I Know All of It and Feel None of It

He could take a group through it. He has, several times.

He knows the difference between the words for love in the Greek and he does not make a great deal of that, because he also knows it is often overdone. He knows Romans 8 by heart, or near enough. He could give you three reasons why the resurrection accounts vary and why the variation is evidence rather than a problem.

And if you asked him when he last felt loved by God, he would go quiet.

Not because he does not know the answer. Because he does, and it is a long time, and saying a number out loud makes it a thing.

He is not in a crisis. He has not lost his faith; he would tell you, correctly, that faith is not a feeling and that the people who tie it to feeling are heading for trouble. He is right about that. He keeps going, he keeps reading, he keeps up.

And there is a distance in him, and it is not a doubt.

It is roughly the distance between his head and his chest. All the material is on one side of it, complete, accurate, well organized. None of it has come across.

Occasionally somebody in the group says something artless about how they felt God's love that week, and he says something generous, and he means it, and he drives home in silence.

He has done everything he knows to do about it. He has read the books about dryness. He has increased his input and reduced his input. He has been, twice, to a conference where something was clearly happening to other people.

That is you, and Paul prayed for exactly this gap, which means it is not a defect in you.

Four things

I am not going to tell you to feel something. That is the whole of the problem and instructing it has never once produced it.

I am not going to tell you that your knowledge is the problem. There is a strain of Christianity that treats theology as an obstacle to intimacy, and it produces people who feel a great deal and cannot say what about, and that is not a better condition than yours.

I am not going to tell you this is sin. It might be worth asking whether anything is sitting there, and if it is you will know, but a long dryness in a person who keeps going is far more often a season, or exhaustion, or something in the body, than it is a moral failure.

And it is worth saying plainly: prolonged flatness that covers everything, not only your faith, is sometimes depression, and that is a medical thing with real treatment and no shame in it whatsoever.

You are not distant from God because you have failed at something. Scripture says he hath said, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee, Hebrews 13:5, and it is a statement about His conduct rather than about your perception of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present through a drive home in silence.

Paul prayed for the gap

There is a prayer in Ephesians 3 that most people read as a general blessing and that is, on close reading, a prayer for precisely your problem.

That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge.Ephesians 3:17-19

Two things, and they are both remarkable.

First, look at who he is praying for. These are believers. They already have Christ, they are already rooted and grounded in love, and he prays that they may be able to comprehend it.

So the state of possessing something you cannot apprehend is not an anomaly. It is normal enough that an apostle prays about it for a whole church.

Second, that last phrase: to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge.

It is a deliberate paradox. Paul is asking that they would know a thing that is, by definition, beyond knowing. Which means the kind of knowing he has in mind is not the kind you already have. You have the informational sort, comprehensively. He is praying for a different faculty entirely, and praying for it because it is not something a person can generate. Scripture stands under that in Ephesians 3:17-19, and the Holy Spirit does the part no sentence can do.

He asked God for it. On their behalf. Which is exactly what you have been trying to produce in yourself for years.

You are not defective for having a gap Paul prayed about. Scripture says that ye may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height, Ephesians 3:18, and the ability is prayed for rather than assumed, and the Holy Spirit is named in that same prayer as the one who strengthens a person in the inner man.

Knowing is not the enemy

Let me defend you for a moment, because you have half begun to suspect your own mind. It is written, in Ephesians 3:17-19, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes what is written off a page and into a life.

Everything you know is true and it is worth having. On the night this matters most, when something happens that no feeling would survive, the thing that will hold you is exactly what you have: that God is faithful, that the resurrection is a historical claim you have examined, that the promise does not depend on your state. Scripture settles that in Ephesians 3:17-19, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it rather than these words.

People who run on feeling alone do not survive that night well. You have watched some of them not survive it. I am not putting my own idea over you; Scripture says it in Ephesians 3:17-19, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it live.

So do not throw away the material. It is not the obstacle. It is a set of foundations, and the fact that a house has good foundations and no fire in the grate does not mean the foundations were a mistake.

The gap is real and it is not caused by what you know.

You are not carrying the wrong equipment. Scripture says thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee, Psalm 119:11, and it treats stored truth as an asset held in the heart rather than as a barrier to it, and the Holy Spirit is not asking you to unlearn anything.

Where He usually turns up

Here is the practical part, and it is not what you have been trying. That is not my opinion. Scripture stands behind it in Ephesians 3:17-19, and the Holy Spirit brings it near.

You have gone looking for this at conferences and in books and in more input, and those are all head-shaped places, which is exactly where you are already full. Scripture holds that ground in Ephesians 3:17-19, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries it into a room like this one.

The reports of people who come out of a long dryness are remarkably consistent, and almost none of them describe a breakthrough at an event. What they describe is small, physical, and usually involving other people. Sitting with somebody who is suffering. Doing something practical for a person who cannot repay it. A long walk. Silence, without a book, for twenty minutes at a time, which will be intolerable for the first four.

That is not because God is hiding in those places. It is that the part of a person that receives this is not the part you have been exercising, and it wakes up in use rather than in study. This rests on Scripture in Ephesians 3:17-19, and on the Holy Spirit who makes what is written a living thing.

So do something with your hands for somebody this week, and do not turn it into material.

You are not going to think your way across this. Scripture says taste and see that the Lord is good, Psalm 34:8, and taste is a sensory verb chosen deliberately over an analytical one, and the Holy Spirit is the one who works in the faculty that reading has not reached.