Halfway Up the Hill

"Walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh." (Galatians 5:16)

Every rider knows the hill. You are moving along the flat, you see it coming, and you do the only thing there is to do. You pedal hard, build every ounce of speed you can, and throw yourself at it, hoping momentum will carry you up. And it does, for a while. Then the ground steepens, the momentum bleeds out, and you have to change gears and actually climb. For most riders the legs give out about halfway, and the rest of the way is spent off the seat, pushing the bike to the top, breathing hard.

That is most of our praying, if we are honest. We hit it with everything we have, in our own strength, and we run out halfway up, and the rest is a grim shove toward a summit we are no longer sure we will reach. We call it discipline. Often it is only momentum, and momentum always runs out.

But watch the word Paul chooses for life in the Spirit. He does not say driven. He does not say pushed. He says led. Led is a different thing entirely. Driven is force applied from behind, the whip, the will, the last of your own strength. Led is something out ahead of you, drawing you forward, so the power is no longer coming from your spent legs.

This is the difference between a prayer life you generate and a prayer life you receive. One ends halfway up the hill. The other is drawn to the top by Someone stronger than you, who was never depending on your momentum in the first place. So stop trying to power up the hill on your own. Ask to be led up it.

The Proving Ground

"Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made." (Genesis 3:1)

Was that not the test in the garden? Not the fruit. The silence. Adam and Eve stand among everything they have been given, and God is not there arguing his case. He has already spoken. He said what he said, and then he stopped, and into that quiet the serpent came, and the serpent's whole strategy was to reinterpret a silence. Did God really say. Is God really good. Is he holding something back from you.

And God was not absent. He was present, and silent, and watching. Picture it, and admit you are picturing, but picture it: God watching them stand at that tree with the whole world already given to them, saying with his whole heart, love me, do not choose this, do not choose to stop trusting me, I have given you everything you ever needed. And his heart breaking as the hand went out.

He has spent every day from that one to this one reminding us that he loves us still. But the shape of the test has not changed. It still comes in the quiet. When God has spoken and then gone silent, a voice arrives to reinterpret the silence, to whisper that quiet must mean he is not good, or not near, or holding out on you.

So understand what the silence is. It is not the absence of God. It is the proving ground of your reliance, the place where it is decided whether you will trust what he has already said, or believe the voice that always shows up the moment he stops speaking.

The Intimacy of Silence

"Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding." (Proverbs 3:5)

Here is a hard sentence. If Jesus must give you an exact answer to every prayer, then he cannot yet trust you with the intimacy of his silence. Read it again, slowly.

We think of the silence as a withholding, a punishment, an absence, or at best a delay. And so we grade our prayer lives by what we can point at. This is the answer. This is what he did. Look what came through. But if the only time we will trust God is when he hands us what we asked for, and the only answers we will accept are the ones our senses can verify, then we are living in a very elementary view of grace. That is a child's faith, and there is no shame in beginning there, for every one of us does, and God is patient with beginners.

But he has more for you than the beginning. There is a kind of nearness that exists only in the quiet, a knowing between two people who no longer need to fill the room with words. A husband and wife find it after twenty years. Old friends have it on a porch, saying nothing, and closer for it. That intimacy cannot be given to a person who demands proof every time, because the demand keeps the whole relationship at the level of a transaction.

So turn the question around from the one you have been asking. You have been asking whether you can trust God in the silence. Ask instead whether he can trust you with it, whether he can be quiet with you and know you will not go looking for a god who talks more.

Building the Stage

"So when he heard that Lazarus was sick, he stayed where he was two more days." (John 11:6)

God may be silent, but silent is not the same as absent, and four hundred years will prove it. The book of Malachi closes the Old Testament, and then the curtain comes down, and nothing is said. No prophet, no word, no whisper, for four centuries. A whole people, generation after generation, born and married and buried, and God does not speak.

