A few years ago, I was coming out of a season where I had been expending an excessive amount of energy trying to grow on a professional level. I was wanting to be a better pastor, a better leader, a better communicator. I was expending so much energy that I became convicted that I wasn't putting as much effort in growing personally, as a husband, as a father, as a friend, as a Jesus follower. And it just so happened in God's providence that while I was searching for ways to grow on a personal level, at the same time, I was repetitively reading the gospels. I was reading Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John over and over again, and something amazing stood out to me, something I had never noticed before. I was shocked at the number of questions that Jesus asked in his interactions with people. And the Holy Spirit used that discovery to ignite something in me. Jesus, the one with all the answers, the greatest leader and friend who ever lived, if he filled his interactions with people through meaningful questions, maybe I need to take note and learn. Maybe what I need to grow both professionally and personally is to learn to ask more and better questions. In the four gospels, Jesus asked over 300 questions. He was asked 180 questions in return, and he only directly answered five of those questions. Jesus was 40 times more likely to respond to a with a question than an answer. And that sent me on a search of the scripture. I I searched the Old Testament looking for ways that God utilized questions. I searched the New Testament looking for ways Jesus utilized questions. I started reading every book I could get my hands on that dealt with the art of asking questions. I read books by journalists on how questions and interviews shape powerful stories. I read books from lawyers on how the right questions can change the dynamics of a jury trial. I read books from leadership experts on the kinds of questions leaders should be asking. But one of the most helpful books I read, the one I'm gonna lean on the most over the next several weeks, is J.R. Briggs' book, The Art of Asking Better Questions. It's theologically rich, scripturally sound, scientifically supported, and it's incredibly practical. In the book, Briggs says this the quality of your life is determined by the quality of the questions you ask God, yourself, and others. There is not a single area of your life, not one, where improving the quality of the questions you ask won't improve the quality of your life and the lives of those around you. So for the next several weeks, we're gonna be on a journey. After all the research, both in the scripture and outside it, I believe this is the single most overlooked practice that can literally change everything. Your relationships, your effectiveness, and your career and your calling in your walk with God. I believe this so much, I'm gonna make you a promise. If you attend the series and you actually apply these principles to your life, you will have deeper relationships, more connection, more intimacy. You will have greater workplace effectiveness and you're gonna develop a richer faith. The first week of this just ask series is a simple introduction. It's very practical. I want to invite you into what I'm calling the question room where we're gonna learn the power and the possibility of questions. And to begin, there's several things that we need to see. First, we have to understand we've forgotten how to ask. Here's the strange truth we're living in. We have more access to information than any generation in human history, but we're simultaneously growing more shallow, more disconnected, more spiritually malnourished than any generation before us. And the problem is not a shortage of information. We have a short of a shortage of wisdom, a shortage of curiosity, a shortage of wonder. Asking good questions has become a lost art. Our culture, from schools to workplaces to social media feeds, has conditioned us to give answers. We've been trained to give the right answers and rewarded for having them, but very little attention has been giving us, given to teaching us how to ask the right questions. And it's cost us our relationships because we stop being genuinely curious about the person sitting across from us. It's cost us our effectiveness, because the smartest person in the room is not always the one that has the answer. It's usually the one who knows what to ask. And it's cost us our intimacy with God because we've been taught to come to God with our answers nicely and neatly rehearsed and packaged rather than coming to God with our honest questions still forming in our hearts. And here's why it matters the questions we ask reveal the values that we hold, and they will determine the kind of life that we live. Just think about kids for a minute. Children are the most natural question askers on the planet, and every parent of young children can say, Amen. They are hardwired with an innate curiosity and an insatiable hunger to understand. Everything is new to them. They literally have fresh eyes. Out of genuine curiosity, they can't stop asking. Studies show that the average child will ask roughly 40,000 questions between the age of two and the age of five. By their fourth birthday, most of those questions have shifted from the search for simple facts to the search for deeper explanations. They're no longer asking by age four, what is that? They're asking things like, why does that happen? What would happen if? But why, though? One study found that the average