Planks Needed: With a Towel and Wash Basin

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I’m trying to reconcile something you’ve been saying with what you just said. You gave the example of the time you just didn’t want to do it, that whole thing with Romans. I can hear all that, but then on the other hand, you’re saying be on the edge of your seat for these things, be anxious to pray. How do those two mesh? On the one hand you’re very much wanting and yet on the other hand, “I don’t want to do this.”

I was anxious to do the Romans night for years. I knew there was something very important there fundamentally. I wasn’t just waiting on God’s timing. I was, but in another sense, I was procrastinating because I didn’t want to do it. I felt uneasy about it. In one sense, I knew it was important, and so I was willing to do it, or I never would have brought it up in the first place as a possibility. I was apt to do it, and yet I was resistant because I knew the process of doing it had the potential of ripping my heart out and just laying me in a heap on the ground in humiliation and chaos. I felt the pain and the price that would have to be paid with it all. In one sense I was anxious to do it, apt to do it, and wanting to take that journey through, but also very fearful in the sense that I knew that I was going to have to rely on God to get through it.

It’s like the teaching thing. It’s evident to all of us. We all have concordances. We all have some knowledge of where particular scriptures are about prayer, etc. We kind of know where the doorways are. We see a person that we know needs help in learning how to pray. “Lord, teach us to pray.” It’s a teaching process; we know that. We know this person needs to be taught. They need the planks to be put in place rather than just blowing on their sail, “Go pray, okay? You need to pray more.” “Right, I know that. Help me.” We just leave them, and we don’t lift a finger to help them as Jesus said. Wrong. I don’t want to be like that. I want to lift fingers to help them.

So, we go into this thing with some measure of fear and trepidation. One, we don’t have a huge confidence in our own ability to pray. There’s step number one: we recognize in ourselves our own needs. We don’t promote ourselves as experts in anything. We sense our own needs. So that keeps us in a place of humility and puts us also in a place of fear and some reticence or reluctance to even go into it. “Am I qualified?” So now you’re already desirous because you want to see God’s people liberated, you want to serve God’s purposes in your generation, and you don’t want to bury your talent.

You don’t want to go another day without fulfilling something positive for God’s sake and building with gold, silver, and precious stone. So, in that sense you’re apt to do it because you care, but you’re reluctant to do it because you feel ill-equipped to do it, and you’re not exactly sure how you’re going to do it even if you get yourself to do it. You’re not sure how or what’s going to transpire when you do it. So, there’s that tension there, and you go forward anyway because it’s right. You’ve got the picture in your mind already.

In other words, you know where the doorways are, you know what the passages are, you know a little bit about what those passages say, although you’re not overly familiar with them yourself. So, you venture into those doorways trusting God, because He has more invested in this than you do, and it’s His Spirit that ultimately does the teaching. We all have heard flawless, perfect exegetical, oratorical things that meant nothing to us, and other things that came from bumbling fools that burnt our hearts and changed our lives.

We know it’s the Spirit who teaches, and so we go into it with that confidence that our job is to go with simplicity of heart, with a towel and a washbasin and a desire that captives would be set free. We go into this thing and begin to creak these doors open and walk through these rooms and try to describe what we see and listen to what they see and work it through together. There’s a reluctance because we have no confidence in ourselves. Good. His strength is perfected in weakness. And yet there’s an aptness or a desire to do that because we know it’s God’s heart. “Go. Teach.” So, we fall back away and we press forward; we fall back away and we press forward, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be. It’ll always be that way unless we begin to get proud, in which case that’s worse than anything else I can think of.