We all know that feeling, don’t we? You want to sleep so badly, but it just doesn’t seem to be in the cards. You drift off, and the phone rings, the kids wake you up, or the preacher raises his voice.

Here’s another one for you. How many of you use the snooze on the alarm on your phone? There are times when I have hit the snooze on my phone - but I KNOW it going to go off again in, like, 10 minutes...and instead of actually going back to sleep, I keep thinking about the alarm for the next several minutes as I lay there in a state of half-conscious anxiety!

But here is the problem: as Christians, many of us are walking around in that exact same state. We are spiritually "half-asleep." We are hitting the snooze button on our faith. We are comfortable, we are drowsy, and we have no idea that the enemy is right outside the window, knocking.

As we continue in our series, "Questions Jesus Asked (And We Must Answer)," we come to a moment where Jesus’ closest friends couldn’t seem to stay awake. And the problem was, this was not the time to sleep.

There are certain questions people ask when you immediately know what they're really asking. If your spouse looks at you and says, "Do you know what today is?" you know that isn't really a question about the calendar. It's a question about whether you've remembered something important. Suddenly you're mentally flipping through anniversaries, birthdays, and every promise you've made over the last month, hoping you've remembered the right one. Sometimes the question itself isn't the point. The question is designed to lead you somewhere.

Jesus was a master at asking those kinds of questions. That's why we've been spending this summer looking at Questions Jesus Asked (And We Must Answer). Jesus often taught by asking questions because questions have a way of reaching places that lectures never can. A question forces us to examine our own hearts. It reveals what we believe, what we fear, and where our faith really is.

Today's question seems almost unnecessary at first. Jesus looks at His disciples and asks, "How many loaves do you have?" It almost sounds as though He's simply taking inventory, but that's not what He's doing at all. Jesus isn't asking because He needs information. He's asking because He wants to teach His disciples something they will carry with them for the rest of their lives.

So we are deep into our summer series, "Questions Jesus Asked (And We Must Answer)." And today's question hits us right between the eyes. It's from Mark 8, and Jesus asks: "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?"

Now before we dive in, I want to start with a story.

Christopher McCandless. Some of you know the story - it was made into a book and later a movie called Into the Wild. This kid was brilliant. College grad. Good family. Had the whole world open to him. But he was suffocating. He felt like society was a trap, like success was a cage. So he did what a lot of people dream about doing - gave it all up, his money, his savings, his car, and headed into the Alaskan wilderness with nothing but a backpack, a rifle, and a copy of Tolstoy.

He wanted to live free. No bills. No bosses. No expectations. Just him and the raw, untamed wild.

What happened? Four months later, he starved to death in an abandoned bus. Just 24 years old. His last journal entry read: "I've had a happy life and thank the Lord. Goodbye and may God bless all."

Now, I share that story because there's something in all of us that gets what he was trying for. We feel that itch too - the sense that life is more than a rat race, more than mortgages and the meetings and the never-ending to-do list. But here's the thing: McCandless went looking for life and found death. He went looking for freedom and found a trap. He gained...what? Freedom from money? Freedom from responsibility? Yes, but in the end, he lost everything.

That's exactly what Jesus is getting at here in our passage.