four-year-old girl asked her mother 290 questions in a single day. But by middle school, these same children had almost completely ceased asking questions. What happened? Our educational system happened. The modern educational system most of us grew up in does not encourage inquiry-based learning. In many classrooms, questions aren't even tolerated. The emphasis is sit quietly, receive information from me, the teacher, passively, memorize it, regurgitate it on the test. Repeat after me, fill in the blank, or circle the right answer. Author Neil Postman captured it perfectly when he said, students enter school as question marks and leave as periods. They become experts at giving answers and novices at asking questions. The very word education or educator comes from the Latin word educe. Educe means to draw out what is latent on the inside, to cause something to appear, to elicit. What if education? What if growth of any kind was less about depositing information into people and more about drawing out what God had already placed inside them? What if it was really about educing? This is actually a biblical instinct. Ancient rabbis, including Jesus, understood something about our modern classrooms, what we've forgotten today. They understood this. In the Jewish tradition of learning called havruta, students study scripture together, not by exchanging answers, but by generating questions. Two people literally will sit with a passage and ask as many questions as they can come up with together and not try to answer any of them. The goal is not resolution, the goal is to think deeply about the passage. The Passover Seder meal, which was just celebrated in Jewish tradition, is the annual celebration of God's rescue of Israel from slavery in Egypt. And the entire ceremonial meal is symbolic of the Exodus story. But the meal and the ceremony cannot begin until a child asks a question. It's tradition that the youngest child begins the ceremonial meal by asking, why is this night different from all other nights? The story is sealed until that question is spoken out loud. God's rescue story. The central narrative of the Old Testament is designed to be unlocked by a child's curiosity. It all starts with the question. There's something profoundly theological in that. God doesn't pour the story into passive recipients, He invites people into the story through the doorway of a question. If we want to understand the power and possibility of questions, we need to see what a good question actually does. Before we go any further, I want to give you the raw power of what we're actually talking about. I don't want you to make the mistake that I'm just up here offering you a mildly useful tip. You have to understand that asking more and better questions is one of the most potent forces available to human beings. The Bible backs it up, science backs it up. Dozens of research studies have revealed that people who ask frequent questions are more liked among their peers and more often seen as leaders. They have more social influence and are sought out more frequently for friendship and advice. Simply asking questions, meaningful questions, changes how people perceive you and how much they trust you. But it goes even deeper than social dynamics. Questions have massive neurological effects. A good question stimulates your brain, releasing serotonin and a rush of dopamine. Questions trigger what researchers call instinctive elaboration, a reflex that takes over your entire thought process, making you momentarily incapable of thinking about anything else. Some researchers have described good questions as having the ability to hijack your brain. Let me give you an example right now. What color shoes are you wearing? What just happened? You couldn't help it. For a moment, even if just a split second, that question captured your thought patterns. Not because I forced you, not because it was urgent, but because our thoughts are shaped by the questions we encounter. A good question is an invitation. It reaches inside you and begins to rearrange some things. Now imagine what if the right question asked at the right moment to the right person, what could it do to a marriage in a relationship with your children, a friendship, a grieving soul, a searching heart? I don't think we realize how powerful questions have shaped history itself. Just consider a few. When Albert Einstein was a boy, he asked himself the question, what would you see if you were traveling on a beam of light? That single question that he held, he examined, he wrestled with for years is what led to the theory of relativity. In 1961, John F. Kennedy stood on the steps of the Capitol and said, Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. The reframe of that question cast the vision for a unified and others-focused nation. In 1980, in that presidential election, Jimmy Carter's campaign slogan was a tested and trustworthy team. Ronald Reagan's campaign slogan was one question. Are you better off than you were four years ago? Reagan won by a landslide. One question moved a nation. