What's the Point?

When Faithfulness Starts to Feel Empty

There is a version of tired that doesn't announce itself.

It doesn't come after a crisis. It doesn't follow a dramatic failure or a visible breakdown. It shows up quietly, after a long stretch of doing everything right — and noticing that your life still looks about the same.

You tithe. You serve. You show up. You pray. You make the faithful choice, even when it costs you something.

And then you look up — and you look around — and you notice something you weren't expecting to notice.

The person next to you, the one who isn't doing any of this, seems to be doing just fine. Maybe better than fine. Maybe better than you.

And in a quiet moment you'd never say out loud, a question begins to form.

What's the point?

The Question Nobody Wants to Admit

This is not the question of someone who has walked away from God.

It is the question of someone who hasn't. Someone who stayed. Someone who kept showing up long after the excitement faded — and is now standing in the gap between faithfulness and its fruit, wondering if the gap will ever close.

It's an honest question. And it deserves an honest response.

Because if we are only faithful when we can see the return, what we have isn't really faith. It's a transaction. And deep down, many of us have been operating that way without fully realizing it — keeping an invisible ledger of what we've given and what we expect to receive, and quietly growing weary when the numbers don't add up.

The exhaustion isn't a character flaw. It's a signal. And the question beneath it is worth following all the way down.

A Worship Leader Who Almost Lost It

In Psalm 73, a man named Asaph — a worship leader, someone whose entire life was oriented around God — writes something remarkable.

He says his feet had almost slipped.

Not because life was chaotic. Not because God had gone silent in an obvious way. But because of what he saw when he looked around him. He watched people who weren't faithful thrive. He watched those who didn't pursue God live with ease and comfort and what appeared to be blessing.

And then he wrote what may be one of the most honest sentences in all of Scripture:

"Surely in vain I have kept my heart pure and have washed my hands in innocence."

Surely in vain.

That is "what's the point?" in the Bible. That is a deeply faithful person, someone who loved God and served Him, saying: maybe this has all been for nothing.

And God did not reject him for asking it. It made it into the Psalms. It has been read by people of faith for thousands of years — because it is that true, and that human.

Asaph kept writing. He described the bitterness he felt, the confusion, the sense that something was deeply unfair about how things were unfolding. He didn't clean it up or make it sound more spiritual than it was.

And then something shifted.

He writes: "Until I entered the sanctuary of God."

He didn't get an explanation. He didn't receive a detailed account of why the faithful suffer and the unfaithful prosper. He didn't see an immediate reversal of circumstances.

He simply drew close to God. And in that closeness, something changed — not his situation, but his perspective. His orientation. What he understood the point to actually be.

The Brother Who Stayed

There is another figure in Scripture who was living inside this same question, and we tend to overlook him entirely.

In Luke 15, Jesus tells the parable of the Prodigal Son. We know the younger son's story well — the departure, the devastation, the return. We know the father's response, the robe, the ring, the celebration.

But there is another son in this story.

The one who never left.

He's been in the field all day, working as he always does, when he hears music coming from the house. He asks what's happening and learns that his brother has come home — and that there is a party.

And he refuses to go in.

When his father comes out to find him, the older son finally says what he has been holding:

"All these years I've been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours comes back — after wasting everything you gave him — you kill the fattened calf for him."

Read past the anger for a moment, because underneath it is something much more vulnerable.

He is asking: does any of my faithfulness actually mean anything to you?

He has been faithful for years. He has stayed, worked, obeyed, and contributed. And standing at the edge of his father's celebration, he is wondering if any of it was seen. If any of it counted. If there is something he missed — some version of life that would have felt less like labor and more like love.

It is not so different from what many of us quietly wonder.

What the Father Actually Said

The father's response to the older son is one of the most tender moments in all of the Gospels — and one of the most misread.

He doesn't lecture him. He doesn't compare the two brothers. He doesn't produce a record of everything the older son has been given.

He says simply:

"My son, you are always with me, and everything I have is yours."

You are always with me.

That is the answer. Not a reward for faithfulness. Not a ledger balanced in his favor. Just — you are always with me.

The older son had been living alongside his father every day, and yet somewhere along the way, he had started relating to him like a servant rather than a son. He was working to earn what was already his. He was trying to accumulate what had already been given.

The closeness — the being with the father — wasn't the means to the blessing.

It was the blessing.

The Question Beneath the Question

When "what's the point?" rises in us, it is rarely just about the outcomes we haven't seen.

It is usually about something deeper: whether we are loved because of what we do — or simply because of who we are to God.

If His love is something we earn, then the question makes sense. If faithfulness is currency and it doesn't seem to be buying anything, the math doesn't add up.

But if we are loved the way the father loved the older son — fully, already, as a matter of relationship and not performance — then the question begins to shift.

The point is not the reward at the end.

The point is that we are always with Him.

And when that becomes something we actually experience, not just believe as a concept, it changes everything. It changes why we serve. It changes what we expect from faithfulness. It changes what we understand ourselves to be doing when we show up, week after week, in the quiet and the ordinary.

This Week's Question

You may find yourself asking:

What's the point?

But beneath that question is a deeper one:

Does what I do actually matter to God?

Not in general. But specifically — in the faithfulness that has cost you something, the showing up that nobody else has noticed, the choosing right when choosing differently would have been easier.

And here is what I believe the answer is:

Yes. More than you know.

Not because you have earned His attention. But because you already have it. You are always with Him. And He has never once looked at your quiet, unrecognized faithfulness and missed it.

A Simple Next Step

This week, bring the real question to God. Not the version that sounds acceptable — the actual version.

Maybe it's: I'm tired and I don't know what I'm doing this for.

Maybe it's: Do You actually see me?

Say that. And then sit with what the father said to the son who never left.

You are always with me.

Let that land somewhere deeper than your head.

Because the answer to "what's the point?" has been there the whole time — not waiting for you to earn it, but waiting for you to be still enough to hear it.

✨ Encouragement for your spirit. Wisdom for your walk.