Think back to when you first became a Christian. For some of you that was a long while ago and for some of you it was recent. When you first started down that road, did you have any idea how long the road would be? How many twists and turns, how many potholes and sinkholes, how much of it would run through dark and shadowy country? Did you know how often you would stumble and fall and scrape your knees and your hands and your face, and break a few things along the way?
I did not. I had no idea what following him might entail.
Most of us do not. We hear the good news, and it is good news — forgiveness, grace, mercy, love, joy, peace, heaven when we die — and we sign on for that. All of it is true. Then the hard times come and we find ourselves thinking, wait a minute, I signed on for the good version. Nobody mentioned this business of taking up your cross daily. Maybe we left that part out when you came to Jesus. It is every bit as much a part of following him as the rest.
Fortunately he does not send us out without directions. Three words this morning: God guides, God provides, God abides.
God guides us if we ask
If your goal in life is to fit in, forget about following Jesus. You can do one or you can do the other. You cannot do both.
Ask, and it will be given to you. Seek, and you will find. Knock, and it will be opened. Bear with me for a grammar lesson: those are three present imperatives in the active voice. Which means do it — and keep doing it. Keep asking. Keep seeking. Keep knocking.
Some of that guidance is about how we talk to people who do not believe what we believe, and here is the thing it took me years to learn: you have to actually listen to them.
Years ago, when the New Age movement first became a thing, I did an intensive study of it. I read their books rather than critiques of their books — you would not try to understand Christianity by reading only its critics. I read Shirley MacLaine, who is by some distance the most fascinating person Shirley MacLaine has ever known. And I made a point of getting to know some actual New Agers.
A friend of a friend introduced me to a woman working in Coconut Grove who was about as hardcore as they come. If I told you what she believed you would not credit that an intelligent adult could believe it. So I sat and listened. For an hour I let her tell me everything, and I asked questions, and here and there I gently suggested that some of it did not seem to comport with reality. Then I thanked her for her time and got up to go.
She said: wait a minute — aren't you going to tell me what you believe?
I would be glad to. And I got that only because I had listened first. Had I spent the hour arguing and pointing out how shallow and inconsistent it all was, that door would have shut.
The other half is being ready to say what you believe, and there are no shortcuts there. Read the Bible. Get into a study. It helps to know your stuff. And if you are new at this and afraid of the hard questions, remember that you are the world's leading authority on you. My life was like this, I met Jesus, my life is like that. Do not glamorize it. Do not Hollywood-ize it. They may not like it, but they cannot tell you it did not happen.
God provides what we really need
So do we always get what we ask for? No. We do not.
Read those verses in isolation and they sound like a promise that failed. Keep them in context and remember that even Jesus did not get what he prayed for in the garden. My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me — nevertheless, not my will but yours. The cup did not pass.
And thank God. If Jesus had received what he asked for that night there would have been no atoning sacrifice, and we would all be lost. The Father knew what the Son needed to do. We are not omniscient. We do not know the beginning from the end or any of the what-ifs. God may lead us through something we would never choose, knowing that without it something else that must happen will not.
There is a small poem from 1859. Said the robin to the sparrow, I would really like to know why these anxious human beings rush about and worry so. Said the sparrow to the robin, friend, I think that it must be that they have no heavenly Father such as cares for you and me.
Which of you, if his son asks for bread, gives him a stone? Nobody. Well — parents, there may be a moment or two when you feel like it. But you do not. And then Jesus reasons from lesser to greater: if you, being what you are, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more your heavenly Father. Think of the best father you have ever known. Take every good quality he had and multiply it by about a trillion.
God abides by his own rules
Whatever God requires of us, he has met himself. Hebrews says we do not have a high priest unable to sympathize with our weaknesses. He has been here. He is still, at the Father's right hand, fully God and fully man. Whatever you are struggling with, he understands it from the inside.
Dorothy Sayers wrote an essay a hundred years ago called The Greatest Drama Ever Staged, and her argument is that whatever game God is playing with his creation, "he has kept his own rules and played fair" — asking nothing of us that he has not asked of himself. He went through the whole of it, from the trivial irritations of family life and the grind of no money, down to humiliation, despair and death. Born in poverty, dead in disgrace, and he thought it was worth doing.
Because he thought you were worth it.