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said life's most persistent and urgent question is what are you doing for others? And that question has continued to shape our national conscience around race across the last six decades. And here's one that I love. I don't know if you've ever noticed it, but the American national anthem, the star-spangled banner, pinned by Francis Scott Key in 1814, is structurally nothing more than two long questions. Oh, say, can you see? And oh, say, does that star spangled banner yet wave? The song that defines a nation is not a declaration, it is an inquiry. It's about someone looking through the smoke of a battlefield and asking, is our flag still there? Questions have changed history, they've changed science, they've changed nations, and I believe they have the power to change your marriage and your household, your workplace, and your walk with God. In his book, How to Know a Person, there's a chap, David Brooks wrote the book, and in the book, there's one chapter about asking the right question, and that chapter is worth the price of the book. In that chapter, he talks about diminishers and illuminators. He says, in every crowd there are diminishers and there are illuminators. Diminishers make people feel small and unseen. They see other people as things to be used, not as persons to be befriended. They stereotype and ignore. Illuminators, on the other hand, have a persistent curiosity about other people. They know what to look for and how to ask the right questions at the right time. They shine the brightness of their care on people and make them feel bigger, deeper, respected, and lit up. Questions are how illuminators make people feel valued, not charisma, not eloquence, not status, not expertise, just genuine caring questions. You don't have to be brilliant to be illuminator. You just have to be curious. And here's the thing: there's a name for that genuine kind of curiosity in the kingdom of God. It's called love. Paul said in the famous love chapter, love is not self-seeking. The Greek word here is zateo, the Greek word for seeking. It means to seek, to search, to pursue. Real love doesn't do that towards self. It seeks, searches, and pursues the best for others. Real love isn't passive, it pursues understanding, it wants to know. It's curious, which means real love possesses a holy curiosity toward God and people. And a good question is love in its most practical conversational form. It says, I'm not here to talk about myself. I'm here to know you. To grasp the power and the possibility of questions, we have to know the difference between question asking and questioning. Being a questioning person is often born out of cynicism, which leads to distrust and doubt. And when somebody feels they're being questioned, they get on the defensive. When they feel they're being interrogated, they're not feeling honored. They become guarded, they don't open up. That's not what this conversation is about. This is about not about questioning, it's about question asking, which is a fundamentally different orientation. Question asking emphasizes honor, discovery, growth. It's about wonder and holy curiosity, not cynicism. Genuine questions hold the power to unlock doors of discovery toward new paradigms and creative solutions and previously unimagined ideas. Briggs says it this way: good questions are like gifts that we extend to others. They are like keys on a keyring capable of unlocking doors and opening new passageways. They are windows that help us see others and mirrors that enable us to truly see ourselves. They are like archaeologists' tools, trolls, shovels, and spades, excavating hidden treasures lying beneath the surface. Good questions are flashlights, shining light on where we need to go next. And some questions are like midwives. They give birth to things that are miraculous: keys, windows, mirrors, flashlights, midwives. I want to be that kind of person who carries those kinds of things into my relationships and into the environments that I frequent. In Christian tradition, this posture of holy curiosity has deep roots. St. Anselm of Canterbury, the 11th-century theologian, gave us the phrase faith seeking understanding. He argued that the life of faith is not a life of settled answers, but of perpetual, reverent inquiry toward God, a God who is greater than all our questions. In Latin, he said, Fidis corins intellectum, which can translate to this: a faith that keeps asking. There's a long-honored tradition in the life of faith of sitting with our questions, of bringing them to God rather than away from him. The question asker and the person of faith are not opposites. In the biblical narrative, they are often the same person. We have so wrongly valued the place of questions on the journey of faith that we have turned Thomas into a bad guy. And we have called him doubting Thomas just because he asked a question. He refused to believe the resurrection without evidence. His questions are the honest, vulnerable expression of somebody who has been hurt before and they will not pretend otherwise. And you have to notice this Jesus honors his honesty. A week after Jesus had appeared to all of the other disciples, Thomas wasn't there, he shows up again just to answer Thomas's question. And Thomas's question produces the highest Christological confession in the Gospel of John. John 20, then he, Jesus, said to Thomas, put your finger here and look at my hands. Put your hand into the wounded my side. Don't be faithless any longer, believe. My Lord and my God, Thomas exclaimed. Learn from Thomas's honest question. The doubt that asked was answered with the truth that transformed. Ask your questions. So if questions are this powerful, if they frame the entire Bible, if they're neurologically wired into us, if children are born asking them at 290 per day, then why do most of us as adults barely ask any? What happened to us? There are many reasons, but let me quickly point out a few. Here's