Not By Might, Not By Volume

She goes about twice a year, because her friend loves them and because she does not want to be a person who does not go.

And it is always the same.

She is fine for the first half hour. Then, somewhere in the middle, a gap opens between what is happening in that room and what is happening in her, and once she has noticed the gap she cannot un-notice it, and the rest of the evening is spent inside it.

By the end she is standing in a room of people who are visibly having something, and she is having nothing, and she is very aware of her own arms.

Then the car. And she is quieter than she came, and her friend is glowing and talks the whole way back, and she says the right things.

She is forty-one. And what she has believed for about six years is that leaving those rooms emptier than she entered them is a report on her spiritual condition. That whatever is being poured out is being poured out on everybody, and she is the one it is not landing on, and that means something about her that she does not want to look at directly.

The sentence given to a discouraged man

Zechariah is given a word for a man facing a job far too big for him, and it is the most quoted line in the book, and almost nobody notices what it rules out.

Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the LORD of hosts.Zechariah 4:6

Not by might, nor by power.

Both of those words are about force. Human energy, human capacity, the visible application of strength to a problem. And God rules both of them out, not as insufficient, but as not the mechanism at all.

Then: but by my spirit. Which is unseen, and which is His, and which is not manufactured in a room and not measurable by what a room feels like.

Now hold that beside the gap you feel in the middle of those evenings. You have been treating force as evidence. You have assumed that where the energy is highest the Spirit is most present, and therefore that a woman who feels nothing at the peak of the energy is a woman the Spirit is not reaching.

That reasoning has an assumption in it that Zechariah 4:6 explicitly denies.

You have been reading force as evidence, and Scripture rules force out as the mechanism. That is not me writing off other people's meetings; Zechariah 4:6 puts the work outside might and power entirely, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a word given to a discouraged builder and lays it on a car journey home.

What this does not license

Now let me guard it hard, because this is where an article like this goes wrong.

I am not saying those meetings are empty, or that your friend is deceived, or that people who weep in a loud room are having an experience rather than meeting God. Some of them are meeting God properly, and your friend's glow in the car is very likely the real thing, and it would be cheap and untrue to comfort you at her expense.

The verse does not say loud rooms are false. It says force is not the mechanism, in any room, including the quiet ones.

Which means the reading runs both ways: nobody in that hall can measure what God is doing by the energy in it, and neither can you. You have been using their instrument to grade yourself and getting a bad result, and the instrument does not work for anybody.

You are not being missed by something everybody else is receiving. The written word rules out might and power as the means and gives the work to His Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is not distributed across a room according to atmosphere.

And the plain thing, which is the actual answer to your six years. Different people meet God in different conditions, and that is a fact about how people are made rather than a ranking of them. Some are opened by a crowd and some are closed by one. You go twice a year to a room that closes you and you come out closed, and you have been reading a mismatch as a verdict.

You are not the one it is not landing on, and there has never been a pouring you were excluded from. Scripture puts the doing in the Spirit rather than in the volume, and the Holy Spirit has been present in every car journey home.