One of the greatest ideas about the American Ethos is this: You can do anything and be anything. If you don’t feel like you can, the solution is simple. You need to do more or try harder.
That business didn’t succeed? Put in more hours. Want to be qualified for a better job? Go back to school.
The answer to all of life’s dilemmas can be found in that phrase. In America, we don’t rest. We don’t need help. We can pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps (a phrase, you should know, that was invented to show that this was literally an impossible task). All we need is to do more and try harder.
The immense amount of self-effort required to succeed in the rat race, combined with the abundance of reliance on self runs contrary to the good news presented by Jesus in the Bible.
Look at what Proverbs 3:5-6 tells us,
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding; In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct your paths.”
We’re not being told to trust in ourselves or our own effort, but lean on God, trust in God, rely solely on Him, and He will take care of directing our path.
Pastor Creflo Dollar refers to this as The Contrast - Self Effort vs. Rest.
Galatians tells us that we are not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith in Jesus Christ. (Gal 2:16)
Our focus now under grace is learning how to rest from our self-efforts. In fact, the writer of Hebrews tells us that we are labor to enter into rest.
“There remains therefore a rest for the people of God. For he who has entered His rest has himself also ceased from his works as God did from His. Let us therefore be diligent to enter into that rest, lest anyone should fall according to the same example of disobedience.” Hebrews 4:9
You see, rest is not passive. Yes, we are to cease from our works or trying to accomplish things in our own effort, but we must be diligent to enter rest. The greatest temptation for you and I as believers is to step out of our place of rest and to go back to performance and works.
That’s what happened with the Israelites. God had given them a plan, but they decided repeatedly that they didn’t need God’s plan, they could do it on their own, and they wound up wandering in the desert for 40 years during what should have been an eleven-day journey.
Our works cannot earn us right standing with The Father. If our works can’t earn us our right standing, then we have to trust in something outside of ourselves, outside of our works, and that is Jesus.
That’s how good God is to us - He no longer deals with us on the basis of our works, but rather on the basis of our faith in Jesus.
And in case that throws you off, the faith that we live and operate with isn’t even our faith to begin with. Romans 12:3 tells us that He has given all of us the measure of faith. So the faith that we live by, use, and operate in isn’t even our faith to begin with, it’s the faith of God!
If it’s His faith, how could it fail? Why would we struggle to trust Him, or think that He wouldn’t come through? Not only has He given us the way and the plan, He gave us the faith to believe Him with!
With all of that being said, how on earth could anything we do bring us closer to God? How could our self-efforts put us in a position to receive what He has already provided? How could we ever do enough or try hard enough to get everything that He’s made available?
The American gospel has been “do more, try harder” for years. But the true Gospel flies in stark opposition to that message. Do more, try harder is replaced by, “Rest. The work is finished. Believe only in Me.”
Do you see how freeing it is? How freeing it is to know that we’ve been justified by faith in Jesus and that we can believe Him for anything we need or want, and then to top it off, He even gave us the faith to believe Him with? That’s a freeing message that makes the human heart so thankful, the only logical response is to worship Him, to follow Him all the rest of your life.
I mean, why would you want to do anything different? If we really believe He’s that good, our gratitude and rest in response to His promise should be apparent to everyone around us.
By Grace,
Dave