I Used To Be Able To Tell By Looking

There was a time when you could walk into a room and know.

Not guess. Know. You would look at somebody across a church hall and you would see it, whatever it was, and by the end of the week you would have quietly done something about it and they would never quite work out how you knew.

You were known for it. People said it about you.

And it has gone.

You look at your grandchildren and you see young people you love very much and cannot read at all. You look at the woman two doors down and you have no idea. You reach for the thing you used to have and there is nothing there, and it has been happening for a few years now and you have not said it to anybody.

You have decided what it is. You decided it privately, sitting on your own, and the word you used was age.

I want to look at that with you, because I do not think that is what has happened, and there is a verse that says something specific about it.

He wakeneth morning by morning

Here is the verse, and it is one of the most practical descriptions of discernment in the book.

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, King James Version)

Read that last part again, because it changes what the whole thing is.

He wakeneth morning by morning. Not once. Not at some point in the past, permanently. Morning by morning, every morning, freshly, as a repeated act.

You were never given a faculty to keep in a drawer, and Isaiah 50:4 has the ear wakened morning by morning rather than handed over once and owned. The Holy Spirit is the one who wrote it in that tense, and the tense is the whole comfort in it.

So what you had was never stored capital. It was a daily giving, and daily givings do not get used up and they do not wear out with the person carrying them.

Which means the loss of it cannot be explained by anything wearing out in you.

You have not run down like a battery, and it is written that the wakening happens morning by morning rather than being spent from a supply. The Spirit of God is the one who does that wakening, and He has not stopped doing anything.

And notice what the wakened ear was actually for.

A word in season to him that is weary. Not a grand insight. Not a prophecy. A word, in season, to somebody tired. That is the smallest, plainest, most ordinary description of the thing you used to do, and it is exactly what you used to do.

You are still the woman that verse is describing, and Scripture measures the gift by a word in season rather than by how impressive the knowing was. The Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a description like that accurate about a person for sixty years.

What actually changed

Now let me say what I think did change, because something did and none of this is imagined.

Think about the room where you used to know things.

The same church hall every week. The same faces, the same pews, the same street, the same shops. You saw those people forty or fifty times a year, standing up, sitting down, in a hurry, tired, pleased, in every kind of weather.

You were not reading them in one look. You were reading them against fifty other looks you had taken that year without noticing you were taking them.

You have been giving yourself credit for something that was mostly hours, and it is written that the ear is wakened morning by morning rather than working from a single glance. The Spirit of God is the one who lets an honest woman see her own past clearly, and this is the honest version.

Now count the hours you get now.

Grandchildren three or four times a year, in a room full of other people. The woman two doors down, waved at. Family on a screen for twenty minutes with a poor connection.

That is not less discernment. That is less looking. And no one alive could read a person off that.

You are working with a fraction of the material and getting a fraction of the result, and the written word puts the wakening morning by morning rather than making it independent of a life. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes an unfair verdict off a woman, and age has been carrying the blame for arithmetic.

And here is what makes that good news rather than sad news.

Hours can be got back. Not all of them, and not the way they used to arrive. But one unhurried hour with one person is a great deal more looking time than a room with nine people in it and a television on.

You have something available to you this week, and Isaiah 50:4 gives the wakened ear for the sake of a word in season rather than for the sake of a reputation. The Spirit of God is the one who makes one hour worth what forty glances used to be worth.

The same ear, pointed at less

There is one more thing in that verse and it is the part that puts your mind at rest about the reaching.

He wakeneth mine ear to hear. The ear, not the eye.

You have been calling it telling by looking, and everybody around you called it that too, but what actually happened in that church hall was hearing. You heard what a woman said and how she said it and what she did not say, over and over, for years.

You have been hunting for the wrong sense, and the written word names the ear as the thing that gets wakened rather than any special sight. The Holy Spirit is the one who wakens an ear, and He has been waking yours every morning of the years you thought it had gone.

And an ear needs somebody talking. That is all it needs. It does not need youth and it does not need a good memory and it does not need you to be quick.

It needs one person, in a room, talking, with nobody hurrying them.

You are not short of the gift, and it is written that the wakening is for a word in season to him that is weary rather than for reading a crowded room. The Spirit of God is the one who arranges the one person and the one room, and He has been arranging them for you longer than you know.

So stop trying to read them across a table with everybody talking. That was never the setting for this and it never will be.

You have permission to stop straining at the family gathering, and Isaiah 50:4 describes a wakened ear and a weary person rather than a woman scanning a crowd. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes the strain off, and He takes it off by moving the whole thing somewhere quieter.