Four hundred and eleven notes, and he has reopened nine of them.
He counted in August, because he was curious, and then wished he had not been.
The system is genuinely good. He is not an amateur about this. There are tags, and the tags are consistent, and there is a color for a cross reference and a different one for a question he wants to come back to. He can find anything in about four seconds. Two men from the Wednesday group have asked him to set it up for them and he did and they were grateful.
Nine.
He went back and looked at what those nine were, in case there was a pattern, and there was, and it was not the one he wanted. All nine were reopened in order to be re tagged.
He has never once gone back to a note in order to think about what it said.
And underneath that, sitting in a truck in August with a phone in his hand, there was a worse one.
He can tell you how long he spends reading, and it is about twenty minutes. He can tell you how long he spends processing what he read, and it is more like thirty five.
Thirty five minutes of filing for twenty minutes of reading. Every day. For three years.
I will meditate in thy precepts
Sit down on the step a minute, because there is a line in the long psalm about what a man does with what he has read, and the verb in it is a slow one.
I will meditate in thy precepts, and have respect unto thy ways.Psalm 119:15
Meditate in.
Not on. In. It is a word about being inside a thing rather than working on it from outside, and the Hebrew behind it is that muttering word again: a man turning a sentence over under his breath while he walks, saying it again, doing nothing else with it.
And have respect unto thy ways, which is a looking word. Gazing at. Keeping your eyes on something long enough that it changes what you are. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the changing while a man sits still.
Neither half of that verse has any handling in it. Nothing is sorted, nothing is captured, nothing is put anywhere.
Hear this on your own step. You are not shallow and you are not fooling yourself, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture puts the whole weight on being inside a sentence rather than on doing anything with it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has had you at that book every morning for three years without missing.
Now let me name what the system is doing, because it is not vanity and vanity is a poor word for a man who set it up for two other men for nothing.
Filing is measurable and meditating is not.
At the end of thirty five minutes of processing there is a visible result. Notes exist. Tags are consistent. Something happened that you could show somebody, and it feels exactly like diligence, and the reason it feels like diligence is that it is diligence, applied to the wrong object.
Ten minutes of sitting still with four verses produces nothing you can show anybody, including yourself, and there is no way to tell at the end of it whether you did it well. A man who likes to know whether he did a thing well will avoid that for years without ever deciding to.
Hear this too, and let it land in the truck. You are not a man hiding from God in a spreadsheet, and Scripture is what says so. What is written asks for muttering and gazing and asks for no filing at all, and the Spirit of God has never once required a man to keep a record of what he was given.
And the nine notes. That is the finding and you already have it.
Three years of capture with a retrieval rate of nine, all of which were re tags. That is not a system for remembering. It is a system for having captured, and those are different things, and you knew that in August before you finished counting.
So this week you read four verses with nothing in your hands, and then you sit for ten minutes.
Nothing in your hands is the instruction and it is the whole difficulty. No phone, no app, no notebook, no pen. Four verses, out loud if you can, and then ten minutes of sitting with them.
You will want to capture something around minute three. That is the entire experiment. Let it go past. If it is worth anything it will still be there tomorrow, and if it is not then you have lost a thought that was not going to survive contact with a Thursday anyway. The written word asks for gazing and no handling, and the Holy Spirit has never once needed you to write anything down in order to keep it.
And when the ten minutes are up, do not write it up. Go and do the next thing.
The written word asks for muttering and gazing and asks for no handling at all, and the Holy Spirit has had you at that book every morning for three years without one gap, so nothing about three years of building was ever wasted or foolish.
Four hundred and eleven notes, and nine reopened, and all nine to be re tagged. That is not a failure of discipline. That is a man with an enormous amount of discipline pointed at the one part of this that can be measured.
Declare this over yourself
Say these on the step with nothing in your hands. You are in Christ and Christ is in you, and the Holy Spirit has had you at that book every morning for three years according to the written word, so the standing you speak from was never built out of what you have captured. Whether the ten minutes feel full or feel empty, the outcome is His to decide, and it is never a measure of a man who has not missed a morning in three years.
- System I built to hold what I read, you are not devotion and you are not the work. Scripture says I will meditate in thy precepts and have respect unto thy ways, and there is no handling in that line and nothing gets put anywhere.
- Thirty five minutes of filing for twenty minutes of reading, get out of this truck, in the name of Jesus. The written word never required a man to keep a record of what he was given, and the Spirit of God has had me at that book every morning for three years without one gap.
- Lord, You asked for muttering and gazing and You asked for no filing at all, and Your Spirit has had me there every morning for three years, exactly as it is written. I am reading four verses with nothing in my hands this week, and I am sitting for ten minutes and not writing it up.
Psalm 119:15
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.