why we don't ask. Obstacle one, we live in an attention-seeking age. We live in a culture defined by relentless pursuit of attention and self-absorption. And we're trained to think, how are people supposed to notice me if I'm always asking questions about them? Obstacle two, we think we already know. If I already know, if I'm convinced I got the answers, why would I bother asking the questions? There's an arrogance on the inside of all of us that shuts down curiosity before it starts, and this is especially dangerous in the lives of people of faith because we can mistake theological certainty for spiritual maturity, and they are not the same thing. The wisdom of Proverbs says in Proverbs 26, there is more hope for fools than for people who think they are wise. The wisdom literature of the Old Testament is remarkably consistent on this. The beginning of wisdom is not the accumulation of answers. It is wisdom is the recognition of knowing what I do not know. It is humility before God and before people. The proverbs are relentlessly. Suspicious of the person who has stopped being curious. Obstacle three, questions feel inefficient. In our fast-paced, productivity-obsessed world, when somebody asks a question, it feels like they're slamming on the brakes. We favor task accomplishment over relational depth. And we feel pressured to act decisively and think quickly and we forget the questions. We just need answers. Move, decide, execute. But here's the thing about Jesus His ministry by that standard was wildly inefficient. He stopped for one person when crowds were pressing in. He responded to questions with questions. He let himself be interrupted constantly. He sat with people, one person, when he could have been reaching more people. By our standards, his ministry was inefficient. And yet, it was undeniably, massively effective. Obstacle four, it isn't modeled for us. If we've never been in an environment where questions are welcomed, encouraged, and modeled, then we have no framework for what this looks like. You can't learn a practice when no one has demonstrated in front of you. And that's why we're talking about this. I want this spiritual family to be a place where asking honest questions is seen as a sign of spiritual health, not a sign of spiritual weakness. Obstacle five, we don't actually care what other people think. Let's be honest. Sometimes we're just too apathetic, we're too exhausted, we're too self-absorbed to be curious enough to ask questions. Most of us have an imaginary sign hanging around our necks that says, too tired to care. We're too tired to be interested in other people. But we're always ready to share our opinion and give somebody advice. And the discipline of learning to ask questions slips the bridle over the advice monster that lives on the inside of every one of us. Obstacle six, we're afraid of awkward interactions and what we might learn. Questions are vulnerable. And asking a real question is verbal admission that I don't know something, and our culture is deeply allergic to peering uninformed. It can be hazardous to your career to raise your hand in a conference room and ask something. And in unhealthy environments, asking questions is perceived as weakness or insubordination or both. So we stay silent and we in our environments stay shallow. Obstacle seven, we assume people don't want to be asked. We wrongly assume that people want to be left alone. But in 36 years of public ministry, I'm convinced that people are battling a greater epidemic of loneliness right now than ever before. And I have been stunned repeatedly when in the right moment with the right question, how much of a person's story starts gushing out. Why? Because most people have had no one ever seriously interested in them. Nobody's ever really asked. Nobody's ever really listened. And when you do, it communicates something worth more than what money can buy. It says to them, your story matters and you're worth knowing. Now let me leave you with this. I want to take you to the theological center of this entire series. The practice of asking questions is not human innovation. It is a divine practice, and you can trace it all the way back to the first pages of your Bible. The first question asked in the Bible is not asked by Adam. It's not asked by Eve. The first question in the Bible, the very first question ever, is asked by God, Genesis 3 9. Then the Lord God called to the man, Where are you? Now think about that for a moment. This is the omniscient creator of the universe who walks through the garden and asks, Where are you? He's not asking because he doesn't know. He knows where Adam is. He knows exactly what Adam did. He knows the shame that sent Adam hiding behind the foliage. He knows everything, but he asks anyway. Why? Because the question isn't about information. The question is about relationship. Where are you? It's not an interrogation, it is an invitation. It's about a God who could have issued a verdict, but instead he chooses to open a conversation. This is a God whose first response to human brokenness is not condemnation but pursuit. Where are you? Is the first pastoral question in history. It creates space for a hiding, ashamed person to be found and loved. And this is not an isolated incident. This is a pattern of God throughout all of Scripture. God asked Cain after the first murder, where is your brother Abel? That's not a verdict. That's a question. God asked Elijah after he collapsed under a broom tree in suicidal despair, what are you doing