What If Jesus Isn’t the Answer to My Question?

by Anna Aven Howard
12/28/2007

I must confess, I have a contrary and sarcastic mind at times (okay, a lot of the time). I was driving down the freeway in Nashville and I saw a billboard proclaiming: “Try Jesus: He has an answer for everything!”

This struck me as odd because a few days before I had seen an eighteen-wheeler driving down the freeway with the words “It’s the answer you’ve been looking for” written on the back. Curious, I pulled up alongside it and discovered that it was an ad for a low-carbohydrate bread, the answer to how to have bread on a low-carb diet.

I actually had the same reaction to both of these signs. My thought when I saw the ad for the bread was, What if I was wondering what to do with my life? and when I saw the Jesus billboard, I thought, What if I was wondering what to have for lunch? I don’t think Jesus is the answer to that question.

I don’t think that “Jesus is the answer” is actually in the Bible. Gasp—I know! We’ve talked before about the fact that Jesus is the way to God. This is actually in the Bible, affirmed in many different places, the most famous of which is John 14:6: “Jesus told him, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me.’ ”

But I would argue that there is a vast difference between Jesus being the way, and Jesus being the answer.

Perhaps I’m leaning too much on my own experience here, but I’ve had many questions to which Jesus was not the answer. I’ve experienced hard times when Jesus wasn’t a quick fix, as that whole “Jesus is the answer” thing tends to imply. Jesus has always been there to walk me through them, but sometimes there just weren’t any answers.

I think this is an important distinction to make. If we buy into the whole concept that Jesus is the answer, and we try to make him the answer to everything, or think that he somehow should be the answer for everything, we will be frustrated. Either we will find ourselves disappointed in who we thought Jesus was, or we’ll be convinced that somehow, we’re not doing this whole Jesus thing right.

It’s sort of like that all-in-one tool you can order from the home shopping network—you know, the one that’s supposed to slice, dice, cube, chop, and cut. Then you get it and either it doesn’t do all of those things as well as the infomercial claimed, or it doesn’t do them for very long before breaking. And we feel as if we have been sold a false bill of goods.

That’s the problem with treating Jesus as the answer. If we buy into Jesus as the answer to all our problems, then we haven’t met the real Jesus. You see, you can’t “buy into” Jesus because Jesus isn’t a commodity. He’s not the latest and greatest labor-saving product to simplify your life.
But this is actually good news. For those of you who have tried Jesus as the answer to everything and then were let down, it wasn’t Jesus who let you down; it was simply the faulty view of Jesus that you’d been sold.

There are always going to be questions with no answers and times of difficulty, sorrow, and darkness. But while Jesus might not promise to be the answer to every problem, we find him telling us, “And be sure of this: I am with you always, even to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20).
And when we’re in the middle of trial by fire, or feel that we’re treading water, barely able to keep our nose above the surface, we find him saying:

“Do not be afraid, for I have ransomed you. I have called you by name; you are mine. When you go through deep waters, I will be with you. When you go through rivers of difficulty, you will not drown. When you walk through the fire of oppression, you will not be burned up; the flames will not consume you. For I am the LORD, your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior” (Isaiah 43:1-3).

Jesus never promised that it would be easy. But He promised to be there. Always. So if you have encountered a situation where Jesus wasn’t the answer, it’s okay. He might not be the answer, but he is the way, the truth, and the life. And he is ready to lead us through this journey of life until we’re safely home with him one day.