Every Answer Reveals Who He Is

EVERY ACT OF GOD'S deliverance and providence is accompanied by a revelation of Himself. When He answers a prayer He does two things in one motion: He meets the need, and He shows you who He is. The showing is the greater half of the gift. A gift from a friend tells you in one motion that he listened, that he remembered, that he knows you, and God's answers carry that same knowledge, only deeper. He wants to be known. The need He meets belongs to a season; what you learn of Him while He meets it can stay with you for life.

I have tested this claim for years, because people bring me their stories of answered prayer, and I have learned to listen for one sentence. It comes near the end, in nearly the same words every time. The job came through, or the child called home, or the scan came back clean, and the teller walks me through the details, and then the voice drops and they say, "I never knew He was like that." I have heard it from people whose request was granted to the letter, and from people whose answer took them years to recognize as one. The sentence is always about God. By the time they sit down to tell me, the gift itself has faded back into the ordinary run of their days. The glimpse they caught of the Giver, while the gift was changing hands, is what stayed, and it is what they came to say.

I have a sentence like that of my own. Years ago I was out of work for months, and for all those months my daily prayer was for work. Near the end of that stretch I had a phone interview for a job I badly wanted, and I came off the call certain I had botched it. Afterward I called the recruiter and told him plainly, "If I don't get this job, please don't call me. I am on an emotional roller coaster." He was kind about it and agreed. A week later, on a Thursday afternoon, my phone rang, and the screen showed his number. My first thought was to hold him to our agreement.

I answered anyway. He was calling with an offer better than I had let myself hope for. I told him I had thought the interview went terribly. He said, "Yes, the manager actually mentioned that you seemed quite nervous during the interview." They had heard the nervous man and hired him anyway. That answer told me more about the Giver than about employment. For months I had approached God as one more interviewer across a desk, certain that heaven grades performances and that mine had come up short. He does not grade performances. And I have been convinced, ever since that Thursday afternoon, that He has a sense of humor.

Scripture teaches this most plainly through Martha, in the eleventh chapter of John, and I want to walk through her education slowly, because it is ours. Her brother Lazarus was dying. She and her sister sent Jesus a message: "Lord, behold, he whom You love is sick" (John 11:3 NKJV). Notice the wording. No request, no instructions, no please come quickly. They set the fact of the sickness down beside the fact of the love and left the rest with Him. I have borrowed that prayer many times at hospital beds: Lord, the one You love is in trouble. It is hard to pray a better prayer than that.

Jesus answered that prayer with a delay. "He stayed two more days in the place where He was" (John 11:6). John tells us in the same breath that Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, as if he knew how badly we would need the reassurance, because on the surface the delay looks like plain indifference. It was nothing of the kind. Jesus had already said its purpose out loud: "This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God may be glorified through it" (John 11:4). The delay was for revelation.

By the time He walked toward Bethany, Lazarus had been four days in the tomb, long enough that Martha would say the unsayable at the graveside: "Lord, by this time there is a stench, for he has been dead four days" (John 11:39). When word came that Jesus was near, she left the house and went out to meet Him on the road. To His face she spoke the sentence she had surely rehearsed for four days: "Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died" (John 11:21).

Martha's theology was sound as far as it went. She knew Jesus was the Son of God. She knew He could heal the sick. But in her mind He had procrastinated. He had not listened to her petition, He had not taken it seriously, He had simply not wanted to do it. That was the root of her bitterness. Hidden inside her solid creed sat a schedule, because in her arithmetic a healer must arrive before death does. Jesus had missed that deadline by four days, and as far as Martha could see the matter was closed and the failure was His. Even so, her faith would not lie all the way down. She added, "But even now I know that whatever You ask of God, God will give You" (John 11:22), reaching toward a hope she could not yet have named.

Then Jesus said, "Your brother will rise again" (John 11:23), and Martha shut her heart against the promise. She filed it under doctrine: "I know that he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day" (John 11:24). Every word of that reply is correct, and every word of it is cold. She was reciting a creed while her brother lay in a cave. We all do it when we are bitter enough, and I have done it myself and heard it done at a hundred gravesides. Then Jesus said the one thing the whole delay had been arranged to say.

Jesus said to her, "I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live. And whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die. Do you believe this?" She said to Him, "Yes, Lord, I believe that You are the Christ, the Son of God, who is to come into the world." (John 11:25-27)

Look at what happened on that road. Martha asked for a healing and was handed an introduction. She had known Him as Jehovah Rapha, the God who heals, and her knowledge was true; He never once corrected it. He enlarged it. It was as if He said to her, You have known Me as the God who heals, and that is good, but by this you will know Me as the Resurrection and the Life. Jesus does not merely make claims about who He is. He demonstrates them. That was His way in Bethany, and it is His way with us still.

