Good Things ...

How far would you go for a friend?  Would you help them move?  I dare say moving is one the most unpleasant tasks we collectively face.  It’s not that the destination is so horrible (though sometimes this is true), it is that the process of moving takes so much out of us.  Even if you were moving from a hovel to a mansion, I would bet you would identify all the sentimental things, and just get rid of the other stuff rather than have to move it.  So when you ask a friend for help to move, you begin to quickly know who is a fair-weather-friend, and who will be there for you in the clinches.  But in helping a friend move, you don’t really lose anything but time, and you gain sore muscles if you can count that.  What about donating a kidney for a friend?  That is a lot more personal, and you will definitely lose something.  It’s not free either and you will be a lot more sore.  Would you go so far as to test a match to see if it is even possible?  Or would you go even farther and volunteer to participate in a multiple-patient kidney donation loop, so some stranger gets your kidney, while your friend gets one from someone else they do not even know?  Those things happen.  But they happen from the most generous of souls.  And they often are driven by love of a family member.  Love of a friend … perhaps not as often.

So compared to helping someone move, or donating a kidney, giving up a few loaves of bread sounds pretty tame.  Maybe in today’s language the nearest equivalent would be giving up a few packages of toilet paper (but I digress).  Luke tells us about how Jesus describes friends and giving and parents and good things.  Luke tells us what it means in human terms we should understand.  But then he takes it further, so we can begin to contemplate what it means to get “good things” from a Father God who loves us more than life itself, even the life of His only Son.  It begins in the eleventh chapter picking up in verse 5 saying … “And he said unto them, Which of you shall have a friend, and shall go unto him at midnight, and say unto him, Friend, lend me three loaves; [verse 6] For a friend of mine in his journey is come to me, and I have nothing to set before him?”  The back story here is a simple one.  Two friends live in the same town or village.  They know each other.  They have history.  But at midnight (a universal term back then for after everyone normally goes to bed, when it is dark out, and “good” folk should be sleeping) one friend receives yet another friend who has been travelling a great distance to reach him.  Most of us would likely crank out the spare sheets, point the guy at the refrigerator if he needs to snack, and send him to bed.  We could deal with his potential hunger at breakfast the next day.

But then, we forget that folks back then did not arrive by plane, and then Uber, to our door.  They arrived by foot (or maybe camel if they had money).  And the journey would have been a physical one, full of the dangers of traveling in low light, with nocturnal predators in the animal kingdom, and even worse ones of the human variety.  You garden variety criminal needs to take whatever you have, and then most want to get away with no further incident.  But your crooked Roman soldier had the power to not only take what you had with you, but imprison, or even enslave you, at the end of your encounter.  So needless to say it would have been quite a bit more stressful for the night going friend than it is for one in our day.  But praise be to God our friend has arrived safely and is quite a bit hungry.  So hungry he would like 3 full loaves of bread just to put a dent in it.  But the receiving fellow has no bread at all.  He may only bake what he needs each day, so by day’s end there is none left.  Thus the dilemma.  And why the one friend goes to his other friend in the village even though it is late at night and asks for him to “lend” him (implying this loan will be repaid so no one at his house will go hungry) the 3 loaves of bread.

Luke continues in verse 7 as Jesus keeps relaying the story saying … “And he from within shall answer and say, Trouble me not: the door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot rise and give thee. [verse 8] I say unto you, Though he will not rise and give him, because he is his friend, yet because of his importunity he will rise and give him as many as he needeth.”  Here Jesus says under normal circumstances we don’t answer the door at midnight with someone outside asking for bread.  The kids are asleep and we don’t want to wake them (try that with cranky toddler and see what you get).  And most things could wait until the morning.  But in this case, because of the situation, the friend will get out of his bed, and give the asking fellow whatever he needs for his long distance traveler despite it being in the middle of the night.  That is friendship.  Taking a risk for a friend.  Parting with food you intended for your own kids to a friend just because he asks, even though it is to feed someone else you may not even know.  That is friendship, and trust that it might be repaid.  But even if it is not repaid, my friend has need, I have the ability to meet that need.  So I will meet it.  I wonder, is that how you and I might act in the same situation?  Or were we so comfortable with the concept of “social distancing” well before covid-19, that neither of us would ask the other for anything, especially late at night.  Instead our friendship consists only of “likes” and occasional comments of posts the other makes.