And look at what was happening inside the silence. Alexander conquered the known world, and the known world learned to speak Greek, so that one language now ran from end to end. Then Rome imposed peace by sheer weight, so that a relative quiet lay over the same vast space. And then Rome built roads, real roads, a system that let a man cross the empire faster than anyone before him. So when God at last spoke again, and the Word became flesh, and the men in the upper room received the Spirit and went out to tell the world what had happened, they found a common language waiting, a road to walk, and enough peace to be heard.

God was not idle for four hundred years. He was building the stage. And if that is what he was doing in the silence of an age, do not be so quick to read your own silence as neglect. The quiet in which you hear nothing may be the very season in which he is arranging everything, laying the roads and setting the timing that your answer, when it comes, will travel on.

You Did Not Pray It Wrong

"Lord, the one you love is sick." (John 11:3)

Here is one of the enemy's oldest tricks, and it works best on the sincere. You pray, and nothing happens, and in the silence a voice begins to suggest that perhaps you prayed it wrong. Maybe your motive was off. Maybe you asked for the wrong thing. Maybe there is a hidden sin or a technical flaw in the petition, and if you could only find it and fix it, the answer would come.

Now, some things do hinder prayer, and Scripture says so plainly. Unforgiveness. Unconfessed sin. Selfish intent. Ignoring the Word entirely and then arriving with a demand. Peter even tells husbands that the way they treat their wives can obstruct their prayers, which ought to sober every married man. Those hindrances are real. Do not pretend they are not, and do not skip the honest examination.

But that is not what is happening to most of us in the waiting. Look at Mary and Martha. Were they wrong to ask Jesus to come? Of course not. They wanted the best thing a person can want, the presence of Jesus in the worst hour of their lives. There is nothing more right to ask for. They asked perfectly. And he waited anyway.

So when the silence comes, do not immediately turn the blame inward and go rummaging through your prayer for the defect that explains it. Examine yourself, yes. But then rest. Sometimes the silence is no verdict on your asking at all. Sometimes the most faithful prayer, prayed by the most loving heart, is met with a wait, and the wait is not a punishment.

Because He Loved Them, He Waited

"So when he heard that Lazarus was sick, he stayed where he was two more days." (John 11:6)

There was a time when waiting was simply the shape of a life. A connection to the wider world had to be built each time, with sound and delay. A call came, and you did not know who it was until you picked it up. A dial turned all the way around, one number at a time, and a single mistake meant starting over. Waiting was not a failure of the system. It was the system. We have nearly lost the skill, and losing it has made us worse at prayer, because prayer still runs on the old system.

Watch what John does in this passage, because it is almost cruel in its plainness. The sisters send word: Lord, the one you love is sick. It is a good message, honest and urgent and full of faith. Then verse five says that Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. And then verse six says, so, when he heard that Lazarus was sick, he stayed where he was two more days.

Read those verses against each other and do not rush past the hinge. So. Because he loved them, he waited. That is not the sentence any of us would have written. We would have written, because he loved them, he came at once. But it is the sentence that is there, and it means the delay was not the failure of his love. It was an expression of it. So when he waits with you, do not conclude that he does not care. The waiting itself may be the love, doing something for you that you cannot yet see.

The Word and the Son

"Blessed are all who take refuge in him." (Psalm 2:12)

Every garden has a gate, and the Psalms tell you exactly where theirs is. Psalm 1 and Psalm 2 are the archway. Neither is really about a single subject; they are the two pillars you walk between to get in, and each hands you something you will need once you are inside. Psalm 1 hands you the Word of God: blessed is the one whose delight is in the law of the Lord, who meditates on it day and night. Psalm 2 hands you the Son of God: it ends with the nations raging and the kings scheming, and then it turns and says, blessed are all who take refuge in him. The Word and the Son. That is what you carry through the arch.

There is another way people try to get in, and it does not work, though most of us have tried it. You can come to prayer wanting an outcome, wanting a resolution, wanting God to do a particular thing on a particular timeline, and you can climb the wall and get in that way. But you will find nothing inside except your own anxiety wearing a religious hat. The garden was never a vending machine, where the right sequence of words drops the desired result into the tray.

