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 22:39-42 · Adapted from a sermon preached June 5, 2022.

I will tell on myself. I am a man who craves comfort. Ask my wife. Every day I come home, peel off my jeans, pull on the old stretchy gym shorts, and let out the long sigh that is the international language of oh yes, that is better. Stretchy shorts are the best of both worlds. I am dressed, and I am comfortable, and nothing is restricting me. I mention it because I think most of us are wired the same way. We are people who crave comfort. And that instinct, harmless enough when it comes to shorts, turns dangerous the moment it wanders into our walk with God.

Peter saw the danger and named it. Writing to believers who were being tested by fire, he says, do not slip back into your old ways of living to satisfy your own desires. Slip back. The word assumes a drift, a slow sliding, the kind that happens when you stop paying attention. And what he is warning us not to slide back into is the old life, the one we were saved from. Hard hearts. Spiritual sickness. A love of darkness. The frightening thing is that it is possible to drift back toward the very thing Christ pulled us out of. And I have become convinced it happens most easily not in a season of open rebellion, but in a season of comfort, when we have quietly decided we are content with where we are.

Here is the thing about holiness. It was never a call into a comfortable life. Peter says, 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 walking, often uncomfortably, deeper into the life of God. So the question I want to put to you, and to myself, is a simple one. With everything you know by now as a follower of Jesus, are you still pursuing holiness? Or have you reached a comfortable place and quietly stopped?

To see why comfort is such a poor goal, we have to remember what actually happened to us. When we were born again the Spirit came to live in us. Our bodies became his temple, the place where his presence dwells. Paul says in Romans 6 that we were united with Christ in his death so that we might be united with him in his life. We died with Christ, and now we live with Christ, and his Spirit lives in us. And here is what I had never stopped to consider. If his Spirit lives in me, then his resources are mine too. The riches of heaven are not somewhere far off. They have moved in.

Which raises an uncomfortable question. What do we actually treasure most? Our homes, our spouses, our children? I like to think I am a trophy husband, though you would have to ask my wife. If we are honest, Christ is often not at the top of the list, and that is a strange thing to admit when Christ himself lives within us. Listen to how Jesus puts it in Luke 11. If your son asks for a fish, will you hand him a snake? If he asks for an egg, will you give him a scorpion? If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him.

I read that verse for years and it never quite landed. I thought, that is a nice line, but I did not pray for the Holy Spirit. My prayers ran more like this. Lord, I need a new car, because the mice have eaten mine from front to back. Lord, I need twenty dollars for this. Lord, I need a new fridge. Real prayers, honest ones, but always about the provision. And all the while God is offering something better than the provision. He is offering the provider. We ask for comfort in a hard situation, and God says, how about something greater, how about the Comforter. We ask for help, and he offers the Helper. We ask for guidance, and he offers the Guide. We ask for the gift, and he holds out the Giver himself.

What God is teaching us in that verse is to be people who want Jesus more than we want a comfortable life. Because if the presence of Christ does not dwell in us and shape us, it is not his image we will carry into the world. It will be our own fallen image, and that is the one thing the world already has plenty of. I think we pray so often for comfort and so rarely for his presence because, underneath it all, we have not yet learned to treasure what we already have in Christ.

So why does any of this matter? It matters because the same Spirit who moved in is the Spirit who makes us holy. Sanctification is his work, not ours. Not my effort, not my willpower, not my good record. The Spirit is the one who transforms a life into the image of Christ. And the whole of it is the work of the Trinity. The Father planned it before the world began, choosing us in Christ to be holy and blameless in his sight. The Son died to accomplish it, giving himself up to present us holy, without stain or wrinkle. And the Spirit indwells to apply it, working in us day by day. The Father planned, the Son purchased, the Spirit performs.

Notice where all of that is centered. It is centered on Jesus. And this is where the whole matter turns, because a life can claim Christ and never actually be centered on him. That is a sad thing to say, but it is true. A life without the Spirit centers on itself. A life seeking holiness centers on Christ. Paul describes it in 2 Corinthians 3. We, with unveiled faces, beholding the glory of the Lord, 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. Our part is small but real. We behold him through his word and through prayer, we repent, we hand ourselves over. His part is to keep our hearts fixed on Christ and to fan the coals of our affection into flame.

And the more we behold him, the more we become like him. The more we become like him, the more he draws us out of the comfort zone. This does not happen once and finish. Regeneration and sanctification are both initial and continuous. The new birth begins it, and then the same grace has to keep going, day by day, moment by moment, until we no longer want what the world keeps telling us to want. Somewhere along that road God asks the quiet question. Are you mine? I wonder how each of us would answer if we heard him whisper it right now.

Let me show you the most important moment I know of for a question like that. Take Luke 22 and go into the garden called Gethsemane, which means the place of pressing. Jesus is preparing his heart for the cross, and he has a choice to make, the same kind of choice you and I face on a smaller scale. The question in that garden is, who will he behold? Not the enemy, though Satan had promised to return at a more opportune time, and there was never a more opportune time than this. Not the disciples, whom he loved, but could not give from a garden the one thing they needed most. Not himself, though he had every right to. In desperate prayer, Jesus lifted his eyes to his Father and beheld him above everything else in the world.

And listen to what he prays. Father, if you are willing, take this cup of suffering from me. That is the prayer we all know, because it is our everyday prayer. Lord, take this illness. Lord, fix this job. Lord, remove this burden. We are fluent in the first half of that prayer. But Jesus does not stop there. He says one more word. Yet. Yet, not my will, but yours be done. I once heard a preacher picture the hosts of heaven leaning over the railing of glory, watching the Son of God agonize in the dirt, and asking one another, has he reached yet, yet? Because the moment Jesus prayed that word, his heart was aflame again for his Father’s glory, and his basic faith had become a desperate, devoted faith.

That is the question I want to leave with you. Have you reached the point of yet, yet? 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. And here is the promise underneath all of it. Basic faith believes in God, but desperate faith honors God, and God honors desperate faith. So do not settle for the comfortable version. Ask him for his presence, behold his glory until you want nothing else, and pray the whole prayer, all the way to the yet.