Every account he has ever been given has a body in it.
Heat across the shoulders. Weight on the chest, like somebody leaning. Hands shaking without being told to. A cousin of his describes a current running down both arms and has described it the same way for twenty years, and he believes her, and he has never had any reason not to.
His had nothing. Not a flicker of anything physical. No temperature, no weight, no tremor, no current. He was there, and then he was different, and his skin reported absolutely nothing about it in either direction.
He has done the arithmetic on that more times than he would admit. If the evidence everybody offers is something the body did, and his body did not do a single thing, then either he has to explain a category of experience nobody around him has a word for, or he has to conclude that he was in the room and it went past him.
He has never mentioned it to his cousin. She would be kind about it, and that is exactly why.
If yours came with no sensation at all, come and sit on the sand. Nothing anybody else felt is going to be doubted here.
Skin is a witness with a narrow job
Let us look at what is actually doing the assessing here, because it has been assessing for years without ever being questioned.
The nervous system is superb equipment and it reports on a very short list. Temperature, pressure, movement, pain. That is close to the whole range, and everything on it is about the body's situation in a physical world.
It was never issued as an instrument for detecting God. When it reports nothing, it is reporting nothing about the one thing it was designed to watch, and that is not the same as a report of absence.
You were not passed over on that day. Nothing your skin failed to do has ever been a measurement of what God has done in you. I am not offering that as consolation. The written word says the wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh (John 3:8), which puts the moving beyond the reach of the instruments that would track it, and the Holy Spirit is the one that verse is about, which is why it holds for a man whose arms stayed still.
What the verse refuses to promise
Here is what changed this for me, and it takes nothing away from one thing your cousin has described.
Read what the Lord declines to guarantee in that sentence, because it is the part everybody reads past.
The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.John 3:8
Canst not tell. That is a limit He states on purpose, and He states it as normal rather than as a problem. He is describing something real and moving and entirely outside the range of what the person can trace.
And then He says so is every one. Not some. The untraceable quality is not a defect in a subset of people. It is the description of the whole class.
You are inside the every one He names, and Scripture places the untraceable part in the ordinary case rather than the failed one. That is written into the verse itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries it into a man who has been checking his own arms for years.
Nothing here doubts what anybody felt
Something has to be said plainly, or this turns into a quiet case against people who have been honest with him.
They felt what they said they felt. The heat was heat, the weight was weight, and twenty years of a woman describing a current the same way is twenty years of a woman telling the truth. There is nothing on this page hinting that a physical account is inflated, or that God does not touch a body.
The relief is not that theirs was less real than it sounded.
You have something of your own to count, and counting it takes nothing off one person who has felt something. Scripture says now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:4), where the difference is named first and named without complaint, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not a sensation, who decides what arrives in what form.
And if these years have cost more than anybody on that beach knows, if sleep has gone, if the thought has started to frighten you, 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.
So here is the turn, and it is not a promise that a sensation is coming to you later.
What He gave you was quiet and it was real. Yours does not have to look like theirs. The written word says the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal (1 Corinthians 12:7), where every man includes the one whose arms never moved, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the nerves, who determines the form of it.
I cannot tell you whether you ever feel anything, and I am not going to guess. Nobody honest would. What I can tell you is that a body that reported nothing was never taking the measurement, and that a man is not standing outside a thing because his skin had no comment on it.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, in your own voice. You are in Christ and Christ is in you, and the standing under these words is His rather than your own. You speak under His will and not yours, and what God does next, and when, is His to decide, however He answers.
- Absence of any sensation, you are a description of my nerves and you are not a description of what God did. John 3 says the wind blows where it wills and I cannot tell where it comes from, so the untraceable part was named as normal, and the Holy Spirit was never on my list of things to feel. In the name of Jesus I take you off the evidence.
- Verdict that it went past me, you are not what God says about me and you are not sitting on this sand tonight. John 3 says so is every one that is born of the Spirit, which puts me in the whole class rather than a failed corner of it, and His Spirit did the moving. I am counting what is actually mine.
- Father, there are diversities of gifts but the same Spirit, and First Corinthians 12 names the difference first and never once calls it a fault. I thank You that You touched my cousin in her body and touched me where nothing showed, out of one hand, and Your Spirit never once asked for a witness. What He gave me was quiet and it was real.
John 3:8
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