You come in with the Word, and you come in with the Son, and you come in to be with someone. That is the whole point of the place. Everything else that grows there, every comfort and correction and joy, grows only because you came for him and not for it.

A Rose the Color of Your Grief

"Blessed is the one whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and who meditates on his law day and night." (Psalm 1:1-2)

The book of Psalms is a rose garden. That is not a phrase reached for to be pretty. It is what the book actually is: one hundred and fifty poems, five books, many hands, and somewhere in it a flower waiting for every situation a human being can face. An English clergyman named Samuel Reynolds Hole grew the most famous rose garden in his country, and in 1869 he wrote a book about how it was done. He described what such a garden becomes with time and care: beds and fountains and hedges of roses, white and blush and crimson and scarlet, roses of a glowing gold and roses almost black. What a diversity, he said, and yet what a harmony.

That is the Psalter. There is a rose in there the color of your grief. There is one the color of the morning you could not stop laughing. There is one so dark you will not want to look at it, and God set it in the book on purpose, because he did not want you to face that color alone. This is what it means to meditate on his Word day and night: not to study the garden from the road, but to live among the flowers until they become the language your own heart prays in.

But here is the plain thing we forget. No one has ever enjoyed a garden he did not walk into. You can own a book of Psalms, respect it, even defend it, and never once go in among the roses. The gate has been standing open the whole time. Do not admire this garden from the road. Enter it, and walk, until you find the flower planted for the exact thing you are carrying today.

An Obedience That Costs Your Expertise

"And Jesus said to Simon, Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching men." (Luke 5:10)

Peter had fished all night and caught nothing. Then a carpenter climbed into his boat and told a professional fisherman where to fish, in the middle of the day, out in the deep water, which is exactly the wrong time and the wrong place, and any man in the trade would have known it. And Peter did it anyway.

That is the hinge of the whole story, and everything after it hangs on that one act, a man doing the thing that made no sense to him in the very place where he was the expert. The nets came up so full they began to tear. The other boat had to come. Both boats began to sink under the weight of it. And Peter, standing knee deep in more fish than he had ever seen, does not celebrate. He falls down and says, depart from me, I am a sinful man.

That is what happens when a man gets close enough to see who is actually in the boat with him. He does not feel worthy. He feels exposed. The blessing did not make him confident. The blessing made him aware. And Jesus does not leave. He says, do not be afraid.

This is where surrender begins, and notice where it begins: on a boat Peter owned, in water he knew, doing a thing he was certain would not work. It did not start with a decision made in a tent. It started with an obedience that cost him his expertise. That is usually where it starts for us too. Not with agreeing to something, but with letting Christ overrule the one place where you were sure you already knew better.

On His Terms

"When Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus' knees, saying, Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord." (Luke 5:8)

Are you willing to come to Jesus on his terms? The question matters, because we have quietly built a version of the faith that lets people come to him on theirs, and I do not think it was done on purpose. It was done out of urgency. We wanted him accessible. We wanted the door wide. And somewhere in the widening, we made him optional. Pray this prayer. Sign this card. Raise your hand while every head is bowed.

There is a familiar scene at the county fair. A tent, big letters, free gifts, and the stated goal of winning souls, which is a thing any Christian should want. But the method is often this: stop the people walking past, share a few lines, and if they say yes, write the name on a list, hand them a small gift, and move to the next one. Names collected. Heads bowed. A prayer said. And then they are sent back out into a world that will eat them alive, and no one follows up, no one disciples them, no one walks with them.

It is not that God cannot save a person in a field in an afternoon. He can, and he does. The ache is over what usually happens next, which is nothing. A decision was gathered, but no one was made a disciple.

So ask it honestly, of your own faith first. Is that what following Jesus has been reduced to, a prayer, a pamphlet, and a free gift? Or have you come to him on his terms, which is not to add him to your life but to fall at his knees and hand it over?

