Is This Just Crowd Psychology

She notices things she would rather not notice.

She noticed, at a conference three years ago, that the key change came fourteen seconds before the invitation, both times, and that the second time it was the same fourteen seconds. She noticed the lighting drop. She noticed that the person speaking said I do not normally do this in a way that suggested he did it fairly often.

None of this makes her a cynic and she would resist the word. She has been in the faith her whole adult life. She prays. She reads. There is nothing hollow in her.

What there is, is a working set of eyes that will not switch off, and a strong suspicion that whatever she saw in that room was a technique.

And underneath all of it, which nobody knows, is that she wants to be filled with the Holy Spirit and has for a long time.

The problem is that the two things arrive together. Every time she has gotten near this, she has been near it in a room, and in the room she can see the machinery, and the moment she sees the machinery she cannot tell what part of anything is God and what part is a lighting board and a well judged pause.

So she does nothing. Year after year. Not out of unbelief, out of an inability to isolate the variable.

The sentence, unspoken: I cannot tell whether this is being done to me, and I am not going to open myself to something I cannot identify.

You may know that seat. Believing entirely, and unable to tell what you are looking at.

The instruction is to test it

Here is what nobody has told her, and it is not a concession made to a difficult person. It is a command in the letters, written to ordinary believers, and it says the opposite of what she has been made to feel.

Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God.1 John 4:1

Try. Test. Examine. That is an imperative, addressed to a whole congregation, from a man who was as close to the center of all this as anybody has ever been.

He does not say discernment is a lack of faith. He does not say a person who examines is grieving anybody. He assumes, as a matter of course, that the people he loves will encounter things claiming to be of God that are not, and he tells them to check.

You have been apologizing for the exact faculty John commanded, and 1 John 4:1 puts the testing of spirits in the imperative to ordinary believers, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself who takes an instruction written to a first century church and lands it on a woman who noticed the fourteen seconds.

Testing is not the same as refusing

Consider what the verb actually requires, because she has been doing half of it.

Testing is an active operation. It involves engaging with something enough to examine it. You cannot test a thing you never come near, and a person who declines everything on the grounds that it might not be genuine has not tested anything. They have abstained, which is a different act and produces no information at all.

That is where she has been for years. Excellent instruments, never lowered into the water.

You have been abstaining and calling it testing, because the written word tells believers to try the spirits rather than to avoid them, and the Holy Spirit is what turns that from a clever distinction into a thing she can do this afternoon.

And notice what John gives them next, which is a criterion. He tells them what to test against, and the test he gives is doctrinal and about Jesus rather than about atmosphere. He does not ask anybody to assess the lighting. He asks what is being said about Christ.

You were handed a criterion and not left to guess, and 1 John 4 supplies the standard in the very next sentence rather than leaving discernment to instinct, and the same Spirit who moved John to write it is the one who fills.

The room was probably doing what she thinks

Now the thing she has never had confirmed, which is whether she was right about the fourteen seconds.

Probably. Rooms get designed. Music gets arranged to move people, which is not sinister and is what music is for, and somebody chose that key change on purpose because it works. All of that can be true.

It does not follow that God was absent. Both things can be running in the same room, which is the observation she needs, and it is precisely the observation that testing exists to make. The alternative, which she has been living, is treating any detectable human craft as proof that nothing else was present.

Run that rule anywhere else and it collapses immediately. A hospital is entirely designed. The lighting, the flow, the order in which somebody is spoken to, all of it worked out by people who studied how to do it. Nobody concludes from any of that that the patient did not recover. Craft in the room is not evidence about what happened in the body, and she would never make that inference in any other part of her life.

You were never required to sort the room to receive anything, because 1 John 4:1 gives a criterion about Christ rather than a method for auditing an atmosphere, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a relief for a woman with very good eyes.