Whose Spirit God Had Raised, and They Just Went

The step outside the front door has a chip out of the corner from the day they moved the fridge in, and everybody in this house sits on that step at some point in an evening, and nobody has ever fixed the chip.

Half past nine. The light over the door is on and there are moths at it. Two neighbors on the step with him because that is how the street works and always has.

They are talking about the bins, and the school, and whether the man at number 12 is selling.

And there it is again. Third time tonight.

A name. A face. Somebody he has not seen in what must be eleven years and had no reason to think about, and it has been arriving unbidden three or four times a day for the better part of a month.

Not with a message. That is the thing. There is no sense of what to do. There is just the person, surfacing, over and over, at the sink and in the car and now on his own front step in the middle of a conversation about bins.

He has done nothing about it. What would he do. He does not have a number. He does not know what he would say. And the whole thing feels like it wants something from him and will not say what.

Sit down here on the step, hermano. Because there is a verse in Ezra about a whole group of people who got up and went, and the reason given for it is one clause long.

The reason given is one clause long

Ezra opens with a decree and then with a list of who responded, and in the middle of the administrative detail there is this.

Then rose up the chief of the fathers of Judah and Benjamin, and the priests, and the Levites, with all them whose spirit God had raised, to go up to build the house of the LORD which is in Jerusalem.Ezra 1:5

All them whose spirit God had raised.

That is the entire explanation offered for why those particular people went and others did not. Not that they were more spiritual. Not that they received instructions. God raised their spirit, and they got up, and the chapter moves straight into an inventory of vessels.

Notice what is missing. Nobody in that verse is described as understanding what was happening to them. There is no account of them praying about it for three weeks or seeking confirmation. Something was raised in them and the next thing in the sentence is that they went.

You are carrying something the text calls a raised spirit, and the people in that verse were not given a reason for theirs either. That is not a way of making your month sound important; Ezra 1:5 gives one clause and no explanation and then moves on to the inventory, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an administrative verse and stands it up on a front step at half past nine with moths at the light. What is on you does not have to justify itself before it counts.

Now the second half, and this is the part I want you to be careful with, because a man in your position can do damage.

You said it feels like it wants something from you and will not say what. That pressure is real and it is worth naming what it is likely to make you do.

You will either dismiss it, or you will act on a guess. And acting on a guess with another human being means turning up in somebody's life after eleven years with a theory about why God put them in your head, which is a heavy thing to hand a person who did not ask for it.

There is a third option and it is the one the book keeps modeling. You can hold somebody before God without doing anything to them.

You are able to carry a person to God without carrying anything to the person, and that has never once been the lesser option. Ephesians 6:18 says praying always with all prayer and supplication for all saints, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes intercession a real action rather than what you do when you cannot think of anything better.

What God may be doing, and what I will not guess

Let me be honest with you about the limits here.

I do not know why that name keeps coming up. It might be that God is stirring you to pray for somebody who needs it and will never know you did. It might be memory doing what memory does at a certain age. It might be that you are in a season of your own life where old things surface, which happens to men in their forties and fifties constantly.

And here is what I want you to hear about the first possibility. If it is prayer, then the assignment is complete every time you pray, and it does not require contact, and it does not require you ever finding out.

That is not a consolation prize. Most intercession in Scripture is exactly that: somebody carried, by somebody they never knew was carrying them.

You have a real action available that needs no contact and no outcome, and the carrying has never once required a report. Colossians 4:12 says he is always laboring fervently for you in prayers, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that kind of hidden labor real work rather than a substitute for it.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it does more than talk about bins.

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 there is. Not the clarity of what you are sensing about a person from eleven years ago. 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.