The delay was the instrument of the demonstration. There are many occasions in Scripture where God deliberately delayed His deliverance, and I have come to believe one purpose runs through them all: the delay dispels our illusions about Him. God is not an ATM machine or a doctor on call, a dispenser we walk up to, punch in the request, and withdraw a blessing from the moment we feel the need. We all carry a small god we assembled ourselves, out of our wants and a handful of true things, and mine, in certain years, was exactly that machine: a dispenser of outcomes who took my request, checked my faith level, and released the blessing or held it back. The trouble with a god like that is that he can be believed in and never met, because he does not exist. The living God means to be met, so He keeps answering prayer in ways the small god never would. At the time it feels like disorder, even betrayal, and Martha's voice on the road had that edge in it for good reason. Only later do you see it was mercy. Every answer that breaks the small god's pattern shows you more of the real One, the way the delay at Bethany broke a timetable and uncovered a Person.

Moses learned the same lesson at the summit of the greatest run of answered prayer in the Old Testament. He had watched plagues turned back, a sea split open, bread lying on the ground every morning, water breaking out of rock. Then he asked for one thing more: "Please, show me Your glory" (Exodus 33:18). God granted it in His own way. He hid Moses in the cleft of the rock and passed by.

And the LORD passed before him and proclaimed, "The LORD, the LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth." (Exodus 34:6)

Moses asked for a sight and received a self-introduction. Glory, when it finally passed, turned out to be character: mercy, grace, patience, goodness, truth. That is what God Himself counts His glory to be, and it ought to correct our imaginations, which paint glory as light and volume and little else. Israel never forgot that answer. The psalmists quote the proclamation back, the prophets pray it back to Him, Jonah complains about it. The deepest knowledge of God has reached His people along that road ever since.

The miracles of the Gospels work the same way. For years I preached them mostly as lessons in faith, and that lesson is in them. But a miracle is a theological statement before it is anything else. Every one of them says something about God before it fixes something for a man. John will not even call them miracles; he calls them signs, and a sign exists to point past itself. Jesus feeds five thousand and then says, "I am the bread of life" (John 6:35). He opens the eyes of a man born blind and says, "I am the light of the world" (John 9:5).

He raises Lazarus, and the raising is simply the sermon whose text He had already handed Martha on the road. A miracle is an announcement before it is a solution. The crowds wanted the solutions and skipped the announcements, and Jesus told them so to their faces the morning after the loaves: "you seek Me, not because you saw the signs, but because you ate of the loaves and were filled" (John 6:26). He fed them anyway. He is generous even to solution hunters, and I have been one. A whole industry stands on that appetite, the preachers who promise that enough faith will withdraw health and money from heaven on demand, and their crowds are large because the hunger under the promise is real. But it turns the gospel into a question of what God can do for you, and that is not what an answered prayer is for. Everything He does in a life He does for His glory, and so that we may believe.

David knew all of this long before Bethany. He opens Psalm 103 by giving his own soul an order, which tells you he understood how quickly the soul forgets.

Bless the LORD, O my soul, And forget not all His benefits: Who forgives all your iniquities, Who heals all your diseases, Who redeems your life from destruction, Who crowns you with lovingkindness and tender mercies, Who satisfies your mouth with good things, So that your youth is renewed like the eagle's. (Psalm 103:2-

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Read the list slowly. Every benefit hangs from the word Who. Forgiveness, healing, redemption, crowning, satisfaction: David counts the gifts, and at every line the counting turns into the naming of God's character. Forget the benefits and the face goes dark on you, one facet at a time. This is why I keep telling people to write down their answered prayers. They assume I am prescribing an exercise in gratitude, and I am after something more. A list like that, kept faithfully over years, looks like an inventory and reads like a portrait.

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NOW I HAVE TO tell you about the airport, because if every answer carries a revelation, we have to face why we miss so many of them. Many years ago an old friend from my student days, a man I count among my spiritual mentors, telephoned and asked me to meet him in a large city far from both our homes. We had not seen each other in many years. I arrived first, checked into my hotel in the afternoon, and went back out to the airport that evening to pick him up. The terminal at that hour was nearly empty. I waited in the baggage claim area, exactly where I had told him I would be, and long after his plane's scheduled arrival he was nowhere to be seen. I could not even raise him on his cell phone. He rarely traveled so far from home, and the last thing I wanted was to call his wife and tell her I had lost him on the wrong side of the world.

So I went looking. I climbed to the ticketing area upstairs, thinking he might be waiting for me there, and he was not. It took me two hours to comb the entire terminal, up and down, studying every face on every bench. Somewhere in the second hour I stopped believing I would find him and kept walking anyway. When I had all but given up, there he was, standing just outside the doors with his bag at his feet. I ran to him and called his name.

He stood there and did not respond. We had not met in years, and I had put on some weight, so I looked different. But I was planted directly in front of him, saying his name, and his face registered nothing at all. It took him a long moment to understand it was me. Then came the embrace and the laughter, and late that night I asked him, more than once, how he could possibly have failed to know me. His answer was precious, and I have never once forgotten it.

