Letting God do the heavy-lifting

One of the biggest pieces of advice the world gives you—from therapists and corporate heads to famous Indian gurus and Oprah Winfrey—is: “You’ve got to work on yourself.”

A typical hackneyed slogan from the business arena, for example, is, “Work harder on yourself than you do on your job.”

Of course, God’s “tips for success” in the Bible are often contrary to man’s thinking. Paul writes in I Thessalonians 2:13, “When ye received the word of God which ye heard of us, ye received it not as the word of men, but as it is in truth, the word of God, which effectually worketh also in you that believe.” He tells Philemon, “The communication of thy faith—I want it to become effectual.”

*****

Preacher Richard Jordan explains, “Working effectually means it gets inside of you and produces its work in you so that when your feet hit the ground, you’re off doing what you need to be doing. How do you that?

“How do you get from where it’s just stuff you know in your head to stuff that lives in your day-to-day life? Well, there’s only ONE word and that one word’s not religion. It’s not rules and regulations and performance systems. The word is believe.

“The long and the short of it is, folks, when you read a verse of scripture, that verse says that this action and this attitude ought to be the action and attitude you take as a Believer because you’re a Believer and this is the way it should live in your life on a daily basis—this is what God would live in you and how He’d act in you.

“And when you don’t do that, you know why you don’t do that? Because you don’t believe the verse. That’s all there is to it. There’s not any other excuse. You’ve got misplaced dependencies. Your confidence is not in God’s Word. It’s not in who God’s made you in Christ. It’s in you, or someone else, or in what you want and not what God wants.

“You want the verses to work in your life—believe them! That’s all you got to do. The only response grace will accept is faith. And when you believe them, you know what they’ll do? They’ll transform your life into what they say. The reality of what they say will work in your life.”

***** 

“When you look at something and you’re afraid you’re going to lose it . . . how many people get afraid of losing their possessions? Losing your children to the world? Losing the respect of others? Losing your health?

“Why do you fear losing those things? Did you know that every one of those things you’re going to lose anyway? Naked you came in and naked you’re going to go out.

“All the things that you try and accumulate, you’re going to leave them. The only thing that’s going to last forever are the spiritual things you have; your identity in Christ, your riches in Christ.

“Why do we fear then? Because we have this idea that our identity, our worth, our meaning, our justification for existence, resides in what I can accumulate, how many people I can get to be happy with me, how well my children are doing so people give me accolades for that. Our fear comes from understanding we really can’t produce all that on our own. 

“Your identity has to be founded in something that can’t be changed. It’s unbelief--it’s a lack of dependence on who God has made you in Jesus Christ, and who God has made Christ to you--for you to get your identity out of anything but Him.

“It’s not what you do, it’s what He did that makes you valuable. It’s not what you accomplish, it’s what He’s accomplished that gives you worth and meaning. Because He’s given you HIS value.

“I Corinthians 1:30 says, ‘But of him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption.’

“God has given you everything your heart could ever desire or long for--all the things you seek and chase and look for behind every tree and under every rock, you have in Christ.

*****

“At the most basic level, sin is a refusal to trust God to give you what you’re looking for in Christ. Anger becomes fear in disguise, striking out, and fear really is unbelief.

“There’s that arrogance syndrome. It starts out with self-justification. ‘I’m going to prove that I’m right!’ As soon as you start proving that you’re right, it moves immediately into self-deception. And in order to prove that you’re right, you deceive yourself into believing that you can be right, that you are right, and pretty soon that leads into self-absorption and that creates bitterness; it’s brooding about why you’re right, and bitterness against those who don’t see it.

“You run that syndrome out there and your old sin nature turns it around and comes back, and once it’s created bitterness, that self-absorption goes right back into self-deception; goes right back into self-justification. That just intensifies the bitterness and then it becomes what Hebrews 12 calls a ‘root of bitterness' that can’t be rooted out.

“You go out into my yard, my wife and I hate dandelions. She has a little metal thing about that long and she goes out and gets that dandelion, and if you don’t get that root out way down deep it will come back.

“So she’ll take that thing and run it down into the ground but I can always go out and see where the dandelions were because there’s a hole where she’s dug that thing out and a root of bitterness is like that.

“To get it out it leaves a scar in your soul, in your emotions, in your heart, and you carry that along in life.

“Now, what happens in this issue of anger, and it’s obviously something Paul understood leaders are going to face, is it’s one of the chief motivating things of religion: ‘I got to be right, I am right, I know I’m right because I got to be right, because if I’m not right, I’m nothing.’

“You always camouflage it by, ‘Well, I’m just defending the truth; I’m set for the defense and confirmation of the gospel.’ Defending the truth is a good thing, but when it morphs into self-defense, what you discover, and what you have demonstrated, is how deeply rooted your identity is in you being right. And that’s a burden you can’t bear because you aren’t right. You’re a sinner and your righteousness isn’t in you; it’s in Him.

*****

“If you can get that monkey off your back that you got to be right to measure up and to belong and have value, then you’re FREE to let His life produce His rightness in and through you. And instead of anger, you see, ‘I don’t have to be right.’

"I can have the humility of mind to say, ‘I’m probably wrong somewhere in this.’ As soon as you do that, there’s that humbling of your mind; that lowliness of mind, that doesn’t say, ‘I know I’m right and I know I know the truth.’

“Listen, being right doesn’t depend on you. Would you relax and realize that? Paul says, ‘You can do nothing against the truth but for the truth.’

“Truth doesn’t depend on you. Close up shop and go fishing. Truth is still truth. That doesn’t mean you don't preach the Word and contend for the truth; it means it doesn’t depend on YOU."

(new article tomorrow)