going to fill in the line. If this article gave you three suggestions, you would have three of somebody else's items and a still empty page, and the whole point is that they have to be yours.

And nobody here is going to turn what you find into a pattern. When you have your three, they will not be evidence about what comes next, and they will not be a system, and they do not add up to a prediction about your year. They are three things that happened. That is all they need to be, and it is enough. The Holy Spirit is the One who takes a line spoken in one decade and makes it live in an ordinary room today.

God proved Himself long before anybody told you to test Him, and the finding out is looking rather than earning. It is written that He is the same yesterday and today and forever (Hebrews 13:8), which means the three things you will find are not a lucky streak. They are the same Person you are dealing with tonight. It is the Holy Spirit who does the carrying here, which is what separates a word being spoken over you from a phrase being repeated at you.