here, Elijah? That's not a rebuke. That's a question. God speaks to Job out of a whirlwind to the man who is demanding answers for his suffering, and God asks him, Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation? Not an explanation, a question. The psalms are saturated with questions hurled at God. Questions that God seems to hold on to in silence. The psalmist asks in Psalm 13, How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart? The psalmist is not having a crisis of faith here. This is faith in action, a faith that is honest enough to bring real questions to a real God. The Psalms, the prayer book of Israel, is not a collection of doctrinal statements. It is a collection of honest questions. The people of God at prayer are people who bring their unresolved questions to the throne of heaven and trust that the God who asked the first question can handle what they bring him. Now, back to that first question that God, the one that God asked. Where are you? Notice how God frames that. He didn't say, What did you do? He didn't say, How could you? He didn't say, Do you know what this means? The first question God asked, a broken, hiding, ashamed human being, is a question of location. It's a question of relationship. It's a question of pursuit. Because he's not building a case. He's opening a door. It's that zotero kind of seeking, that pursuing love that Paul talked about in 1 Corinthians 13. And that is the signature of a great question, whether it's one asked by God or one asked by the people that God has placed in your life that care about you most. Good questions don't corner you. Good questions don't condemn you. They create space for you to be found. Where are you? Here's my prayer for this series that we become a people of holy curiosity. Not the cynical questioning that arms against vulnerability, but the honest, humble, wonder-filled curiosity that leans in toward God, toward each other, toward ourselves. I'm convinced that the questions we start asking in our marriages, in our friendships, in our prayers, in our quiet moments, those questions will change things. Not because they're magic, but because behind every great question is a posture of humility that says, I don't have this figured out. I want to know more. I want to know you, God, or I want to know you, person sitting in front of me. You are worth my full attention. That's the posture of a good disciple, of a good friend, that's the posture of a good parent, that's the posture of a good spouse, and remarkably, that's the posture of God Himself, walking through the garden toward us, asking a question that means I have not stopped looking for you. Where are you? But he asks because he wants you to answer that question. Where are you in your marriage right now? Where are you in your relationship with your kids right now? Where are you in the fulfillment level of your life's purpose and what you spend the majority of your time doing during your work week? Where are you in your prayer life? Where are you in your intimacy with God? Where where are you? He's not asking that from a condemning place, he's trying to locate you. It's it's it's it's he's trying to get you to locate where you are. He's trying to get you to rearrange some things in your heart. Here's what I want you to commit to this week. Before you come back for week two, this is simple, okay? Somebody said, Oh shoot, pastors assigning homework now. This is really, really practical. Not easy, but very practical. Choose one relationship in your life: your spouse, a close friend, one of your kids, a coworker. Ask them one question that you've never asked before. Not a surface question, a real meaningful one. Something that communicates by the question and the way you ask it. I want to know what's actually going on inside you. I care and I want to know. And then this is the harder part. Don't talk, don't give your opinion, don't give your advice, don't redirect, don't try to fill the silence. Just listen. Hear them. That's holy curiosity in practice. And next week we're gonna talk specifically about how that kind of curiosity, deployed with care and intentionality, can transform every relationship in your life, elevate your effectiveness at your career and your calling, all by simply learning to model what Jesus did every day. I want you to stand with me across the room today and across our campus family, and I'm gonna ask our prayer teams at every location if they would to make themselves available to serve you. Let that question reverberate in your heart. God's asking, where are you? Where are you in each of these areas of your life today? You don't have to have an answer. You just need to sit with the question and let it probe your heart. He's calling us up, he's calling us out. He wants us to grow. Strengthen our homes and our families and our calling and our purpose, our vocation. Strengthen our relationship with him. Where are you? He's pursuing you with a seeking kind of love. Whatever you need prayer for today, the altars are open. If it's as significant as I need to give my life to Jesus today, prayer about something going on in one of these areas of your life. This team is here to serve you. Father, would you bless them and keep them? God, would you be gracious to them? Would you turn your countenance their direction today? And would you give them peace? Help us learn to ask more and better questions like you. May we be more like you in this area, Father. God bless us as we go. In Jesus' name. Amen. These altars are open.