The Questions Jesus Asks: Getting to the Heart of Our Desires

Introduction

We are beginning a new series of messages today around the topic of the questions Jesus asked. The questions he asks in the gospels, and the questions he asks today through the Holy Spirit.

I’ve noticed this for quite sometime in my own relationship with God. I find God regularly asking me questions…

There was one morning while I was praying, quite a number of years ago, and I was asking God to help us, as an entire church, become better at evangelism. We had seen a few people each year make a commitment to follow Jesus with their whole life—a few people a year.

So I was praying that God would allow us to participate in more people making that kind of commitment. And the question popped into my mind, I believe it was the Holy Spirit… “How many do you want?”

That question to my prayer began this several month journey of actually seeing this community, our church become very engaged in helping people make a commitment to reorient their lives toward following Christ.

The Holy Spirit asked me a question that reoriented me, a question that refocused and reignited a passion in our whole community towards evangelism. That question, and a few more that followed, deeply challenged me personally, and helped us to reorient around becoming the kind of church God was inviting us to become.

In this new series of messages, I think that God wants to do something like that in each of us, and in our church community as a whole.

I long for us to get really good at hearing the questions Jesus asks of us. And not just hearing them, but responding to them in ways that reorient our perspectives. I want us to learn how to respond to the Holy Spirit’s questions in ways that allow us to participate in what God’s doing in our midst.

I find it fascinating that we see the very same thing in the Gospels. The gospel that we’ve been studying through for the past several months, the gospel of Mark, was the first one written down.

In Mark, we have 67 episodes of conversations or interactions with people. Even when you carefully count double questions as one…

“whose face is that on the coin? Whose inscription is it printed with?”

…we have 50 questions of Jesus in 67 interactions…that’s a lot of questions, and that pattern holds throughout the gospels.

Listen to this quote from Conrad Gempf, in his book, Jesus Asked,

[SLIDE] “Jesus was a bit different from other religious teachers. Moses wanted to tell you the Law of God. Prophets were always telling you what the Lord was saying. But apparently if you met Jesus on the street, he was more likely to ask you something than to tell you something. Even when other people asked him a question, he often replied with one of his own.” (Jesus Asked, by Conrad Gempf, p.19)

Think about this with me for a moment…[SLIDE] Why do think Jesus asked so many questions?

Here we have the incarnate God-in-the-flesh, the second person of the trinity… I think he probably already know everything!

[SLIDE] Colossians 1:15-17 “The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”

There’s pretty much nothing Jesus doesn’t know, and he’s asking more questions than he is telling people what to do. Why is that?

Jesus’ questions, as we’ll see in more detail throughout this series, are designed poke at us a bit, to force us into getting off the fence we so often find ourselves sitting on… the fence of wanting to follow Jesus but not wanting to rearrange my life to do so. His questions don’t let us stay on the middle. His questions force clarity about who we give allegiance to.

Jesus’ questions people to get at what’s under the surface. His questions are designed to help us pay attention to what’s really going on inside of us, to where our motivations lie, to what we have really aligned our lives around… his questions are subtly working uncover our deepest longings and to reorient our longings towards him, because that’s actually the best thing for us!

Let me show you an example from one of the very first questions Jesus asks his disciples…

[SLIDE] What do you want?

One of the very first questions we read about Jesus asking is one that Jackson highlighted in his message last week…

In John 1, Jesus is passing by John the Baptist who is with a few of his disciples, and john, pointing at Jesus says, “Here is the lamb of God.” And a couple of these disciples get up to follow after Jesus…

[SLIDE] John 1:38 “Turning around, Jesus saw them following and asked, “What do you want?” They said, “Rabbi” (which means “Teacher”), “where are you staying?””

Turns out, Jesus asks this specific question more than a few times…

Jesus asked a couple of blind men following him… [SLIDE] Matthew 20:32 “Jesus stopped and called them. “What do you want me to do for you?” he asked.”

Jesus asked James and John as they were jostling for position… [SLIDE] Mark 10:36 “What do you want me to do for you?” he asked.”

Jesus asked Bartimaeus, a blind beggar on the side of the road… [SLIDE] Mark 10:51 “What do you want me to do for you?” Jesus asked him.

