What Jesus Didn't Say

Jesus left things out on purpose.

That's the part I keep coming back to. Not the parts he said, which we've spent centuries arguing about. The parts he didn't say. The things he looked at his disciples and thought, Not yet. You can't hold this yet.

I shared this past weekend why I think John 16:12-13 is one of the most underrated verses in the Bible:

There is so much more I want to tell you, but you can’t bear it now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own but will tell you what he has heard. He will tell you about the future.

I want to stay on that first sentence. "There is so much more I want to tell you, but you can't bear it now."

We don't know. Jesus doesn't say. He just gestures at the silence and tells the disciples that the Spirit will lead them into what they weren't yet ready to receive. Which is either deeply comforting or genuinely unsettling, depending on your relationship with not-knowing.

But here's what gets me: He's not insulting them. He's not saying they're too slow, or too sinful, or not spiritual enough. He's saying they don't have the capacity yet. That's a different thing. Capacity can grow. Capacity is the point of the whole journey.

We tend to treat theological development like a completion project. You learn the right things, settle the right questions, arrive at the right conclusions, and then you're done. The work is finished. You spend the rest of your life defending what you found rather than continuing to look.

One of the patterns I've noticed as a pastor is how often we use the Bible as a boundary fence rather than a road. "Give me the chapter and verse." Which sounds like faithfulness, and can be. But it also reflects an assumption: that every dimension of an infinite God fits neatly into a finite text. That the journey ends where the canon closes.

A theologian named William J. Webb offers a framework I've found genuinely useful here. He calls it XYZ. X is the original culture in which a biblical text appeared. Y is the biblical text itself. Z is the ultimate ethic, the direction the text is pointing toward. His argument is that the Bible usually moves beyond X, the original culture, but doesn't always arrive at Z. There's still somewhere to go. The trajectory matters as much as the destination, and sometimes more.

Take the question of women in leadership. X is the first-century Mediterranean world, where women had essentially no public voice, no legal standing, and no platform from which to teach men anything. The culture was not ambiguous on this point. Y is what the biblical text actually does with that reality, which is already more complicated than X. Paul tells women to be silent in Corinth (1 Corinthians 14:34). He also calls Phoebe a deacon and Junia an apostle (Romans 16:1, 7). And then he writes this: "There is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male and female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28). The text is not one thing. It is moving. Z is the direction all that movement points toward, which the church has been arguing about ever since.

Webb's own conclusions land in different places than mine on a number of issues. But we're both on the same journey. The framework doesn't tell you where to stop; it tells you to keep asking where the text is going, not just what it says.

That question, where is this taking us, is exactly what Jesus is pointing at in John 16. We don't just consider what the Bible says. We consider where it's pointing. And we ask whether we have the capacity yet to go there.

The obvious follow-up question is: how do we know if the Z is of God? If the text is pointing forward to places that don't have specific verse references, how do we know when we're following the Spirit rather than just following our preferences?

The Apostle Paul gives us something to work with. Galatians 5:22-23:

The Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

Notice what this list is not. It's not a list of beliefs. It's not a doctrinal checklist. It's a description of what a person looks like when they're actually following the Spirit, when the Spirit's presence is producing something visible in their life.

The grammar is interesting too. Fruit is singular. Then Paul lists nine things. A New Testament professor named John Anthony Dunne describes it as a grape cluster. Nine grapes, one cluster, one word. The image has stayed with me since I first heard it (check out Cabernet and Pray episode 66 for our conversation about this). As someone who thinks about wine more than most pastors, I find this deeply beautiful.

The point is that the Spirit produces all nine together. You might have a few by personality. But the whole cluster requires the Spirit. And here's the inverse, which matters just as much: when you see someone whose life is consistently not producing this fruit, you can ask what they believe that's getting in the way. Beliefs shape formation. Formation produces fruit, or it doesn't.

We are living in a moment where a lot of things labeled Christian actually suppress the fruit of the Spirit. It's worth asking what beliefs, values, or postures are inhibiting love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control in the people who hold them?

That's a better question than "what do they believe about this Bible verse?"

On every episode of my podcast, I ask guests the same question: What's something you used to believe that it turned out later you were wrong about? Everyone has an easy answer. Fast, sometimes even sheepish. "Oh, I used to think..." and then the story of how they changed. That answer, whatever it is, is a map of where the Spirit took them.

If you sit with that question and nothing comes to mind, it's worth sitting longer. The disciples walked with Jesus for three years. They still weren't ready for everything He had to tell them. The idea that any of us arrived at complete theological correctness and has been defending it faithfully ever since is probably worth examining. We're all wrong about something. We just don't know what that something is yet. Thankfully, we can change our minds about it.

Alan Watts is credited with saying: "You're under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago." 

You don't have to end today believing exactly what you believed when you woke up. The Spirit is still in the business of guiding people into the truth they weren't ready for before. The question isn't whether She's moving. The question is whether we're open enough to follow.

If you're interested in watching the message I gave on these ideas, you can see that below.

If this resonated, there's more where it came from. The Rebuilding Faith community is where I do this work every week alongside people rebuilding their faith on the outside of institutional Christianity — book studies, live calls, weekly newsletter, and honest conversation. Find out more.

Photo by Susie Burleson on Unsplash