Simply Ask

What do you do when crisis comes? Do you call a friend? A parent? Your brother or sister? Undoubtedly, you reach out to someone trusted. Someone resourceful, someone knowledgeable, someone wise—who knows how to patiently listen, carefully sort you out, and take action.

And (of course) good friends do this for one another, too. We consider our network of contacts and ponder who might be most beneficial for a friend in need. Who can we appeal to who has faced a similar challenge? Or worked in a similar field? Or experienced similar suffering?

Friends, I’ll level with you—too often when crisis comes, this is the often first response that comes to my mind. I’m prone to forget the most basic reality of my new life in Christ. That the God who upholds the universe by the word of his power, cares about me. Isn’t that amazing? He cares for us. A lot. In fact, more than we can even possibly imagine. He is not simply resourceful and knowledgable and patient and wise—he’s familiar with every temptation and acquainted with every grief. He “gets” us. He knows our needs and the needs of others immeasurably better than we do. And what do the Cross, the resurrection, the outpouring of the very Spirit of Christ at Pentecost demonstrate, if not that he will stop at nothing to give us what we need?

And the Father doesn’t care simply about the big things—the cancer diagnosis, the lost job, or the death of a friend. Because the big things in life are made up of countless little things. The small aches and pains, the petty snub and the lost promotion, the friends who pick up and move many miles away. He cares about broken toys and broken bodies and broken systems and broken hearts. Jesus didn’t call us to cast only our biggest anxieties on him. He wants them all (1Pet 5:12).

And Jesus tells us this when he teaches us how to pray in Luke 11. The inclination to ask him for the basic things like our daily bread leads us to ask him for world-shaking things like the coming of his Kingdom. For, as Jesus says in Luke 11:10, “everyone who asks, receives, and the one who seeks, finds, and to the one who knocks, it will be opened.”

So, the exhortation this morning is simple. Ask. Keep on asking. Help each other keep on asking. Not only for the big things, but for the small things that make up the big things. For the humility to know how much we really need to ask. For the grace to repent for not asking enough.

Friends, we’ve not even begun to understand the blessing God has for us—if we would simply ask. In fact, the only way our church will transform these cities—the only way that we’ll have courage to share the gospel, to confess our sins, to repent, to give sacrificially, to serve perseveringly, to make it to the end—is for the Father to pour out his Spirit upon us. And when we ask for his Spirit, he delights in answering (Lk 11:13).