Morning by Morning He Wakens the Ear

The gauge on the tank has been wrong by about four inches since it was installed and everybody who uses this place knows to add four inches, and nobody has replaced the gauge.

Sunrise. Up the track, gate, tank on the shoulder of the hill with the whole valley underneath it going from gray to gold. He does this at the same hour every day and has done for a long time.

His son in law came up with him this morning, which is not usual, and they are both looking at a gauge that they both know is wrong.

And here is where he is at.

Something has been reaching him lately. Two weeks or so. Not dramatic, just that the ordinary things have been arriving instead of going past. He is a man of sixty something and he knows exactly how rare that is and exactly how much he wants it to stay.

And he has already worked out that it will not. He has a date in his head. Two weeks from now, three at the outside, and he will be flat again and the whole thing will be a stretch he remembers fondly.

Because in his experience, staying awake is a job, and jobs need doing, and a man his age knows what he can and cannot keep up.

Lean on the tank with me a minute, friend. Because there is a line in Isaiah about mornings and about whose job the waking is.

Morning by morning, and He is the one doing it

Isaiah is describing somebody who listens, and he says this.

The Lord GOD hath given me the tongue of the learned, that I should know how to speak a word in season to him that is weary: he wakeneth morning by morning, he wakeneth mine ear to hear as the learned.Isaiah 50:4

Read the verb and read who it belongs to.

He wakeneth. Twice in one sentence. Both times it is Him.

Morning by morning. Not once and for all. Not a state achieved. A repeated action, done freshly, at the start of every day.

He wakeneth mine ear. And the thing being woken is an ear, which is to say a receiver, and it is being woken by somebody else.

So the arrangement described there is exactly the opposite of the one you have been running. You have been treating wakefulness as a state you enter and then maintain. The verse describes it as an action performed on a person, again, every morning, by God.

You are wakened morning by morning by Somebody else, and the verb in that verse is His both times it appears. That is not a rearrangement of Isaiah to let a tired man off; Isaiah 50:4 says he wakeneth twice and never once puts it on the person being woken, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a servant's line and lays it on a hillside at sunrise with a gauge that reads four inches wrong. The job you have been dreading is not a job you were ever given.

Now the date in your head, and I want to look straight at it.

You have two weeks in mind and you are already planning around it. That is not pessimism, it is experience. You have watched this happen to yourself before.

But notice what you concluded from that experience. You concluded that the flatness came back because you failed to keep something up. And what the verse suggests is much simpler: that wakefulness was never a state anybody keeps up, and that what came before was not a failure of maintenance but the ordinary rhythm of a thing that is given fresh rather than stored.

You did not lose something last time through failing to maintain it, and nobody has ever kept this up because it was never a thing to keep. Lamentations 3:23 says they are new every morning, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes new mean issued again rather than remembered, which removes maintenance from the arrangement entirely.

What is actually being asked of a man

One more thing, and it will change how you come up this track tomorrow.

The verse gives the person one thing to do, and it is not effort. He wakeneth mine ear to hear. The ear listens. That is a receiving posture and not a working one.

And notice what the whole sentence is for: that I should know how to speak a word in season to him that is weary. The wakening is not for the man's own benefit primarily. It equips him to say the right thing to somebody tired.

Which means whatever has been reaching you these two weeks probably has somebody else on the end of it, and it does not require you to sustain a spiritual condition to be of use.

You are being wakened for the sake of somebody weary, and the equipping does not depend on you sustaining a condition. Isaiah 50:4 gives the purpose in the same verse as the wakening, and it is the Holy Spirit who arranges for a man's fresh morning to land on somebody else's hard one.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it does more than tell a man to add four inches.

Jesus said in Matthew 17:20 that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, is enough to move it. The smallest seed a man plants. Not how long you can hold a good stretch open. That a person opens their mouth and says what God has said. You have that standing because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and speaking is the appointed way this works. We flip the switch. He sends the current.