Jesus continues the theme in verse 9 saying … “And I say unto you, Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. [verse 10] For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.”  First let’s identify the players in this scenario.  Who do you think is the one doing the asking?  That is supposed to be you or I, right?  Then who are we asking something from?  That is supposed to be Jesus, right?  The analogy then holds true for the next set of actions.  When we seek for something we will find it.  That might turn out to be good or very bad.  Try looking to break the rules and you will usually find a way.  Try looking for drugs, and you will usually find them.  Going back to the previous friend example.  Try knocking on God’s door at midnight and what do you think is supposed to happen.  Jesus just told you.  God will swing that door wide open and meet whatever need you have in the best way our God knows how.  So when we ask, we are going to get an answer.  Could be yes, could be no, could be to wait a while, but an answer is forthcoming.  When we look for something, we are going to find it.  Better to look for good things then, because looking for bad turns this promise into a cautionary tale.  And when we find ourselves desperately in need of the Bread of Life, we can still bang on God’s door even at midnight, and expect our fix is coming.

If you read these verses and instantly start planning what you are going to do with your pending lotto winnings, you may have attributed great wealth with “good things”.  Are you so sure that is a fair equivolence?  Perhaps for you, getting great wealth would be like tying an anchor around your neck in the great wide ocean, causing you to swim frantically trying to stay afloat, all the while coming to the realization its going to take you down into the abyss.  Or if you read these same verses and instantly start thinking you have discovered the cure for every disease and can forestall death indefinitely, perhaps you come to equate life in this world as equal to “good things”.  Are you so sure it is?  We are all dying.  It is just a matter of timing, and perhaps of method.  Immortality is not something we are ready for yet.  Perhaps it is better to learn to live in each moment we have to its fullest, than to fret about how many more moments we have left in this world of pain and death.  The world we have hope in is the world we will wake up to.  That one would be worth living forever in.  And it is what God has planned for each of us.

Jesus continues His theme picking back up in verse 11 saying … “If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone? or if he ask a fish, will he for a fish give him a serpent? [verse 12] Or if he shall ask an egg, will he offer him a scorpion? [verse 13] If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?”  And there it is.  The fine print of this entire section on asking and receiving.  This was not intended to be an open ended gimme session from Santa Clause god (instead of Jesus).  It had a singular deliverable that is better than anything else we could ever get.  The Holy Spirit is the gift here.  The Father will give us the Holy Spirit if we but ask Him to.  If we seek the Holy Spirit we will find Him.  If we knock on the doors of heaven itself, those doors will be thrown open and the Holy Spirit will be sent to us, to meet our real needs.  Not the needs we imagine we have, but the real needs our God already knows we have need of.

If you are hungry, you may believe you have “need” of food.  But the gift of the Holy Spirit may radically alter even that perception.  How do you think Jesus survived in this world with so little food, or sleep?  Through the power of the Holy Spirit meeting bodily needs while He was looking for God and the will of God in doing what is next.  It turns out, the Holy Spirit can beat hunger, while maintaining the human body.  If you are sick, the Holy Spirit can cure you, of whatever is wrong.  But the Holy Spirit can do so much more for you than just bring an end to an illness.  He can teach you what it really means to live.  What it really means to love.  How to think differently.  How to love differently.  With a passion you have never even imagined.  Two minutes of that life, is worth ten years of this one.  If you are poor, you are doubly blessed.  Not only will your needs be met by the Holy Spirit (blessing number one), but your trust in God to ONLY provide what you need today will also grow (blessing number two).  You will learn to quit fretting about tomorrow.  Tomorrow has enough problems to worry about then.  Today is what you have.  Today is enough.

Jesus tells us if we think as parents we know how to meet the needs of our children, and we think as parents we “love” our kids – then why would we assume a God of perfect love knows less how to do it than we do?  As it turns out “good things” don’t come to those who wait – they come to those who ask Jesus for them.  And the definition of “good things” could be summed up in the gift of the Holy Spirit to us, that the Father God virtually guarantees us.  If we are to have money, let it come because the Spirit wishes us to have it – or not at all.  Whatever the will of God is, let that be what happens in our lives.  And let the Spirit be with us every single minute as it does.  I sometimes think I am not strong enough to do some particular thing.  But then my mind takes a step back and asks, whose strength am I relying on to do it?  If I am relying on my own strength to get it done, I may well be right.  But if I can learn to rely upon the strength of the Holy Spirit to do the very same thing, I may find myself pleasantly surprised.  We were never meant to conduct the war.  We were meant to fall in line behind our God and let Him bring us the victories we benefit from.  We might have once thought those victories were the “good things”.  But what we will come to know, is that it was the companionship of the Holy Spirit that was even greater than the victories themselves, that was the truly “good thing” we were ever given.  And it is there just for the asking, or the seeking, or the knocking.