Why Asking Costs You So Much

You are the one who drives people to the airport at five in the morning.

You lend the ladder. You sit with the ones nobody else sits with. When somebody in your street has a week like the one you are having, you know about it inside a day and you are round there with something in your hands, and you do not think of that as remarkable, because it is simply what a person does.

Six weeks ago something happened that you needed a hand with. Nothing dramatic. Practical. Two hours of somebody's time and a set of hands that are not yours.

You have opened your mouth to ask eleven times.

Twice on the phone to the very person, right at the end of the call, with the words physically in your throat. Once in a doorway with your coat already on. Once in the car park after the meeting, where you got as far as the first syllable and then converted it, mid air, into a question about their mother.

And every time, the thing that arrives instead of the sentence is a kind of heat across the back of your neck, and a total certainty that this would be an imposition, and a very fast calculation about what they have going on at the moment, and out of your mouth comes: no, honestly, I am all right.

They believe you. Of course they do. You are extremely convincing on the subject, and you have been practicing since you were about seven.

So you have solved it privately. You have a plan involving a Saturday, an early start, some rope, and a shoulder that is not what it was, and it will take you nine hours to do what two people could do over one afternoon with the radio on. You have already accepted that. You are not even annoyed about it.

What you cannot work out, sitting here now, is why a sentence that other people say fifty times a week, without a thought, costs you more than anything else you do.

What the sentence actually costs

You are not broken in a new way tonight, and this is not one more item for the list you keep. Hebrews 4:15 hands you a high priest who can be touched with the feeling of an infirmity rather than briefed about it, and the Holy Spirit brought you to this page rather than to one about trying harder.

For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.Hebrews 4:15

Read the construction rather than sliding over it, because the double negative in it is doing real work. Not a high priest who cannot be touched. The verse goes out of its way to rule out the distant one, the briefed one, the one who has read the file and formed a view. What it puts in that place is somebody who feels the infirmity from the inside of it.

So let us start with the cost, because almost nobody does. You have a nervous system that learned something early, in a place where learning it was the sensible thing to do, and Scripture nowhere calls that a defect of character, and the Spirit of God is not standing over a grown man in a kitchen wondering why he will not just ask.

And we are not going into what happened. Not here, not tonight, not on a screen. I am not asking you to describe it, I am not going to explain it, and I am certainly not going to stand here and account for the people who did not come, because there is no account that makes it all right and I would not insult you by attempting one.

But there is one thing to be said about that time, and it is the only claim being made on this page. The call was heard. Psalm 10:17 says the LORD has heard the desire of the humble, and the Spirit of God was in the room where the asking happened, and you were heard then, at that volume, in that house, whatever did or did not come afterwards.

What a person does next is entirely reasonable, and it is not a fault. A small human being works out very quickly that the asking is the expensive part, and so the asking gets put away. Not the needing. Nobody has ever managed to put the needing away. Only the asking, which is a much smaller and far more portable thing, and it stays put away for thirty years because nothing has come along since to make it safe to take out.

And here is the thing that changes the whole arithmetic. You have an intercessor for precisely this. Romans 8:26 has the Spirit helping our infirmities and making intercession with groanings that cannot be put into words, which means the sentence you cannot form is already being formed, by the Holy Spirit, on your behalf, tonight.

Sit with that one rather than moving past it. The single thing you cannot do is the very thing He does. Not a technique for producing the sentence. Not a breathing exercise or a form of words to practice in the car. An intercession already running, made by somebody who does not require the words, underneath a man who has never once been able to say them.

Which is why the next verse does not tell anybody to work up their nerve first. Come boldly, it says, to a throne of grace. The boldness was never something you were told to manufacture, and Hebrews 4:16 puts the mercy and the grace on the far side of that door as the whole reason for coming, and the Spirit who wrote it knows exactly what walking up to a door has cost you.

One plain thing, dropped here in the middle where a person is still reading. If not being able to ask has left you somewhere darker than tired, if what is in your head is ending your life or quietly not being here, then that one gets said out loud tonight, even though it is the hardest sentence of the lot. In the United States, 988 answers by call and by text, and the person on the other end does this all day and thinks nothing whatever of you for it. Anywhere else, emergency services, or the crisis line for your country. Faith did not fail here, and nobody is being burdened. God put real rescue into human hands on purpose, and a man who cannot ask for help still gets to be the man who dials the number.

And when the asking does come, it does not have to be done well. There has been a version in rehearsal for weeks now that would not inconvenience anybody, and Isaiah 42:3 has a God who does not break a bruised reed or put out a smoking flax, and the Spirit of God is not grading the delivery of a sentence He has been carrying already.