2Cor. 6:1 As God’s fellow workers we urge you not to receive God’s grace in vain.
1Cor. 15:10 But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me.
God’s grace is his power made available to us. How can that be in vain? When we don’t work with him, we hinder the flow of his power in our lives.
Think of someone sitting in a dark room. You ask why they don’t flip the switch and turn on the light. What if they insisted that it was arrogant to think they could do anything about their situation. You tell them that by flipping the switch, they can have light. They insist that it is the power company that is awesome and, well, powerful. True, very true. Yet they sit in the dark. Sound foolish? Silly? People do this all the time when they point to the majesty and power of God, yet sit in spiritual darkness all because they refuse to think, believe and do what God says. They refuse to flip the switch.
The point: Instead of debating the importance of the power company, the switch or the one who flips the switch, why not acknowledge that all play their role and without all of them, you sit in the dark. With all of them, you have light.
Kingdom reality: God’s power works through us as we “flip the switch”, or make the choice to align with his ways... to think, believe and do according to his Kingdom principles. Usually, he is waiting on us to hear, to see... to move... to simply follow Jesus.
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I love this...it's a simple way to explain what is available with God, and what's at stake. If Jesus was a control freak or an enabling God, He would have delivered us so completely that we wouldn't even have a role in our own redemption or the redemption of others...but He is completely confident of His own identity, and only did a little to expose what He is capable of while here on Earth, so that He could reveal the rest of what He's capable of through us...allowing us to share in His glory (Psalm 84:11) and divine nature, while never seeking the glory or taking it on for ourselves in some kind of ego fed way...
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ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that oftentimes we put too much emphasis on making a decision. Was Jesus slain before the foundation of the world because God carefully evaluated all the possibilities? Or, did He go to the cross as a natural flow of Who He was (love)? In other words, didn't He go to the cross because that is what love would do? I think that is similar to "I am what I am."
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