"I have been looking for you for two hours," he said. "I have come to a realization that I might not meet you here, and so I have closed my heart."

He meant that he had stopped expecting me. His feet had gone on walking and his eyes had gone on scanning faces, but somewhere in those two hours he had concluded the meeting would not happen, and that conclusion changed what his eyes could do. The very man he had crossed an ocean to find stood in front of him, calling his name, and registered as a stranger. A closed heart cannot recognize even what it loves. We laughed about it that night, two friends reunited in an empty terminal. I have mostly stopped laughing about it since, because I have watched people do the very same thing to God, and I have done it to Him myself.

His own followers did this to Him. You can gather up many theories about why they did not expect Him to rise from the dead, though He had told them plainly, three times, that He would. My friend outside the glass doors handed me the only explanation I have ever needed. They had decided in advance what redemption had to look like, and a crucified rabbi did not fit the decision, so their hearts closed over. Two of them walked to Emmaus with their hope already in the past tense: "But we were hoping that it was He who was going to redeem Israel" (Luke 24:21). Redemption Himself fell into step beside them and talked over His own death with them for seven miles. "But their eyes were restrained, so that they did not know Him" (Luke 24:16). Mary Magdalene stood weeping at the empty tomb and mistook Him for the gardener. We cannot see the risen Christ, though He walk the whole road at our side, unless He wills to disclose Himself. In appearance after appearance the risen Lord goes unrecognized at first, and by the people who had loved Him best.

We do to God's answers what my friend did to me. We pray, and while we pray we paint the answer: its shape, its door, its deadline. Then we take up our post at the painted door and stand watch. God has a lifelong habit of coming through some other door entirely. The provision arrives wearing work clothes we had thought beneath the prayer. The softening we begged for in another person starts in gestures too small to register on the painting. And we, faithful sentries at the wrong door, decide that no one ever came. I have sat with people reciting their unanswered prayers to me while the answer stood at their elbow, saying their name.

That painting deserves a harder look, because a painted answer is always the portrait of a painted god. Martha's painting had a timetable worked into it, and behind the timetable stood her small god, a healer obligated to beat death to the door. Our sketches of what the answer must be are, underneath, sketches of who He must be, and He declines to sit for them. He answers as Himself. My friend's eyes worked perfectly that night; what failed was on the inside. Recognition, in the things of God, belongs to the open heart, and the open heart is simply the one that has left room for God to be larger than its picture of Him.

But the story did not end at my friend's closed heart, and grace does not end there either. His blank stare did not stop me. I had searched far too long to quit at the last step, so I stood in front of him and kept saying his name until his eyes changed. The Lord is at least that stubborn, and He has better reasons. When I was a boy I used to study the pictures of the risen Lord standing before the rolled-back stone, and I assumed the angels had rolled it away so that He could get out. I was wrong. He needed no stone moved; a week later He stood among His disciples inside a locked room, and the shut door meant nothing to Him.

The stone was not rolled back to let the risen Lord out. It was rolled back for the watchers, so that they could look in and believe. No closed heart stopped Him on that first Easter. He walked the whole Emmaus road beside restrained eyes and opened them at the breaking of the bread. To Mary, staring straight at Him and seeing a gardener, He said a single word, "Mary!" (John 20:16), and that one word did what all her looking could not. If somewhere in your own second hour your heart has quietly closed, say so to Him. That is a prayer, and an honest one. He goes on standing in front of us, saying the name.

So here is the practice I have come to, for myself and for the people I serve. When an answer comes, in whatever form and through whatever door, put a second question to it. The first question asks itself: did I get what I requested? The second is the one Martha learned on the road: what is He showing me of Himself in this? Ask it of the swift yes. Ask it of the strange substitute that took you years to accept as an answer. Ask it of the grant that came so late you had nearly forgotten the petition. Answered prayer, read this way, becomes a long course in the character of God, and the course compounds on itself. The more of Him you have seen in past answers, the faster you will know Him in the next one. There comes a day when the answer arrives through an unexpected door, dressed in unexpected clothes, and instead of a stranger's stare something in you says, that is like Him.

Watch Martha one last time as she turns back toward the house. She had come out to the road to renegotiate a healing. She goes back confessing: "Yes, Lord, I believe that You are the Christ, the Son of God" (John 11:27). Her petition still stood, and within the hour it would be granted beyond anything she had dared to imagine. But something had already shifted in her before the stone ever moved. She had seen who He was, and after a glimpse like that the wanting itself begins to move. I have watched it happen in others and felt it happen in me. A man catches sight of the Giver inside one of the gifts, and quietly, without any decision on his part, his desires start to rearrange themselves around a new love. It is a strange thing to feel your own wants shifting under you, and it unsettles some people at first. It should not. It is the surest sign that prayer is doing its deepest work, and it deserves to be followed all the way in.