To be honest, we mostly expect our leaders, our teachers, our experts to tell us what to do, rather than ask us what we want… AmIRight!?

Doc, just tell me what to do so that I don’t have this pain anymore…

To our therapist, just tell me how to not feel stressed all the time

…but when they tell us what we don’t want to hear, then it’s just “fake news”? I think this is exactly why Jesus asks the question he does…

I think this “What do you want?” question is at the heart of every single thing God asks us… it might be the question underneath every question…

Listen to this from Curt Thompson, MD, in a book called, The Soul of Desire, Discovering the Neuroscience of Longing, Beauty, and Community

[SLIDE] “To consider and answer Jesus’ question in John 1:38 “What do you want?” is a life-altering practice, for it opens our minds to the reality that Jesus is keenly interested in what we want—our desire. In fact, that question lies at the center of the triune God in whose image we have been made.”

I’m inviting us into the life-altering practice of considering the what-do-you-want? question, which lies at the center of everything…

[SLIDE] “Jesus’ question eventually draws our attention to our deep longing to be known for the purpose of creating beauty in the world, in whose very places—our politics, our ethnic identities, our painful marriages, our sexual encounters, our histories of interpersonal and social abuse—where it might seem impossible to imagine it could emerge.”

Dr Thompson is highlighting, just as Jesus does over and over again, that we are not just on this planet to pay our bills and spend our weekends in search of psudo-life-changing-experiences.

There has never been a life more stunningly beautiful than Jesus’ life—it’s why it’s still being talked about some two-thousand years later—and we are invited into, we are created for the purpose of creating this same kind of beauty. And we are meant to live this beauty into all of the seemingly impossible places of our world.

And somehow, the what-do-you-want question is at the heart of it all

[SLIDE] “You might be suspicious that desire has much good to offer us, considering how often our desire can go awry—how often we move from desiring to devouring the very beauty for which we so hunger and thirst.”

that phrase is a gut-punch, isn’t it? “…how often we move from desiring to devouring the very beauty for which we so hunger and thirst.”

Our desires, our “wanters”—are broken. We constantly find our desires aimed in hurtful or painful directions. And so it’s natural for us to distrust any of our desires…even to the point of ignoring Jesus’ What-Do-You-Want? question.

“How could what I want to be helpful at all? Jesus, just tell me what you want!”

To which I hear Jesus responding, “What do you want?”

[SLIDE] “I invite you to join me and to discover and acknowledge that you are a person of deep desire. You desire to be known in the deepest recesses of your story so that you will be liberated to become an outpost of the new creation—of beauty and goodness—even as you create that same beauty and goodness in yourself, as you practice the kingdom of God that is here and is surely coming.”

(The Soul of Desire, Discovering the Neuroscience of Longing, Beauty, and Community, by Curt Thompson, MD, p.5–7)

This right here is the ongoing invitation of the Kingdom of God. This is the invitation to the Vineyard community. This is what we’re about.

Our lives, our lives together, our Vineyard church community is an outpost of God’s kingdom, an outpost of the new creation—still imperfect, yet always being developed under the leadership of the Holy Spirit—an outpost of beauty and goodness as we practice participating with all God is doing in our lives and in the community around us.

[SLIDE] We are people of desire

Saint Augustine once wrote, “The whole life of the good Christian is a holy longing….”

We want things. We long for things. This yearning is part-and-parcel of what it means to be human.

We begin at birth with desires for breath, warmth, nourishment, security. Before we are thinking creatures, we are desiring and habit-forming creatures.

While we’re full of desire, we don’t desire just anything. We aren’t interested in the unexciting or the painful. We don’t long to get covid of the flu. We don’t desire to feel more shame at the end of the day. Or live unseen, meaningless lives.

Rather, we long for a world of goodness and beauty, of biblical justice, of putting the world back to right—a world governed by kindness and honesty.

We long for deep connections with friends, where the fabric of our relationships can withstand the rigors of real life.

We want to engage in work that is meaningful and where we find ourselves growing as we help to make the world a better place.

We want to enjoy our embodied presence on the planet…who wants to be unfit or unhealthy? We don’t long for the medical or psychiatric difficulties that plague our lives.