No Third Category

"Death and life are in the power of the tongue." (Proverbs 18:21)

We have to become mindful of what our words are doing to people, because they are doing something, always, whether we intended it or not. We can use words to speak life. We can use words to speak death. There is no third category. There is no neutral. There is only what is happening in another person's chest after you have stopped talking, and you do not control it, and you cannot take it back, and very often you will never even find out.

And here is a question worth not putting down. If Jesus is truly in us, would not our words also speak Jesus out of us? Take it not as a flourish but as a test. If the Spirit of the living God has taken up residence in a person, and if what fills a heart is what finally comes out of the mouth, then the things you say when you are tired, and the things you say when you are angry, and the things you say in a low voice about someone who is not there, are all telling you something true about what is actually in you.

Not what you hope is in you. What is in you. The mouth is the most honest instrument you own. It reports the true contents of the heart, especially when you have stopped guarding it.

Most of us do not always like what our mouth reports. But the answer is not to argue with the report. It is to let it drive us back to the only One who can change what is in the well, so that what comes up out of it is life. Ask him to fill the heart with himself, and then listen this week to what your words reveal is really there.

And the Lord Heard It

"And the Lord heard it." (Numbers 12:2)

That is nearly the whole verse, and it is the shortest and most terrifying line in the chapter. They spoke against Moses. And the Lord heard it. Not, someone told him. Not, it got back to him eventually, the way these things do. He was there. He stood in the room the entire time their voices were low.

Whispers seem small. That is their nature and their disguise. A whisper is the smallest unit of speech, a thing so quiet it barely counts, a thing you can say and then honestly tell yourself you did not really say. But the echo of it is not small. The echo can shatter a friendship. The echo can reach a person's children. The echo can go on sounding in a marriage or a family or a church for years after the two who started it have forgotten they ever opened their mouths.

And notice who is speaking. Miriam and Aaron were not strangers to Moses. This was his sister and his brother, the two people on earth who had known him longest, who had watched him lead a nation out of slavery. The people closest to us do the most damage, precisely because they are the ones who have the material.

So before you say the small thing about the person who is not in the room, settle one fact in your mind. There is no such thing as a private conversation. The quietest word you speak is spoken in the hearing of God, and it does not die when the whisper ends. It goes on echoing. Say only what you would be willing to have heard.

The Whisper

"Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses because of the Cushite woman whom he had married." (Numbers 12:1)

You have walked into that room. Everyone has. Two people you know have their heads close together, whispering, and when you come near their eyes drop, or their voices jump suddenly bright and high and they ask how your weekend was. And you know.

The truth is that nearly all of us, in the course of an ordinary conversation, say something about someone who is not there. Most of it is harmless, only information moving between people. Some of it is even good, a kind word handed to a stranger about a person he has not yet met. But there is another kind, and the other kind has a purpose, and the purpose is to raise me by lowering you. It creates a small false warmth, two people bonding over a shared low opinion of a third and feeling closer for it, and calling it honesty.

That is what Miriam and Aaron did about the woman their brother had married. They were not strangers to Moses. They were his sister and his brother. And they got their heads together and talked about his wife, quietly, in a whisper, the way we do when some part of us already knows the thing should not be said aloud.

The whisper is the tell. We lower the voice precisely because we know. So the next time two heads lean together and the third person is not in the room, ask what the whisper is for. If its purpose is to lift you by lowering someone else, it is not honesty and it is not closeness. It is the oldest way there is of pulling a person down while feeling good about yourself.

The Bill With No Invoice

"Life does not consist in an abundance of possessions." (Luke 12:15)

We are used to thinking of wealth as a blessing, and here especially, and we rarely notice how much of that we absorbed from our country rather than from our Bible. God is not saying wealth is evil. Abraham had great wealth and is our father in faith. David was a king and a man after God's own heart. Money is not the enemy. What God says is, beware. Beware, because it is a dangerous thing to want more.

