His Life, Not Ours

His Life, Not Ours

Read: John 15:5

“Apart from me you can do nothing.”

John 15:5

“He who trusts in himself is lost. He who trusts in God can do all things.”

—Alphonsus Liguori

IN WORD This is one of the foundational truths of our discipleship. If we do not learn this early, we may spend years of frustration trying to be the Christians God calls us to be. Our natural tendency is to try hard, be sincere, study diligently, and train ourselves to be the disciples we were meant to be. And there is a sense in which all of this is good—even necessary—if it is done with the knowledge that God is working in us all the while as our enabler. But when we use all this self-effort to attain our own growth, we quickly find ourselves feeling like failures. We come to a startling conclusion: Only Jesus can live the Christian life; we can’t. We can only have Him live that life in us.

Jesus is clear: He has not come to be just our Teacher, our Guide, our Savior, and our Lord. He is all of that and more. He is our Life. In a very real sense, we died with Him on the cross and He now lives in us (Galatians 2:20). He breathes His Spirit into us, He sustains us, He bears His fruit in us, and He does His work in us and through us. When we think we led others to Christ, we didn’t. He did. When we think we’ve become more patient, loving, or joyful, we only became so because He did that in us. It is all His work.

IN DEED Much of the Christian life is God stripping us of our self-effort so that He can live His life in us without our interference. We stress and strain over our discipleship, but God is after our relenting and our trust in His strength. When we find ourselves in circumstances that are beyond our control, frustrated from our lack of effectiveness, we can know with certainty that we are to realize our weakness and rely on His strength. God often places us in situations in which we are in over our heads—even letting us fail miserably, sometimes—in order to teach us this. He must break us of self-reliance. We are never to depend on our own strength and strategies. We are to be utterly dependent on the power of God that works in us and in our circumstances.