Three Confirmations And Waiting For A Fourth

She has them written down, all three, in the same notebook, with the dates.

The first one she could have argued with, and she did, honestly, for a couple of weeks. It was the kind of thing that could have been coincidence if you were determined, and she was somewhat determined.

The second one arrived about four months later and could not be argued with. It came through a person who did not know her situation, could not have known it, and used a specific word she had used in prayer, and she went and sat in her car afterward for eleven minutes.

The third one was in a passage of Scripture she was not looking in, on a morning she was not looking for anything, and it did the thing where a sentence stands up off the page.

Three. Dated. In the notebook.

And she has not moved.

If you asked her why, she would say she is waiting to be sure. And if you asked her what would make her sure, she would tell you about a fourth one, and she would describe roughly what it would need to look like, and she would notice while she was describing it that she is describing something bigger than the first three, which were not small.

Here is what she has not looked at directly.

The second one was four months after the first, and the third one was fourteen months after the second, and it has been ten months since the third. So the fourth would need to be somewhere in front of her, and the pattern of the gaps is not encouraging, and in the meantime she is a woman with three confirmations doing nothing, which from the outside looks exactly like a woman with none.

She is not faithless. She is not playing games with God. She writes things down and dates them because she takes this seriously enough to keep records.

She has just quietly made certainty the entry requirement, and certainty is not on offer, and she is going to be at this a long time if nobody says so.

And you have something you have had confirmed. Once, twice, maybe three times. And you have been asking for the next one.

He moved on it may be, and the account never corrects him

There is a young man in 1 Samuel who does one of the most remarkable things in the Old Testament, and the way he says it is the part worth staring at.

The army is paralyzed. Six hundred men, hiding, badly equipped, with the enemy garrison on the ridge above them. And Jonathan says this to his armor bearer.

Come, let us go over to the garrison of these uncircumcised. It may be that the Lord will work for us, for nothing can hinder the Lord from saving by many or by few.1 Samuel 14:6

It may be.

Not: the Lord has told me. Not: I have a word about this. He does not claim a promise he has not been given, and this is a man of real integrity, which is exactly why he says it that carefully.

What he does have is a settled conviction about God's character, which is the second half of the sentence: nothing can hinder the Lord from saving by many or by few. He is certain about who God is. He is explicitly uncertain about what God will do this afternoon.

And he goes.

You have more than he had, and he went with an it may be, and what you are holding is three dated things in a notebook. It is written that nothing can hinder the Lord from saving by many or by few (1 Samuel 14:6), and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a young man's honest uncertainty and makes it, of all things, the model of how to move.

Now here is the part that has to be said clearly, because it is the whole diagnosis.

You are not short of confirmation. You are short of courage, and those are two entirely different needs, and they cannot be met by the same thing.

Another sign cannot supply courage. It never has. That is why the third one did not do what the second one did not do, and it is why a fourth would be looked at, written down, dated, and then followed by a question about a fifth.

You are not being asked to become certain, and certainty was never the door, and it has not been the door for anybody in Scripture. Scripture calls faith the conviction of things not seen (Hebrews 11:1), which means the not seeing is inside the definition rather than a defect in it, and it is His Spirit rather than an accumulation of evidence who makes a person able to act.

And this deserves saying to a woman who keeps records: the record keeping is not the problem.

Writing them down and dating them is good. Gideon asked for a sign twice and God gave both, and God is not offended by a person who wants to be sure they have heard right. There is nothing shameful in your notebook.

You are not being rebuked for wanting to be sure, and the three entries in that notebook are a good woman's carefulness rather than a coward's stalling. It is written that the Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love (Psalm 145:8), and it is the Holy Spirit who gave all three of those confirmations to a woman who kept asking, which tells you exactly how He feels about her asking.

But at some point the asking stops being about hearing and starts being about waiting, and only you know where that line was, and you crossed it a while ago.

You have permission to move without the fourth one, and moving without it is not presumption, because presumption is going without a word and you have three. Scripture says His sheep hear His voice and follow (John 10:27), and the following is the second half of that sentence, and it is His Spirit who has been standing in the ten months since the third one waiting with you rather than withholding from you.