How To Tell The Two Apart

Neil has had the feeling five times, and three of them were right, and he cannot tell you what was different about the three.

That is the actual problem and he would put it exactly that way. He is not a man who cannot make decisions. He runs things. He is decisive in every other area of his life and people bring him difficult calls precisely because he does not flounder.

But he has had, five times in his adult life, a specific interior event. It arrives at about the same strength each time. It is not an emotion exactly; it is closer to a conviction with a direction on it, and it always comes with a sense that something is finished here and something is beginning elsewhere.

Three times he acted on it and it was right, in the way you can only see afterwards.

Twice he acted on it and it was not, and one of those cost his family a year they did not need to spend.

And here is the thing he said in a garden, over a wall, to a neighbor who had asked him a casual question and got a much longer answer than he expected. He said: I have had it five times and I still could not tell you today which kind this is.

Which is worse than not knowing, in a way. Not knowing would be humble. This is five data points and no pattern.

Now, most of what gets said about this is useless, and I want to name that before I say anything else, because you have almost certainly been handed the useless version and it did not work and you may have concluded the fault was in you.

The useless version is: you will know. Peace, they say. You will have a peace about it.

Neil had peace about both the wrong ones. He would tell you that plainly. He had more peace about one of the wrong ones than about the best decision he ever made, which he went into with his stomach in knots and did anyway.

So peace is not the tell. It never was, and a great many people have been left standing in a hallway waiting for a feeling to arrive that was never a reliable signal.

You have your own version of this. Something is moving in you, and you have felt it before, and you genuinely do not know which kind it is.

Nobody is going to hand you certainty tonight. But there are two places where the difference actually shows, and neither one of them is a feeling.

The verse has two senders in one sentence

There is a line in Acts that has always looked to me like a small contradiction until you sit with it.

So they, being sent forth by the Holy Ghost, departed unto Seleucia; and from thence they sailed to Cyprus.Acts 13:4

Read the sentence before it in that chapter and the room is doing the sending. They fasted, prayed, laid hands on them, and sent them away. Then this verse says they were sent forth by the Holy Ghost.

Both are true and the text does not think it needs to reconcile them.

That is worth a moment, because it tells you what a sending is made of. It is not one event. It is a thing God does that also happens in public, in a room, with hands and dates and people who can be asked about it afterwards, and neither half is the whole.

And now hear what is already settled over you before we go near a diagnostic. You are not being tested on this. That is not my softening: the written word says God gives wisdom to those who ask, liberally and without upbraiding, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a man who has got it wrong twice and is frightened of a third.

And the two wrong ones did not disqualify you. The word says the steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord, and then says that though he fall he shall not be utterly cast down, which means the falling was written into the sentence about the ordering, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a place to stand rather than a comfort somebody offered you.

The first place the difference shows

Restlessness and sending are indistinguishable at the start. I want to be plain about that because most teaching on this pretends otherwise and leaves people feeling stupid.

They both arrive with conviction. They both feel like clarity. Both of them make the current situation look suddenly thin, and both produce a sentence in your head that begins I think this season is finishing.

The difference shows up at the cost.

Restlessness leaves when the thing gets boring, and it always has a reason that sounds like discernment. That is the tell, and it is not a nice one: it does not present as quitting, it presents as fresh guidance, arriving conveniently at the exact point where the work stopped being interesting.

A sending stays through the boring part. Not because the person is more disciplined, but because the going was never about how it felt, so a change in how it feels does not touch it.

And you already have what you need to see this. Not once you are wiser: the word says the Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God, and He has been given to you, which means the discernment you have been waiting to acquire is not a competence you are behind on. It is a Person you already have and have been consulting without noticing.

The second place, and it is the more useful one

Here is the other tell, and this is the one that would have saved Neil a year.

Ask what happens after it works.

Restlessness needs the next thing almost immediately. It arrives at the destination and finds, within months, that the horizon has moved, and the same interior event fires again, and it is always about somewhere else.

A sending can sit still in what it started. It can stay in a good thing for eleven years without the feeling coming back, because it was never an appetite.

Which means, and this is the part that will annoy you and is also the mercy in it, that the clearest evidence about the five times is not available in advance. It is available afterwards. Neil can, right now, tell you which of his five were sendings, and the way he can tell is not what they felt like going in. It is what happened in year three of each one.

That is not a satisfying answer and I am not going to dress it up as one.

But you are not walking blind. The word says His sheep hear His voice, and the hearing is put in the present tense and given to ordinary sheep rather than to specialists, and the Spirit is the one who makes that true in a man who has misheard twice, because a sheep that mishears is still a sheep and the Shepherd knows it.

And nobody is asking you to be certain before you obey. Nothing in Scripture makes certainty the condition of a step, and the Spirit of God has never once withheld Himself from a person who moved carefully, took counsel, and could still have been wrong.