Preaching Breakthrough With One Closed File

She has one. Everybody who does this work has one, and almost nobody says so.

She calls breakthrough over that room every week and she is not performing. She has watched God do things she cannot explain, in that building, to people she knows by name. She would go to the wall for the truth of what she says.

And there is one situation in her own life that she closed the file on about two years ago.

Not with a speech. She did not renounce anything. She simply stopped bringing it, the way a person stops mentioning a subject at a table where it never goes well, and after a while the not mentioning became the settled state, and by now it would feel strange to raise it.

What she cannot work out is whether that disqualifies her. Not theologically. She knows the theology. She means whether a woman with one closed file has any business standing in front of a room telling them to keep theirs open.

If you carry one like that, come and sit down with me. Nothing about your calling is being weighed here.

One closed file is not a disqualification

Let us settle the question she is actually asking, because everything else is downstream of it.

There is nobody in Scripture with a clean sheet on this. Not one. The men and women God used most were carrying private closed files while publicly speaking for Him, and the book records both without treating the second as canceling the first.

Elijah calls fire down and then wants to die. Moses tells a nation what God will do and asks God to kill him. John the Baptist announces the Messiah and then sends a message from prison asking whether it was really Him.

Not one of them is described as disqualified by it.

You are not disqualified. Nothing about a private closed file has ever revoked what God has put in your hands, and no week has ever changed His mind about it. I am not saying it to reassure you. The written word says the gifts and calling of God are without repentance (Romans 11:29), which means He does not change His mind about what He has given, and the Holy Spirit is what carries it into a woman stacking chairs.

The complaint God actually answers

Here is what steadied me, and it is not a way of reopening your file.

There is a moment in Isaiah where God quotes His own people back to themselves, and what He quotes is a complaint about being overlooked.

Why sayest thou, O Jacob, and speakest, O Israel, My way is hid from the LORD, and my judgment is passed over from my God?Isaiah 40:27

My way is hid from the Lord. That is the sentence in a closed file, said out loud by a whole people, and God repeats it back rather than pretending He has not heard it.

And read what He does next. He does not scold them for saying it. He goes straight into the greatest passage about His own strength in the book, and ends with the ones who wait on Him renewing their strength, and He never once returns to the complaint to correct it.

You have said something God has already quoted, and the Word answers it with His own character rather than with a rebuke. That is written down as a direct quotation, and the Holy Spirit is the one that makes it register in a woman who has been asking whether she still belongs at the front.

Nothing is being predicted about your situation

Something has to be said plainly, because this is where a page usually turns into a promise.

I do not know what happens with the thing you closed. Nobody does. This article will not tell you it is about to move, or that the two years are nearly up, because I have not been given that and an invented promise would cost you more than the closed file has.

You have God's disposition toward you settled, and nothing about an outcome is being announced over your life. Scripture says the Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering (2 Peter 3:9), which speaks about His character and never once about a schedule, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has carried two years of a closed file exactly as He carried the years when it was open.

And if this has cost more than anybody in that building knows, if sleep has gone, if the evenings have started to frighten, please tell 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.