How Will You Know If You Never Try?

Randall Baskin is a very successful insurance executive who founded his own insurance agency in Nashville. I loved going to lunch with Randall. He was energetic, focused and always moving toward his next goal. After lunch with Randall, I felt like I could climb any mountain and overcome any obstacle. He’s still one of the most inspiring men I’ve ever met.

Randall shouldn’t have been the success he was. He didn’t start from a privileged position. He was dirt poor when he was a young man. When he got married, he and his wife lived in a mobile home that leaked. When they went to bed at night, they had to decide at which end of the bed to put their heads because the mobile home leaked. If your head was on the wrong end of the bed, the rain would drip on your head.

Randall also had a speech impediment. When a friend talked to Randall about going into the insurance business, Randall said he didn’t think he could do it. The friend responded, “How will you know unless you try?” That question became the driving mantra of Randall’s life. Whenever he was faced with a difficult challenge, whenever he worried he couldn’t do something, he would ask himself, “How will you know unless you try?” Needless to say, Randall tried more things than he naturally would have and succeeded far more than he failed.

With his permission, I’ve started using this question in my own internal conversations. Whenever the mountain seems a little too high or the opportunity just a little too big, I’ll ask myself, “How will you know unless you try?” Like Randall, I’ve been prompted to take on several challenges I wouldn’t have passed on before and again, like Randall, I’ve ended up succeeding more times than I’ve failed. Things ended up working out simply because I tried when I would have normally just walked away.

As I’ve started working with churches in my new role, I’ve found myself asking this question to pastors and church leaders in a variety of settings. When we talk about church planting, “How will you know unless you try?” Or perhaps there’s an opportunity in the community, a special need that no one can seem to get their hands around, but no one in the church has the courage or faith to take it on. “How will you know unless you try?”

This points to a glaring oversight in most of our discipleship programs. For most of us, discipleship is a transfer of information from one person to another. Starting with Jesus and moving from His disciples across the years and finally to us, the truth about Jesus and His teachings were told to us. Getting information we could trust became the focus of our discipleship work. We wanted to be sure we had the most accurate information about Jesus and what it meant to be one of His followers. We were so committed to having the right information, we’d spend generations tracing down obscure manuscripts and even pieces of manuscripts trying to get the right translation to be sure we had the truth.

All of this is well and good, but somewhere along the line following Jesus became more about information than transformation. Discipleship became more about knowing about Jesus and less about being with Jesus. Being a Christian was about what you knew, not about how we lived. This gap between knowing and doing has only continued to widen. G.K. Chesterton famously said, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.”

Most of us don’t know because we’ve never tried. We don’t know if we would be a good leader of a small group because we’ve never tried. We don’t know how we’d do in a prison ministry because we’ve never tried. Singing in worship? Never tried. Sharing your faith? Never tried. We can’t say we failed at any of these things because we’ve never tried.

And because we’ve never tried, we don’t know. You can go to a seminar on how to change a tire. You can watch a video about how to change a tire, but until you’ve had to pull a tire tool and a jack out of your trunk on the side of the interstate, you don’t know how to change a tire. This is the missing piece of discipleship. Most of us have never tried.

We’ve read about prayer.

We’ve read about sharing a cup of water.

We’ve read about feeding the hungry and clothing those in need.

But we’ve never tried it.

Fully following Christ has three parts: worship, discipleship, and ministry. There are things about following Christ that are learned only in obedience. For instance, have you ever really had to turn the other cheek? Not just talk about it, but stand there while your cheek is still stinging from the slap and trust that Jesus was telling us the truth? Does turning the other cheek actually work? Most of us don’t know because we’ve never tried it.

Over and over again, God invites us to test Him. We’re told to “taste and see” that the Lord is good. Try and find out for ourselves what generations of believers have found out. You can trust Jesus. He’s been tried in the worst of situations.

This is one of the main reasons discipleship is so lame in the American church. We’ve heard about it, but we really don’t know about it. Because we don’t know if we haven’t tried it.

And most of us, for all of our talk, have never really tried Jesus at all.

This essay was first posted in Scot McKnight’s newsletter.