We long for adventure and creativity that leaves us speechless, with a tear in our eyes… we want to live all four seasons to their fullness, and we want to be resilient enough to embrace them all, even winter with gratitude and wonder, enjoying God’s provision along the way.

Our desires run so deeply within us—as every poet and artist continues to represent, and to which all of our addictive tendencies continue to point—have you noticed that our desires run so deep that no matter how often or deeply we engage in fulfilling them, we are always longing for more. That should tell us something. We long for something more—something eternal.

But let’s be realistic, our desires are not always directed toward God, toward his goodness and beauty—absolutely not.

Our desires can easily be bent by, what the bible calls, sin. Our longing for an ever-growing relationship with God—a relationship that leads to loving ourselves and loving others and loving God’s world more deeply—can easily be turned into desiring stuff for it’s own sake.

For instance, instead of experiencing joy in our relationship with God and others, we desire to become god and to posses others and the objects they love.

Instead of loving our neighbors as we love ourselves, and using our resources to help accomplish that, we turn to loving our resources and using God and other people to accumulate more!

This is exactly why the bible makes such a big deal about worship…

[SLIDE] What’s the big deal about worship?

Why do you think the bible so often commands us to worship God?

Over and over in the bible we find commands to worship God…

[SLIDE] Psalm 29:2 “Ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name; worship the Lord in the splendor of his holiness.”

[SLIDE] Psalm 95:6 “Come, let us bow down in worship, let us kneel before the Lord our Maker;”

[SLIDE] Psalm 100:2 “Worship the Lord with gladness; come before him with joyful songs.”

The commands to worship and praise God are designed to get us in the right alignment with reality. They are not about God being needy. They are about us being in alignment with who is actually in charge of the world and sustains our life.

We were made to worship—created to desire—and if we don’t worship God we will divert our energies towards something else and make that thing our god.

God knows this and he knows the consequences.

The Psalmist highlights this reality of becoming like whatever we idolize… [SLIDE] Psalm 115:8 “Those who make them become like them” (ESV).

The prophet Jeremiah elaborates on this when he says the children of Israel… [SLIDE] Jeremiah 2:4 “went after worthlessness and became worthless themselves” (ESV).

We become like whatever we worship. What we love shapes who we are. We become like what we desire.

Or, think about the ten commandments for a moment… Here’s how they begin…

[SLIDE] Exodus 20:2-3 ““I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. “You shall have no other gods before me.”

The first four commandments list like this:

[SLIDE] You shall have no other gods before me

[SLIDE] You will not make any graven images

[SLIDE] You shall not take the name of the Lord in vain

[SLIDE] Remember the Sabbath Day

All of these are commands involve our relationship with God. They don’t receive much attention today because breaking them is pretty subtle, except for Sabbath keeping which is obvious but it’s considered normal to not rest anymore.

These top four commandments are the prelude to observing the bottom six. Unless we have a right relationship with God then loving our neighbor by not lying to them, cheating on them, stealing from them or coveting what they have is difficult at best.

Why? Because whatever we love the most becomes the priority and if we love anything more than God then obeying his commandments is negotiable.

The last for the commandments sums this all up with the word desire… do not desire any of your neighbors people or things. The last commandment flows right from the first commandment.

If you want a stunningly beautiful life, if you want a healthy life full of the goodness and beauty each of us longs for…it turns out that it begins in worship of the one true God. It begins with desire.

[SLIDE] Worship is one of the main ways we bring a healthy alignment back into our lives. Worship, giving God what he’s worth in every area of our lives, is reorienting. The songs we sing, the tithes and offerings we give are actually really good for us. So much better for our well-being than kale ever could be!

So, Jesus’ what-do-you-want question actually lies at the heart of all of this…

…as with all of his questions, he’s offering a thorough realignment that’s designed to bring an ultimate health to our lives.

What you and I actually want, what we really, really want…our desires lie right at the ver foundation of our lives.

So…what do you want? If Christ himself were standing right in front of you in this moment, how might you answer?

I want to highlight how we can begin to pay closer attention to our desires, and how we might think about a reorientation of our desires from Psalm 37.

