Self-Sufficient

It wasn’t my finest hour. I had a crisis and I was stuck. I did what I should do and prayed. “Please, God, I don’t know what to do. Please … give me guidance.” Almost immediately an answer occurred to me … the right answer. And, to my embarrassment, I heard me tell God, “Oh, don’t worry, God … I’ve got this.” What effrontery! Like I came up with that on my own. I was ashamed.

We all have it in us, this notion that we’re capable, that we're sufficient. Oh, maybe not entirely, but for the most part, right? “I can do this.” We’re taught to tell ourselves that. “I think I can. I think I can.” It’s very human.

Some people have delusions of grandeur. We all suffer from delusions of adequacy. We think we’ve got this … at least sometimes. In life, we can be deists—the notion that God made everything and then stood back and watched. We forget that Jesus said, “Apart from Me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). We don’t really grasp the very clear statement “From Him and through Him and to Him are all things” (Rom 11:36). Paul told the Athenians, “In Him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). He told the Corinthians, “Not that we are sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, but our sufficiency is from God” (2 Cor 3:5). Even when Paul told the Philippian Christians to “work out your salvation with fear and trembling,” he told them it was because “God is at work in you to will and to do His good pleasure” (Php 2:12-13).

We are, by birth, self-centered and therefore anthropocentric. We are human-centered. So we naturally believe that it’s all about us—that we are the primary focus. We believe that we’re capable. We believe that we, in our experience and efforts, can determine what is and isn’t true, as if something becomes true simply because we declare it to be true. It’s a lie, a product of a heart deficiency (Jer 17:9).

It’s not true. We are not that good. The only realgood in us is the good God produces in us and sustains by His grace. We would do well to remember that and be properly grateful.