Show Me Your Glory, Said A Tired Man

The study has the books in it and the lamp and the chair that is not comfortable enough to fall asleep in, which is why he chose it.

Three of them tonight, which is unusual and good. Somebody brought olives and somebody brought a plate of things and there is an argument going about a footnote.

He is sixty-five.

Eleven years, and worn thin is the phrase. Not dramatic. Not a crisis. A long slow subtraction that has taken most of what he could do and left the man who could do it sitting in a hard chair being interested in a footnote.

He prays. He has always prayed. And for about the last four years his prayers have all had the same shape, which is: help me get through this week.

Last spring he said something else out loud, alone in this room, and it surprised him.

He said: I want to see You.

And immediately after it, in the same breath, came the correction, which he has had all his life from good people and which he has never examined. That is not what a man in your position asks for. Ask for strength. Ask for endurance. Ask for grace to bear it. Wanting more than that, when you are already being carried, is a kind of greed.

So he went back to help me get through this week, and he has not said the other thing again.

If you have caught yourself asking for something and then withdrawn it, you know how fast the correction came, and you know you could not name who taught it to you.

Moses asked, and it is in the record

Weigh it first, whole, because on this site the honest paragraph comes before the good one and it never gets shortened.

What this costs is not the eleven years, though eleven years is what it is. It is the shrinking of what you are allowed to want. It costs you the size of your own prayers, which have narrowed to a week at a time and stayed there for four years. It costs the sentence you said out loud last spring, which was the truest thing you had said to God in a decade and which you withdrew inside two seconds. It costs the hard chair, a little, because you chose it to stay awake in and now it mostly holds a man asking for the minimum. And it costs you a rule you cannot source, which has been governing your prayer life without ever being examined.

I am not calling that small and I am not putting it beside anybody else's, because on this site there is no ranking of what people carry and there never will be. Any word from God that needs your eleven years made lighter first is not one Scripture speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.

And plainly, before we go on: if worn thin has gone somewhere darker, as far as thinking these three would have easier evenings without a fourth chair, tell one living person today. Your doctor, one of the two arguing about the footnote, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Scripture asks no man to hold that alone, and the Holy Spirit has always moved through people who turn up with olives and start an argument.

Now, Exodus 33, and consider who is speaking and what condition he is in.

Moses has been leading an impossible people through a desert for a long time. In the previous chapter he has watched them build a calf while he was on the mountain. He is, by any measure, a man at the end of his resources, and in that same conversation he says out loud to God that if His presence does not go with them he does not want to move at all.

And then he asks for something else.

And he said, I beseech thee, shew me thy glory. And he said, I will make all my goodness pass before thee.Exodus 33:18-19

He asks to be shown the glory.

Not strength for the journey. Not endurance. Not grace to bear the people. He had every reason to ask for those and he asks for something else entirely, and he asks it in the middle of the hardest stretch of his working life.

You are looking at the most worn out man in the Old Testament asking for more than survival. Exodus 33:18 has him asking to see the glory, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an exchange on a mountain and lays it on a hard chair in a study.

And now the part that undoes a rule. God says yes.

Not the whole of it, and He says why, and He puts Moses in a cleft in the rock. But the answer is not a rebuke. There is no sentence anywhere in that chapter in which God tells a tired man that he has overreached, or that he should have asked for something more appropriate to his situation.

You have an answer on record and it is not a correction. That is written into Exodus 33:19, and His Spirit in you is the one who makes a mountain conversation land on a man who withdrew his own prayer in two seconds.

Now let me be exact about what this does not say, because eleven years of good advice has already been given in that study.

It does not promise you a vision, and it does not promise you anything about your body or your eleven years, and I am not going to predict either, because what God does there is His, in His own way, and He answered Moses partly and on His own terms and said so plainly in the text.

And it does not tell you that asking for strength is wrong. Asking to get through the week is a good prayer and God is not offended by it.

What it does is remove a rule that nobody wrote. There is no verse anywhere in which a person in a hard position is told to keep their requests proportionate to their circumstances.

You were never given a smaller list of things you are allowed to ask for. Scripture has a worn out man asking for the glory and receiving an answer, and the same Spirit who inspired it is the one who carries that into a room with three men in it and a plate of olives.