If you have ever worked with a nervous horse, you already know the whole of this article and you have known it for years.
Here is what everybody does wrong the first time. They stand in the middle of the pen with the halter and they wait for the horse to want to come. That seems respectful. It seems like the patient thing. And the horse, who is nervous, reads a man standing still in the middle of a pen as exactly what it is, which is a man waiting to catch something, and nothing happens for forty minutes.
What actually works is this. You step. You move first, at an angle, unhurried, and you make it plain by your body that you are going somewhere and not lunging at anything. And something in the horse settles, and after a while the horse steps too.
The order matters and it cannot be reversed. You do not wait for the horse to feel differently and then move. You move, and the feeling in the horse follows the movement.
Now, there is a man who has been standing in the middle of his own pen for about a year and a half.
He has a matter to bring to God and he has been waiting for something in him to shift first. Some sense of readiness. Some warmth or urgency or conviction that would tell him this is the moment. He is not being difficult. He wants the turn to be real, and he has a picture in which a real turn is preceded by a real feeling.
So he stands still, waiting to want to move, and the wanting does not come, because wanting is not a thing that arrives at a man standing still in the middle of a pen.
That is you with the halter.
You've been waiting for the interior thing to happen before the exterior thing. And the order you are using is the one that does not work with horses, does not work with mornings, does not work with any part of a body, and does not work here.
The verse has an order in it and the order is the instruction
James writes eight words that people quote as a comfort. Read them as a sequence instead.
Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you.James 4:8
Draw nigh. Then He draws nigh. That is the order James gives, and it is not an accident of phrasing: it is an instruction with a promise attached, and the instruction comes first.
Now, nobody is saying God is far off and has to be fetched. That is not what this is. The verse is about a movement made by a person who does not yet feel anything, and what follows it, and James put the human step at the front on purpose because he was writing to people who were waiting.
You are able to move before anything in you moves, and the verse puts your step first for exactly that reason, and I am not making this easier than it is: James 4:8 states the order in writing, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my saying so who can get a man out of the middle of a pen.
Here is what a lifetime around stock has taught me and I have never found it wrong anywhere else. Feeling follows action about nine times out of ten, and the tenth time the action was still right. A man does not feel like getting up at five and then gets up. He gets up, and somewhere around the second cup he feels like a man who is up. Nobody thinks that is dishonest.
You have permission to turn with nothing in your chest, and the turn is not worth less for arriving before the feeling, which is written into the sequence of that verse rather than into my opinion of your year and a half, with the Spirit of God able to make a step possible where waiting has only made it heavier.
I want to be careful about one thing, because this could be heard wrong. I am not telling you to fake anything. Faking is pretending the feeling is there. What James is describing is the opposite: moving honestly while saying plainly that the feeling is not there. That is not pretense. That is a man crossing a pen at an angle.
And notice what is promised on the other end. Not a feeling. A nearness. James does not say you will feel better; he says He draws nigh, and whether you notice that this week is another matter entirely and one that belongs to Him.
This step is available this morning, with your chest exactly as flat as it is, because Scripture puts the drawing nigh first, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into a pen at first light.
Move first.
You have been standing in the middle of a pen waiting for a nervous thing to come to you, and it is your own heart. James 4:8 puts the step first for exactly that reason, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a flat man able to take it.
James gives the order plainly: draw nigh, and He draws nigh. The step is the part that goes first, and it goes first for people who have nothing in them, because a person with plenty in them would not need the instruction.
You are moving toward Somebody who moves toward you, and the sequence starts with a step and not with a stirring, because James 4:8 says draw nigh before it says anything else, and the Holy Spirit is the one making that a thing a flat man can actually do.
Cross the pen at an angle. The feeling comes on its own time and it is not the gate.
Declare this over yourself
Say them out loud, in whatever voice this morning has left you, and a flat one is fine. The standing to say them is not something a man works up to and it does not come off his record: Christ is in you, and the authority in these words belongs to Him and has been given to you in Scripture, made living by the Holy Spirit rather than by what you can feel while you say them. Jesus put the faith required at a mustard seed, which is His way of setting it under the line where anybody would trouble to measure, and then He said the part that carries: speak to the mountain. The mountain here is not the matter. It is the feeling you have been waiting on. Speak to that. What He does with the rest of it He does in His own way, and the step is yours to take this morning.
- Feeling I am waiting on, you are not the starting gun, and in the name of Jesus I move without you. Scripture says draw nigh to God and puts my step at the front of the sentence, so the order was settled before I ever stood still in this pen.
- Fear that a turn made cold is a hollow one, you have had a year and a half of my mornings. Scripture promises a nearness rather than a feeling, so what is coming back to me was never the thing you told me to wait for.
- Lord God, You draw near to the one who draws near, and I am standing one step further on than I was a minute ago with nothing in my chest to report. I thank You, because Your Holy Spirit did the drawing and Your word put the step first, and I am received in the moving and not at the end of a feeling that was never going to start me.
James 4:8
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