I Read About Intimacy Instead

There are eleven of them. You have not counted for a while and it may be more.

Books about hearing His voice, about the secret place, about the difference between working for Him and being with Him. Two of them are genuinely good and you would recommend them to somebody. One you did not finish. One you have read three times and it does something to you every time, in chapter nine, at the same paragraph.

That paragraph is the reason you keep going back. Something happens in your chest when you read it, and it feels like the thing the book is describing, and it lasts about an hour.

And here is what you have known for about a year and have never said.

Reading about it does something. It is not the thing.

You have been having an experience of proximity by proxy, eleven books' worth, and the whole time the thing itself has been available, and you have preferred the book.

That is not because you are lazy. It is because chapter nine is reliable and the other thing is not, and you know exactly what you will get from chapter nine and you have no idea what you will get from four minutes in a quiet room.

What this page will not do

I am not going to tell you the books were a mistake. Two of them are good, one of them has genuinely helped you, and the people who sneer at Christian books have usually not been helped by anything in particular.

I am not going to tell you the feeling in chapter nine is fake. It is not. Something true is being described well, and something in you responds to it, and that response is not manufactured.

And I am not going to give you a twelfth. That is the joke this whole page is built to avoid.

What I am going to name is a substitution, which is not a sin and is very hard to see from inside.

You are not far from Him because you have been reading. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, Psalm 34:18, and nearness is not adjusted by a shelf, and the Holy Spirit is in that front room with a woman and eleven books.

The verse is somebody outside a door

There is a line in Revelation 3 that is on a great many walls and is much stranger than the paintings make it.

Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and sup with him, and he with me.Revelation 3:20

Notice who is outside.

That letter is written to a church. Not to unbelievers, not to people who have never heard of Him. To a congregation of people who are doing all of it, and He describes Himself as standing outside their door.

That is not condemnation and He does not shame them for it. He knocks.

And look at what He proposes when the door opens. Not a lecture. Not a curriculum. Sup with him, and he with me. A meal, which is the least instructional thing two people can do together, and which takes time and produces nothing.

So the offer is not information about closeness. It is an evening.

You have eleven descriptions of the meal on a shelf, and the man is on the step.

You are not being kept outside anything. Scripture says behold, I stand at the door, and knock, Revelation 3:20, and the standing outside is His position rather than yours and the initiative in it is entirely His, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a knock audible to somebody who has been reading about knocking.

Why the book is easier

Say it plainly, because it is the whole mechanism.

A book delivers. You open it at chapter nine and the paragraph does what it does, every time, within about ninety seconds. It is reliable, it is repeatable, and you are in control of when it happens. This rests on Scripture in Revelation 3:20, and on the Holy Spirit who makes what is written a living thing.

Four minutes in a quiet room delivers nothing on demand. Some days it is dull. Some days something comes up that you were not looking for. You cannot schedule it, you cannot repeat it, and you have no idea in advance what it will be like. Scripture already said it in Revelation 3:20, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the work, not the sentence.

Anybody would choose the book. That is not a spiritual defect; it is a preference for the reliable over the uncontrolled, and every human being has it about everything.

But the reliable one is a description of a meal, and it does not feed anybody.

You are not lacking desire for the real thing. Scripture says as the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God, Psalm 42:1, and the panting is the very thing that has kept you buying books, and the Holy Spirit is not the one who taught you to prefer the safer version.

The evening you have not had

Here is what is actually on offer and it is smaller and more ordinary than eleven books have led you to expect.

Not an experience. Not chapter nine in real life. An evening, in which you are with somebody and nothing much is achieved. None of that is mine to declare on my own. Scripture said it first in Revelation 3:20, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings it the distance.

That is what supping with somebody is. It is not efficient. It has silences in it. Nobody comes away with notes.

And that is precisely why it has been avoided, because you are a person who likes to come away with something, and an evening that produces nothing feels like an evening wasted. Scripture put that in writing long before you read it here, in Revelation 3:20, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes written words land.

Four minutes tonight will produce nothing you can point at. That is not the exercise failing. That is what being with somebody is like, and it is what the eleven books have all been trying, in their different ways, to describe.

You are not required to come away with anything. Scripture says one thing have I desired of the Lord... to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to enquire in his temple, Psalm 27:4, and beholding produces no output at all, and the Holy Spirit is not assessing whether an evening was productive.