No Need for Anything to Be Written

She did try. That is what she wants on the record before anybody suggests she dismissed it out of hand.

Two women she respects, one of whom prayed her through the worst year of her life and has earned every hearing she will ever get from her, said the same thing to her at about the same time. That a believer who is not watching what is happening is asleep. That the news is where you see it. That the ones who are awake are the ones tracking it.

So she tracked it. For a year.

She followed the accounts. She learned the vocabulary. She got quite good at it, and there were stretches where she felt engaged in something serious, which is not nothing.

What it produced in her, by the end of that year, was one thing only. Fear. Not urgency, not zeal, not any particular love for anybody. A low, daily, background fear, and a habit of reading a headline about a place she has never been and feeling something in her stomach.

She stopped in the spring, and she has not told either of them, and she has a small private worry that stopping means the thing they said about her was right.

She is fifty three. She has been a believer since she was seventeen. She serves in that church every week.

Sit down. There is a verse that speaks directly to a church about this and it says something almost nobody expects.

No need of anything being written

Here it is, and read what Paul says he does not need to send them. The Spirit inspired that opening rather than a briefing.

Now concerning the times and the seasons, brothers, you have no need to have anything written to you.1 Thessalonians 5:1

He is writing to a church that is anxious about this exact subject. He has just spent the end of the previous chapter comforting them about their dead. And when he arrives at times and seasons, which is the phrase for the whole question of when, he says they have no need of anything being written.

That is not a refusal to teach. It is a statement that they already have what they need, and that what they need is not information about timing.

You are not underinformed. 1 Thessalonians 5:1 says you have no need of anything written on the subject of times and seasons, and the Spirit inspired that as the opening of the passage rather than as a footnote at the end of it.

And notice what he gives them instead, in the verses immediately after: an identity. You are children of the day. Not a chart, not a briefing, a description of who they are.

What the year actually produced

Now the year, and the honest measurement of it.

Test it by fruit, because that is the test Scripture actually supplies for practices. A year of tracking produced fear, a stomach that responds to headlines about places you have never been, and a habit that had to be stopped.

It did not produce love, or joy, or peace, or patience, or kindness, or any of the rest of that list. That is not a small observation. That list exists precisely so that a person can look at a practice and see what it is growing, and the Spirit is named as the one who grows it.

The stopping was not disobedience. Nothing written anywhere makes a low daily fear a mark of wakefulness, and the Spirit is described as producing peace rather than a response in the stomach to somebody else's headline.

And the two women are not fools and they are not enemies. One of them prayed you through the worst year of your life, and that is real, and it does not make her right about this. People can be entirely trustworthy in one thing and mistaken in another, and holding both at once is ordinary Christian maturity rather than disloyalty.

What watching actually is

Here is the correction, and it is not a smaller version of what they told you.

The watchfulness language in the New Testament is about how a person lives, not about what they monitor. The contrast in those passages is never between the informed and the uninformed. It is between people living as though nothing is coming and people living as though somebody is.

Which means the awake person in your church might well be somebody who has never read a single one of those accounts and who forgives quickly, keeps her promises, gives away money, and looks after her neighbor as somebody who expects to meet Christ.

That is what the word means. It has been quietly redefined, over about a century, into a research activity, and the redefinition is so complete that a woman who stops the research thinks she has stopped being awake.

It is worth noticing how recent that is. For most of the history of the church nobody had access to what is happening anywhere else in the world on a given morning, and the passages about watchfulness were preached and obeyed the whole time by people who could not possibly have been monitoring anything. Whatever the word means, it has to be something available to a woman in a village who never heard a single piece of news from outside it, and that rules out the version you were handed.

You have not fallen asleep. What is written defines it as a way of living rather than as a subject to follow, and the Spirit produces that way of living rather than a browser history.