It’s fascinating to watch God open someone’s eyes to the Truth of the gospel when they have been schooled in religious performance all their lives. They want to believe in the reality of grace, but have so many questions about what they’ve been taught in the past. It’s as if they can’t move on in grace until they get all the questions answered to their intellect’s satisfaction.
Now I’m not one to despise the intellect. God gave us a brain for a reason. I love people who ask questions and try to sort out things in ways that make sense. But if we’re going to wait for all our questions to be answered before we move on down the road with him, I’m afraid some of us will never move.
Easter morning Sara and I stole a few, quiet moments on our patio in the cool of the day. We read the resurrection story from Luke. What a day. Women reported an empty tomb, but Peter hadn’t found anything there. Two brothers have a conversation with a man on the road, they later recognized was Jesus. Finally Jesus appears to them all at the end of the day. He came through the wall into their room and they behold him. And some of the first words out of his mouth were something I think we all need to hear in our own context:
“Don’t be upset and don’t let all those doubting questions take over.” (Luke 24:38, THE MESSAGE)
In the presence of the Resurrected Christ, they had a choice. Embrace him and let him resolve your questions and concerns in the going, or settle back in those doubting questions and never take the journey to begin with. If we’re really looking to follow Jesus, would he allow us to be deceived by a false grace? If we ask the Father for bread, will he let us pick up a stone instead?
So many brothers and sisters I know get paralyzed when they haven’t figured out answers to every question, about something they sense him leading them to do, or even just believing that the Gospel of grace, is simply that. What if we trusted Jesus to sort out our questions in the going, rather than having them all answered before we head out? We talked on a podcast a few weeks ago about the gap many people talk about between their head and their heart. I have been asked countless times, “How do I get what I know in my head, into my heart?”
Robert, a friend of mine from Virginia, suggested that perhaps God’s love is won in our heart (Romans 5:5), not our heads. Instead of trying to get our heads to convince our hearts of a reality, perhaps the greater freedom is to let our hearts when over our heads. Our hearts already know how loved we are by him. Our hearts already bear witness to his reality. It’s our heads that have a hard time catching up.
Questions can be important, but we must not let them rule the day. Instead, embrace the One your heart already knows. Live out of that reality and you’ll find your questions will get sorted out in the going. Try to answer all your questions first, and you’ll never get anywhere on this journey.
