I Know The Doctrine And Have Never Felt It

She has taught this exact subject. Twice, to a room, from notes she made herself.

Justification. Adoption. The believer's standing in Christ, which does not fluctuate with performance. She had the verses in order, she anticipated the objections, and a woman came up afterward in tears and said it had changed something for her, and that was real and she is glad about it.

And she drove home and felt exactly nothing, the way she always does.

That is the thing she has never said to anybody: she is fluent in a doctrine she has never once experienced. She is not doubting it. She would defend it under pressure. But somewhere she has come to a private conclusion, which is that this is a thing that works for other people and that she is describing a country she has read about and never visited.

Nine years of teaching it. Not once felt.

If you can explain something you have never experienced, come and sit at this table. Nothing about your teaching is being questioned here.

Feeling was never how it was established

Let us look at the standard being applied, because that is where the trouble is.

The doctrine is being tested against experience, and it is failing, and the conclusion drawn is that it must not be true of this particular person. But watch the move: experience has been quietly appointed as the higher court. A thing established by God in Christ is being submitted for confirmation to how a woman felt in a car.

Nothing in Scripture ever proposes that arrangement. The standing is stated as a fact about a legal and relational position, and it is never once offered as a sensation to be verified.

You are not exempt from what you teach. Nothing about the absence of a feeling has ever suspended a standing that God established in Christ. I am not saying it to reassure you. The written word says he hath made us accepted in the beloved (Ephesians 1:6), where the acceptance is a completed act with a location and no experiential condition attached, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that hold in a woman driving home from a room she just helped.

Because ye are sons, not so that you feel like one

Here is what changed this for me, and it is not an instruction to feel something.

Paul writes about the Spirit being sent, and the order of the sentence is the whole point, and almost everybody reads it the wrong way round.

And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father.Galatians 4:6

Because ye are sons. The sonship comes first and the Spirit is sent on the strength of it. The crying in the heart is downstream of a status already established, and not the evidence that establishes it.

Read that on a bad drive home. Your position was not conferred because something moved in you. Something moves in you because your position was conferred, and the traffic runs in that direction only.

You are a son or a daughter first, and whatever is felt afterward is a consequence rather than a qualification. That is written into the order of the sentence itself, and the Holy Spirit is what drives it home in a woman who has taught this twice and never felt it once.

Do not go looking for the feeling now

Something has to be said before Sunday, because a woman with notes will now go and try to have the experience, and will grade the attempt.

That turns the whole thing into a new project with a new pass mark. The feeling is not owed and it cannot be produced, and its absence has not been an indictment for nine years and it is not one tonight.

You have the standing without the sensation, and it is not less yours for being unfelt. Scripture says the just shall live by faith (Romans 1:17), where faith is the settled reliance on what God has said rather than a report on internal weather, and the Holy Spirit, not the wording, is the one who has been holding a woman up on that for nine years while she thought she was outside it.

And if this has cost more than anybody at this table knows, if sleep has gone, if the evenings have started to frighten, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.