QUESTIONS JESUS NEVER ASKED

How is your walk with God? 

It's a question that wraps around you like a blood pressure cuff, and the way you answer it says something about your success or failure. 

If I answered "It Sucks! Then it stands to reason that I'm doing something wrong. 

Are you reading enough? Are you remembering God IS Good? Are you praying? What about attending church services? 

Ask me about my walk with God these days, and I mostly hem and haw. I don’t know what to tell you about the state of my faith, which seems to ebb and flow with the seasons and the hours and the moments of my daily life.

While I recognize the importance of the spiritual disciplines of prayer and quiet and Scripture reading, I no longer believe that they correlate directly to that vibrant, heady spirituality that I used to frame as “success.”

I’m not even sure that “walk” is the truest metaphor for my particular spiritual journey. So many days it doesn’t feel like I’m moving anywhere – forward or backward. Rather I’m just here, still – waiting for something like faith to grow inside of me.

It seems truer to talk about my faith life as a tree – so dependent on the soil and the weather and the rain and the sun. Dormant during long stretches of the year, but reaching ever toward a hope I cannot fully understand. My faith is not a movement – a walking toward. The growth is so slow and quiet that you’d never even notice that it’s happening.

Out of curiosity this week, I Googled questions that Jesus asked. I wanted to know if this How’s your walk with God question had any biblical grounding, and so I read through several lists compiled by pastors and bloggers and theologians.

(Here's the list I love to read: The Questions of Christ) 

Reading through Jesus’ questions, so odd and beautiful, so simple and complex, I was arrested by him all over again. I found myself in quiet awe of Jesus who asks:

Who are you looking for? (John 20:15)

Who do you say that I am? (Matthew 16:13-15)

“Why are you so afraid?” (Matthew 8:26)

"Where is your faith?" (Luke 8:25) 

"Why are you sleeping?" (Luke 22:46) 

This is the Jesus who doesn’t, in the end, ask How’s you’re walk with God? Nor does he ask How’s your prayer life? Are you doing your devotions? Are you in the Word? Are you plugged in to a church?

In fact, none of his questions seem posed to assess the spiritual "performance" of the people he’s talking to. Instead, they reach deeper, toward desire and identity.

His questions reach into the hidden places, the unwell places, the broken places – not to suggest that we get it together, but to show us that HE is holding it together for us.

He is asking: “What do you want me to do for you?” (Matthew 20:32-22)

He is asking “Do you want to get well?” (John 5:6)

We need Jesus' questions to remind us it’s not our job to fix ourselves. Our work, despite the mixed messages from our DIY culture, is not to give one another spiritual health assessments and then offer 10 steps toward better faith.

Rather, our work has to do with making space for Christ, with making space for healing after we have suffered, with offering grace and mercy, kindness and love.

Ask better questions, sweet pea. Ask them to yourself. Ask them to one another. Ask the questions Jesus asked. Ask that which you cannot answer and then be quiet........

Wait for the whispering of God’s love to fill in all the gaps.......

He always answers. 

"Who do you say that I am?" 

This is an Iced double shot espresso. 

Robbs