I Installed Everything

Tom could write a book about the filters. He could genuinely do a talk on it.

He has installed nine different systems in six years and he can tell you the exact failure mode of every one of them. He knows which ones fail on a laptop and hold on a phone. He knows the two that a person can defeat by changing a date. He knows the one that is genuinely good and how he beat it anyway, on the eleventh night, in about four minutes, and how he felt afterward, which was not triumph.

He has given the password to his wife twice. He has given it to a friend once. He has had a phone with no browser on it for four months. He has had a router with a schedule on it. He put a laptop in the trunk of the car. One winter he kept the modem in a bag on top of a cupboard.

And here is the thing that keeps him up, and it is not the failure itself.

He is a decent engineer. It is what he does for a living. And every one of those systems was designed by a version of him who genuinely wanted them to work, at eleven in the morning, with coffee, thinking clearly.

And every one of them was defeated by a version of him at half past midnight who is, and this is the part he cannot bear, better at it.

The man who builds the fence is not as clever as the man who gets out. And they are both me.

And here is where I stop talking about Tom, because you have built the fences too, and you know your own failure modes, and you have concluded something about yourself from the fact that you keep winning against yourself.

Let me say the first thing plainly, because you are about to draw the wrong conclusion, and I have watched good men draw it for years. What has failed here is not you. It is an approach. Fences are a good idea and they are not a power source, and asking a fence to change a man is asking a fence to do something it was never able to do.

Not by might

Let me put the true thing down first, before you start designing the tenth system.

You are not going to engineer your way out of this, and that is not a verdict on your engineering. It is a statement about the category of the problem, and God said it about a man rebuilding a temple with insufficient resources and a lot of opposition: And it is the Holy Spirit who makes that land in you rather than merely read well.

Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, says the Lord of hosts.Zechariah 4:6

Notice what is being ruled out and what is not. He does not say the work is unnecessary or that the builder should stop building. Zerubbabel goes on building. What He rules out is the source: the thing that will actually finish it is not force and not capability.

And notice what replaces it. Not a better technique. A Person. By My Spirit.

So the reason nine systems did not change you is not that you chose badly, and Scripture is where I get that rather than my own theory, and the Spirit of God is not standing over your shoulder marking your architecture.

Keep the fences, change the source

Now let me be careful here, because this is the exact point where a message like this does damage, and I do not want to take one useful thing off you.

I am not telling you to uninstall the filters. Keep them. Keep the password with your wife, keep the router schedule, keep the phone with no browser. Fences are useful. A fence buys three minutes, and three minutes is often the entire distance between a man and a different outcome.

What I am telling you is what a fence is for. It is not a power source. It is a slowing device, and it works exactly as well as a slowing device works and not one degree better, and you have been asking yours to be a savior and then reading their failure as evidence about your soul.

Hear this: the power that changes a man is not stored in his own capability, and its failure to arrive through your engineering says nothing about you. What you have in you is the Spirit of God, given, not installed, and He is not defeated at half past midnight. That is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it something you can rest your weight on rather than something you find theologically correct.

And the practical half, because a message without it has failed you: real help exists and none of it is small faith. A counselor who works with this specifically, which is a genuinely different thing from a filter. A doctor if the sleep or the low afterward has got heavy. One person who knows and does not flinch. That is His kindness arriving with a face and a phone number, and it is not a rival to His Spirit.