And the danger does not arrive looking like a warning. It arrives looking like a promotion. More from the work also means more responsibility. More responsibility means more hours. More hours means more time away from the very people you were working for in the first place. The raise comes with a bill attached, and no one itemizes it, and you pay it in a currency you do not think of as money, which is the only reason you are willing to spend so much of it.

That is exactly how the carrot works. You get it. You actually get it. And getting it quietly costs you the thing you wanted it for, and you do not notice for years, because no one ever sends the invoice. The loss is real, but it is never billed.

So this is not a sermon against money, which is not evil, and which you would not believe anyway. It is one question, and it is worth sitting still with. What did your last raise cost you? Not what did it pay. What did it cost, and did anyone ever send you the bill, or are you only now beginning to add it up?

What You Tell Your Soul

"But God said to him, You fool! This night your soul is required of you." (Luke 12:20)

The man in the parable does nothing wrong. Say that clearly, because we assume he must have cheated someone, and he did not. His land produced. That is all. The ground was good, the rain came, the harvest was enormous, and he had a genuine problem: he had nowhere to put it. So he made a plan, a sensible plan. Tear down the small barns, build bigger ones, store it all, secure the future. Any of us would have done it. Most of us are doing it.

Then listen to what he says to himself, because the whole tragedy of the man is in one sentence. Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years. Take your ease. Eat, drink, be merry. He is talking to his own soul. And he is telling it that it is safe now, that the barns will hold it, that grain is enough to keep a soul alive.

That is the fool of it. Not the wealth. Not the barns. The moment a man looks at a warehouse and tells his own soul that it can finally rest there. A soul cannot live on grain, and it cannot be secured by anything you can lock inside a building. And God says, tonight. Not eventually. Tonight your soul is required of you, and all you have prepared, whose will it be?

The barns stood for years. Someone else ate the grain. So hear the question the parable is actually asking, the one underneath the money. What have you been telling your soul is enough to rest on? Because if it is anything you can store, the night will prove it could never hold a soul.

Friend, First

"But he said to him, Friend, who appointed me a judge or arbitrator over you?" (Luke 12:14)

Notice one word, because it is easy to miss. Before Jesus warns this man, before he says a single thing about greed, before the parable of the soul demanded in the night, he calls him something. Friend.

Look at the situation. The man has interrupted Jesus in the middle of teaching to ask him to referee a family fight about money. He is not there to learn. He is there to win. He wants Jesus to be a hammer he can swing at his brother, and Jesus sees the whole tangled, grasping heart of it in a single glance. And the first word out of his mouth is friend. Then, and only then, watch out.

That is the order, and the order is no accident. The warning comes wrapped in the address. He does not say fool, though he will use that word in a moment, and when he does he will use it of a man in a story rather than the man in front of him, which is its own kind of mercy. He tells him the truth. But he tells it to him as a friend.

This is worth carrying into every hard conversation you owe someone. Truth without friendship wounds and does not heal; it is only being right out loud. Truth inside friendship can be received, because the other can feel that you are for him even as you say the hard thing. So before you say the true thing to someone who needs to hear it, ask what your first word will be. Are you saying it as a friend, or are you only right?

Just a Little More

"One's life is not in the abundance of his possessions." (Luke 12:15)

Ask anyone what it means to be rich, and however they dress it up, you will get the same answer. Rich is more than I have now. No one has ever said rich is having less. No one has ever said rich is exactly what I hold at this moment. Rich is always a little further out than where you are standing, which means rich is not an amount at all. It is a moving target, and it moves at precisely your speed.

A younger man is certain that if he could just cross one particular line of income, that would be enough. Then the raise comes, and he crosses it, and it is not enough, because the line has already moved. And it moves again. Every time he gets more, the line slides further out, and he needs more, and he would tell you with a straight face that this time is different. So how much do you need to be happy? Just a little more. It is always just a little more.

That is exactly what the man in Luke 12 was asking for. Tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me. He wanted his share, what he was owed. And Jesus refuses to settle the estate, because Jesus is not interested in the estate. He looks past the request and names the thing sitting in the man's blind spot. Greed.

