The Point of Yet
On comfort, holiness, and the desperate faith that prays not my will, but yours.
Scripture: 1 Peter 1:13-16 · Luke 11:11-13 · Luke 22:39-42 · Adapted from a sermon.
Most people crave comfort. It shows up in small and harmless ways, the change into old clothes at the end of a hard day and the long sigh that means that is better. The instinct is ordinary. It turns dangerous only when it wanders out of the wardrobe and into a person's walk with God, because there it stops being a preference and becomes a goal, and comfort is a poor goal for a Christian. But holiness was never a call into a comfortable life. It is a call to keep walking, often uncomfortably, deeper into the life of God; this walking is the Spirit's work and not an achievement to be manufactured; and the mark of a mature faith is not the prayer for relief but the prayer that adds one more word to it. The whole thing turns on that word, and Jesus prayed it in a garden.
Holiness was never a call into comfort
Peter saw the danger and named it. Writing to believers being tested by fire, he says, do not slip back into your old ways of living to satisfy your own desires. Slip back assumes a drift, a slow sliding that happens when attention lapses, and what he warns against sliding back into is the old life, the hard heart and the love of darkness that Christ pulled a person out of. The unsettling part is that the drift rarely happens in a season of open rebellion. It happens in a season of comfort, once a person has quietly decided he is content where he is. Against that, Peter sets the actual command: be holy in everything you do, just as God who chose you is holy. That is not an invitation to relax into the new birth and coast. It is a call to keep moving. So the question worth putting plainly is this: with everything a person knows by now as a follower of Jesus, is he still pursuing holiness, or has he reached a comfortable place and stopped?
The Provider, not the provision
To see why comfort is such a thin goal, remember what actually happened in conversion. The Spirit came to live in the believer; the body became his temple. Paul says in Romans 6 that we died with Christ so that we might also live with him, and his Spirit now lives in us, which means his resources are not off in some distant heaven. They have moved in. That reframes what a person ought to be asking for. Jesus says in Luke 11 that if a son asks for a fish no good father hands him a snake, and if even flawed parents know how to give good gifts, how much more will the Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask. Most prayers never reach that request. They run toward the provision: the repair, the money, the way out of a hard situation. Those prayers are honest, and asking is invited, so the objection that this is scolding people for ordinary requests misses the point. The point is that God keeps offering something larger than the thing requested. Ask for comfort in a hard place and he offers the Comforter. Ask for help and he offers the Helper. Ask for guidance and he offers the Guide. Ask for the gift and he holds out the Giver. The reason people pray so often for comfort and so rarely for his presence is that they have not yet learned to treasure what they already have in Christ.
Holiness is the Spirit's work, not a performance
There is a second objection, and it runs the opposite direction: if holiness means walking out of the comfort zone, does that not turn the Christian life into striving, a matter of willpower and a good record? It does not, and this is the heart of it. Sanctification is the Spirit's work, not the self's. The Father planned it before the world began, choosing us in Christ to be holy and blameless. The Son purchased it, giving himself to present us without stain. The Spirit performs it, working in us day by day. The Father planned, the Son purchased, the Spirit performs, and none of those verbs belongs to human effort. Paul describes the mechanism in 2 Corinthians 3: beholding the glory of the Lord with unveiled faces, we are being transformed into his likeness from one degree of glory to the next, and this comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit. There is a part that is his and a part that is ours, and the human part is small but real. We behold him in the word and in prayer, we repent, we hand ourselves over. His part is to keep the heart fixed on Christ and to fan the coals of affection into flame. The discomfort of holiness, then, is not the strain of self-improvement. It is what it feels like to be moved by the Spirit further than comfort would ever have taken you.
The point of yet
All of it centers on Jesus, and the clearest picture of what it asks is in a garden called Gethsemane, which means the place of pressing. There Jesus prepares his heart for the cross and faces the same kind of choice, on an infinite scale, that comfort always poses: who will he behold? Not the enemy, not even the disciples he loved, not himself, though he had every right to. In desperate prayer he lifts his eyes to his Father above everything else. And listen to how he prays. Father, if you are willing, take this cup of suffering from me. That half is familiar, because it is the everyday prayer: take this illness, fix this job, remove this burden. Most people are fluent in the first half. But Jesus does not stop there. He adds one word. Yet. Yet not my will, but yours be done (Luke 22:42). That word is the hinge between two kinds of faith. Basic faith believes that God exists and that he is good. Desperate faith honors him, holds nothing back, and wants his glory known in the world more than it wants to be comfortable. The whole argument comes to rest here: comfort asks God to take the cup, and stops; holiness prays through to the yet. Basic faith believes in God, and desperate faith honors God, and God honors desperate faith. So the question to carry out is simple and searching. Have you reached the point of yet, yet? Do not settle for the comfortable version of this life. Ask for his presence rather than only his provision, behold his glory until you want nothing else, and pray the whole prayer, all the way to the yet.