For the decisive one who cannot make a decision and is furious about it.
Some of what God knows was deliberately withheld from you, and that withholding is a kindness rather than an oversight.
You're not a person who struggles with decisions. You decided about the house in a weekend. You've ended two jobs, started a business, and moved a family across a country. In every one of those you could name the reasoning inside about four minutes.
This one has been open for two years and three months.
You've done what you always do with a hard question, which is to write the whole of it out. There is a document. It has headings, and under the headings there are arguments on both sides set out properly, and you have read the whole thing perhaps thirty times.
It doesn't resolve. It has never once resolved. And the thing underneath the frustration, which you have not said to anybody, is a suspicion that a better believer would have been given the answer by now.
The unfinished part was left unfinished on purpose. The written Word that what is secret belongs to God alone, and the Spirit hasn't withheld anything you were meant to be holding.
The Document Is Not the Problem
Be fair to yourself, because the method isn't at fault here and you have started to doubt it.
The document is good. The arguments are set out honestly, both columns are strong, and you have not stacked it in either direction. Anybody reading it would say the same, and most people could not have produced it at all.
A document like that can only do one job. It can show you the shape of a decision where the information exists to make it. Where it doesn't exist, the document will show you that too, clearly, thirty times in a row.
That's what yours has been doing. It isn't failing. It's reporting, accurately, that the information required to close this is not in your possession.
Your document isn't failing, it's reporting that the information isn't yours. The written word divides what is revealed from what is kept, and the Spirit leads without handing over the whole map.
The Secret Things Belong
Here's the verse, and it draws a line that most people have never noticed is there.
The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law.Deuteronomy 29:29 (KJV)
Two categories, and both of them have an owner. The secret ones belong to God, and the revealed ones belong to you and to your children, given so that you can act on them.
Notice that neither category is unowned. There is no pile of unassigned material lying about waiting for somebody sufficiently diligent to claim it, which is the pile you have been searching for two years.
That's the whole division. There's no third category of matters that ought to have been revealed and have not been yet because you failed to press hard enough for them.
That third category is where a great deal of unnecessary suffering lives. A believer who assumes it exists will read every unanswered question as a personal failure of persistence, and will keep pressing at a door that was never a door.
Moses said that to a people standing at the edge of a land they knew almost nothing about, and it carries over to a man with a document and thirty readings of it.
What's hidden has an owner, and it isn't you. The written word assigns whatever is hidden to God, and the Spirit has given you what is yours to hold.
What You Can Do With the Revealed Part
Look at the second half of the verse, because it tells you what to do next and you've been ignoring it.
What is revealed is given, in the verse's own words, that we may do all the words of this law. The purpose of what you've been given is action. Not completeness, not a closed system, but obedience in the part that's already lit.
So take your document and mark what is actually clear in it. You know you are to keep praying, you know you are to stay honest with your wife about where you have got to, and you know what you owe two particular people this month.
None of those three has ever been in doubt. They have been sitting in the lit part of the board for two years while you waited for the dark part to come up, and they are the only part of this that was ever yours to act on.
None of that requires the unresolved part. You've been holding a whole set of obvious obligations in suspension while you wait for a framework to close, and the framework was never going to close.
Act on the lit part rather than waiting for the whole board. The written word hands over what is revealed so that it can be done, and the Spirit works in what is already clear.
I Am Not Telling You to Stop Thinking
Be careful, because a decisive man can hear this as an instruction to go passive and it is not one.
Keep the document. Keep reading, keep asking, keep taking counsel from people who will tell you the truth. If the answer comes, it may well come through exactly that work, and I'm not telling you to close the file.
Nor am I saying that every unanswered question is a secret thing. Some are simply questions you haven't worked hard enough on yet, and an honest man should check that first.
What I want off you is the verdict about yourself. Not the thinking. Not the wanting to know.
A Forced Answer Is a Guess in Better Clothes
Here's the turn, and it's about what you nearly did last month.
You came close to deciding. Not because it resolved, but because you'd had enough of it being open, and a decision made out of fatigue would at least have ended the document.
That would have been a guess. A guess with headings, two columns, and thirty readings behind it. That is the most convincing kind of guess there is, and it is more dangerous than an obvious one precisely because it looks like a conclusion.
You didn't do it. That took more strength than the decision would have, and you've been reading it as weakness for two years. Leaving a gap open honestly is harder than closing it dishonestly, and you've been doing the harder thing without crediting yourself for a single day of it.
Leaving the gap honestly is harder than closing it with a guess. The written word permits an unfinished map, and the Spirit has kept you from filling in what you cannot see.
Declare this over yourself
You are in Christ and Christ is in you, so what follows is not a claim made out of your own authority. It is agreement, said back to God in His own words, while the Holy Spirit carries it. How He orders the rest of it is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His own time.
Speak it the way a person agrees with a fact rather than the way a person argues for one. Christ is in you, the Spirit carries it, and God keeps the rest.
Speak it plainly and stop when it stops.
The unfinished part was left unfinished on purpose, and forcing a resolution would only be a guess in better clothes. It is written that what is secret belongs to the Lord our God, and that what is revealed belongs to me and to my children so that we can act on it. The Spirit has given me what is mine to hold and has kept back what is not. I am not a worse believer for an open question. I have left a gap honestly for two years and three months, which is harder than closing it with a guess, and I have never once credited myself for it. I give the outcome to God and act on the part that is lit.
Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.
This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.
Deuteronomy 29:29
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.