The man did not need more. He needed a friend who loved him enough to tell him what was in the mirror. And so do you, because the target will never stop moving, and no sum you reach will ever be the sum. Ask instead where your life actually is, since Jesus says it was never in the abundance at all.

The Blind Spot

"Watch out and be on guard against all greed, for one's life is not in the abundance of his possessions." (Luke 12:15)

Every car has a blind spot. There is a place just beside you where a whole automobile can sit completely unseen, and unless you turn your head and look back over your shoulder you will never know it is there. So you move to merge, and the horn blares, and you mouth an apology through the glass, because you truly did not see them. Some cars now light a small triangle in the mirror and beep when the lane is not clear. Left to ourselves, we have no such warning.

There are blind spots in the soul as well, places where we are deceived and do not know it. And here is the hard thing said plainly: there may be a blind spot deceiving you at this very moment, and you cannot see it, and only other people can. That is what a blind spot is. It is not a sin you are ignoring. It is a thing you are structurally unable to see from where you sit.

Which means you cannot fix this one alone. You cannot introspect your way out of a blindness, because the blindness covers the very place you would need to look. You need someone in the car with you, close enough and honest enough to turn the radio down and say, there is something beside you that you cannot see.

So the question is not whether you have blind spots. You do. The question is whether you have let anyone near enough to name them. Do you have that person? Or have you slowly arranged your life so that no one is close enough to beep?

What It Is Built On

"What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed, and in that I rejoice." (Philippians 1:18)

Paul writes this from prison, and it is worse than prison, because there are men on the outside preaching Christ precisely to make his chains hurt more. Rivals. Men using the gospel as a weapon against a man who cannot answer back, out of envy and ambition, hoping to afflict him while he sits helpless. And what does he say about them? He says Christ is being preached, and I rejoice.

It should stop us, because most of us cannot do it. Someone takes a shot at us and we carry it for a week. Someone builds himself up by pulling us down and we rehearse the conversation in the shower for days. But Paul looks straight through their motives and finds Christ standing behind them, and that is enough for him. Actually enough.

Comfort has become so treasured a thing in our faith that we can scarcely grasp that faith might be uncomfortable, that it might cost, that the way forward might require us to see past a whole cloud of unfairness and misrepresentation, find Christ above it, and keep walking. Paul could do that because his life was not built on being treated fairly. It was built on Christ, and Christ was not going anywhere, and so neither was he.

The question is not whether you will be treated unfairly. You will. The question is what your life is built on underneath the unfairness, because a life built on fair treatment collapses the first time the treatment is unfair. What is yours built on? You will find out the day it is taken.

When the Comfort Goes

"Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ." (Philippians 1:27)

We live in a culture unashamedly committed to comfort. Get better things. Build a bigger house. Book the next vacation before this one has ended. Maximize the safety and minimize the friction. From every direction the same dream is pressed on us, a life without friction, and it seeps so quietly into faith that we seldom say it out loud. So say it out loud and test it. Does following Christ lead to your ultimate comfort in this life? Is being a Christian a promise of an easier road?

If we are honest, that is close to what many of us signed up for, whether we would admit it or not, and it is the unnamed assumption beneath a hundred small disappointments with God. Here is the part that should sober every one of us. A person can have a good family and good standing, a nice house and a healthy retirement, real knowledge of the Bible and genuine belief in Jesus. A person can come on Sunday when it is convenient, feel the hair rise on the back of the neck during a song, take the sacrament, serve on a team, do every good thing the faith offers, and still not have a life centered on Christ. The mind knows. The heart has never recognized.

And the only way any of us ever finds out which one we are is when the comfort goes. Comfort insulates the question. Loss exposes it. When the house, the health, the standing, the ease are stripped back, what remains standing is what was actually at the center all along. So do not wait for the stripping to find out. Ask now, while it is easy, whether you are following Christ or following comfort, and move him to the center on purpose, before loss does it for you.