Drawn from Questions of the King Vol VI: When Salt Loses Its Savor Know Your Enemy Vol I Liked But Not Read Time Is Created. So Is Science. The Companion Regenerate, Not Degenerate Out of the Depths Ecclesiastes Today
The corpus asks this question more than it asks any other, and it does not ask it about doctrine. The question is where the life is, where it has stopped, and what stopped it. Six instruments answer from different angles. You will not need all of them. Take the one that matches where you are standing.
The questions of the King
Reach for it when you are stuck and do not know why, or a pastor's answer has not touched the place you are stuck.
What it asks that you pick the category that matches your stuck place and sit with its questions. The volume sorts forty-nine questions Jesus asked into seven kinds: identity, belief, motivation, want and desire, loyalty, perception, and questions without comfortable answers. Each category closes with one question to carry through the day: "But who do you say I am?" "Do you believe this?" "What do you want?" "Do you love me?" Each comes with the scene it was asked in, so read the scene first.
What it prevents answering for the crowd. The introduction says, "You cannot answer these questions from a position of sufficiency. Every one of them requires some form of empty hands." Its last instruction is, "Read these slowly."
Where it lives in The Questions of the King
The Beatitudes as a map
Reach for it when you are trying to help someone, or when you cannot locate yourself.
What it asks where this person is among the eight: poor in spirit, mourning, meek, hungry for righteousness, merciful, pure in heart, peacemaking, persecuted. It begins in poverty and ends in persecution. "The disciple who understands this can ask of any pastoral situation: where is this person in the Beatitudes?"
What it prevents help that removes the hunger the person needs. The volume's questions are, "Are they approaching the poverty of spirit that is the beginning? Are they in the mourning that follows it? Are they being fed by people around them who are preventing the hunger that would drive them to the righteousness they need?"
Where it lives in When Salt Loses Its Savor
The seven letters
Reach for it when church has become comfortable, or discouraging, or both.
What it asks that you read the letters to the seven churches as a present-tense diagnostic: "which of these is addressed to me, to my church, this Sunday." Then bring your answer to the gathered community. The volume says the letters were addressed to churches, "plural and specific," and that "The diagnosis requires the body."
What it prevents the lone diagnostician, and the reading that keeps the letters safely in the first century.
Where it lives in Know Your Enemy, Volume I Liked But Not Read
Where am I disconnected?
Reach for it when you are asking how to produce a fruit, such as patience or joy or love.
What it asks a different question. The engineer's volume says the religious person asks how to produce the fruit, and "The abiding disciple asks: where am I disconnected? Because where the disciple is connected, the fruit is what happens. Where the disciple is disconnected, no amount of trying produces it." The Companion supplies the practice: noticing, in the middle of a task, with no self-reproach.
What it prevents a project of self-improvement dressed in a fruit list.
Where it lives in Time Is Created. So Is Science. The Companion , and the essay on regeneration .
The cup
Reach for it when you have caught yourself being right, and being right has become the point.
What it asks the question the adversary's confession turns inward: "if the people who know you best were asked to describe your interior life honestly — not your behavior, not your theological positions, not your attendance record, but what is actually inside the cup — what would they say?" Ask it of yourself before you apply Matthew 23 to anyone else.
What it prevents the whitewashed tomb, which the volume says is dangerous to others "precisely because it looks like solid ground from the outside."
Where it lives in Know Your Enemy, Volume I , in Confession Nine.
The formation question
Reach for it when prayer has gone dry, or the only honest thing you have to say to God is not polite.
What it asks "Is there something you have been too polite to say to God?" The Psalms are inviting you to stop being polite. Pray a psalm that does not match your mood. The volume teaches the pattern of Psalm 22: the cry from the bottom, a statement of God's character from inside the dark, and a declaration that He heard before any answer.
What it prevents performing for God. "You cannot know someone while performing for them. The Psalms teach you to stop performing and start talking."
Where it lives in Out of the Depths
Ecclesiastes Today supplies a quieter question for the same bench: "The real question is: who's holding the clock?" It answers, "Every moment has its hour. You do not run the clock." And it ends where the corpus always ends: "Go back to John 15. That is where this was always pointing."
