There Is Nobody To Ask

There is nobody to ask.

That is the sentence, and you have said it to yourself with real conviction, and it has ended the conversation every time.

And it is worth noticing that the sentence arrives instantly. It does not arrive after a search. You do not go through anybody and come up empty. The sentence gets there first and then no search happens.

That is what I want to look at this morning. Not whether it is true. Whether it has ever actually been tested.

You are not a man with no one, and a phone full of names has never once been the same as an empty week.

Here is what I suspect is going on, and tell me if this is wrong.

When you think about who to ask, your mind produces a category rather than a list. It produces something like people who could give me work, and then it checks that category, and the category is empty, because the category was never a real place.

Nobody is filed in your phone under people who could give me work. They are filed under Dave, and Marie, and Gary from the old place, and your daughter's friend's father who you spoke to at a wedding.

So the search comes back empty, instantly, and it was always going to.

Send men to Joppa, and call for one Simon

There is a moment in Acts where a man gets an instruction, and what is striking about it is how specific it is.

And now send men to Joppa, and call for one Simon, whose surname is Peter. (Acts 10:5, King James Version)

Send men to Joppa. Call for one Simon. Whose surname is Peter.

A town, a name, and then a clarification in case there was more than one Simon. That is not a vision about being open to opportunity. That is an address.

You are looking at an instruction that came as a name and a place rather than as a direction, and God has never once been vague about who a person was supposed to go and find. Acts 10:5 names the town and the man, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gave that instruction with the surname attached.

And there is something else. Cornelius did not know Peter. There was no relationship there at all.

But there was a name, and once there was a name, there was an action that could be taken that afternoon.

You have been waiting for an opportunity when what is actually given is usually a name, and a person you have not spoken to in four years has never once been the same as a stranger. The Holy Spirit is the one who brings a specific person to mind, and it is written in Acts 10:5 that the whole thing started with one man being sent to find one other man.

Read the names, all of them

So here is the thing I would like you to actually do, and it is more boring than most instructions on a site like this.

Open your phone. Go to the contacts. Start at the top and read them.

All of them. Not the recent ones. The whole list, slowly, and give each name about two seconds.

You are able to read a list for ten minutes, and an honest look through four hundred names has never once come back with the same answer as a two second guess. The written word starts a whole account with a man being told one specific name, and the Spirit of God is the one who brings a person forward in the middle of an ordinary list.

And while you read, you are not asking, would this person give me work. That question is too big and it will make you skip everybody.

Ask this instead: does this person have the problem I fix.

That is a different question and it has a different answer rate. It also does not require the person to be important, or well off, or in a position to hire anybody.

You are able to change the question you are running down the list with, and a better question has never once produced the same empty result as a worse one. The Holy Spirit is the one who narrows a search down to something answerable, and Acts 10:5 gives a man a name rather than a strategy.

The four you will find

Let me tell you what usually happens, and then you can tell me afterward whether it happened to you.

Most men who do this find four. Not one, and not forty. Four.

One is somebody obvious who never occurred to them because they are filed under family. One is somebody they have not spoken to in years and feel awkward about. One is somebody they think is too important to ask. And one is somebody whose need they already know about and have never once connected to themselves.

That last one is the one that stops people in the middle of the list.

You are going to find at least one you already knew about, and a need you have been aware of for months has never once been invisible, only unconnected. The Spirit of God is the one who joins two things a man has been holding separately, and the written word sends one man to another who was, at that moment, already on a roof praying about the same business.

And then you ask one of them. Not four. One, this week.

You are able to do one of the four this week, and starting with a single name has never once been too small a beginning. The Holy Spirit is the one who is with a man in a short conversation, and it is written that the whole of Acts 10 turns on one journey to one address.