[SLIDE] Combining our desire with trust

[SLIDE] Psalm 37:1–11 “Do not fret because of those who are evil or be envious of those who do wrong; for like the grass they will soon wither, like green plants they will soon die away. Trust in the Lord and do good; dwell in the land and enjoy safe pasture. Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the Lord; trust in him and he will do this: He will make your righteous reward shine like the dawn, your vindication like the noonday sun. Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him; do not fret when people succeed in their ways, when they carry out their wicked schemes. Refrain from anger and turn from wrath; do not fret—it leads only to evil. For those who are evil will be destroyed, but those who hope in the Lord will inherit the land. A little while, and the wicked will be no more; though you look for them, they will not be found. But the meek will inherit the land and enjoy peace and prosperity.”

[SLIDE] Do not fret…

To be constantly or visibly anxious; like a gradually wearing away by constant rubbing of gnawing… ouch! The result is that constant gnawing of anxiety, we burn with anger…

When we’re in this emotional state the Psalmist warns us abut, we often fell like we’re justified—we’re burning with anger over the apparent success of the wicked…but like I said, the Psalmist warns us not to go down this path.

He’s telling us to not fret—be like this—when those who we completely disagree with, those on the other side of the isle, whomever you think of as evil or those who do wrong… whenever those folks seem to be winning.

Do not fret, do not let anxiety gnaw away at you, do not burn with anger…why? Because it will not last.

Rather?

[SLIDE] Trust in the Lord and do good

To place my confidence, to rely on the one who is really in charge—Yahweh. Rather than feeding on your anger, feed on the faithfulness of Yahweh—He’s revealed himself as the “I Am”.

And to make goodness, usefulness, friendliness, kindness…to create a life of joyfulness, to become valuable and useful to others…

To, because of my confidence in the Lord, to give of myself to others as we work to make this world a place where all people can experience the goodness and grace and kindness and mercy of God in very tangible ways!

And you can even move beyond trust to…

[SLIDE] Take delight in the Lord

To take is to reach for and hold onto to…

To delight is to take one’s pleasure in, to refresh oneself, to have/make fun, to pamper…

this is the Hebrew word we might translate to our idea of Soul Care. Biblical soul care is all about taking pleasure in God. It’s about refreshing yourself by spending time engaging with God. It’s about pampering yourself by investing in an interactive relationship with God.

Have you noticed that you fall in love with whatever you’re cultivating a love relationship with? The more time you spend cultivating something, the better it grows. This is exactly why my neighbor’s yard looks so much better than mine—she cultivates it! I do not! Her yard is a thing of delight. Mine is…more natural.

The Psalmist is directing you and I to reach for and hold onto a source of pleasure and delight and pampering… in the Lord—Yahweh. God’s personal name is written here, not just his title. He’s revealed himself as the one who is—I am.

and he will give you the desires of your heart

When Jesus asks those around him, What do you want?” He’s probing the desires of our heart. “What do you really want?”

I hear him asking me, Michael, what have you settled for?

What are you desiring that has actually imprisoned you?

How have you allowed the good things I’ve created to become the ultimate longing you have?

How have you replaced the freedom and health of worshiping the only living God with the

Commit your way to the Lord

To commit – to roll your way/journey upon Yahweh. To build your life upon, to build your behavior, your habits, your way of life on Yahweh.

Our behavior is more powerfully driven by the habits we form, our embodied movements, than by what we think.

If you life, your behavior is formed by your fretting, you will have a very different way of life, a way of life that doesn’t look much like the people of God.

Trust in him…

to be confident in, to rely on

Proverbs 28:26 “Those who trust in themselves are fools, but those who walk in wisdom are kept safe.”

[SLIDE] and he will do this…

And the promise is that Yahweh will bring it to pass. Our job us to trust, to surrender to God and his promise us that he will make our lives—righteous and justice—shine with his character.

So, what do you want? I think that’s the question we’re again being asked. What do you want? Let’s pray together.

Along the way, these desires and the way we fulfill these desires shape us in ways we didn’t quite imagine.

We become what we love.

[SLIDE] Don Williams, an OG of the Vineyard, writes: “Worship money and you will become a greedy person. Worship sex and you will become a lustful person. Worship power and you will become a corrupt person. Worship Jesus Christ and you will become a Christ-like person. We become like the object of our worship

Idols make us into themselves. But if we worship the living God, we become more and more like him in our intensions and actions.