Not in my own strength

I had to give myself a lecture earlier this week. The subject was "Doing things in one's own strength," as opposed to leaning back and trusting God to accomplish His purposes through me, in His ineffable fashion.

It was on a day when I was preparing for a Young Lives gathering. I had three or four girls who needed rides, but only one or two drivers. On top of that, I had agreed to do "the talk," and wasn't exactly sure what I would say. Even worse, I'm not particularly confident about delivering homilies to teen-aged girls. I spent the afternoon writing and re-writing pithy statements, text messaging girls and drivers, and generally wringing my hands.

There's a peculiar tension in the notion. On the one hand, we need to trust that God will indeed accomplish His purposes--with or without us, as a matter of fact. I suppose that in theory, I could have done nothing and all the girls would have arrived at Young Lives club somehow.

On the other hand, God expects us to work, to put some thought and effort into what we do on His behalf. In practice, drivers had to be identified, matched up with someone needing a ride, given the address, confirmed with the girl.... and so on. I'm not convinced these things would have happened had I decided to blow it all off and take a nap.

So somewhere in the middle of the hand-wringing, I lectured myself. After pondering this line of thought, I guess I concluded that we do indeed need to put out a worthy effort on the tasks that have fallen to us. But when we start to think about how God is at work in the background to accomplish the purposes, it just seems to take the pressure off.

And it also seems to take me off my egotistical pedestal of thinking how indispensible I am.

Both of these are excellent results.

Everyone got to Young Lives that night. My spiritual talk went pretty well. I even used some of this as an illustration about the joy and refreshment we receive when we have a close relationship with the Lord.

The Scripture reference is Nehemiah 8:10. "The joy of the Lord is your strength." I think "the joy of the Lord" must be that energized feeling that the Lord is in you and with you. I also think the inverse of this proposition is true as well: Strength in the Lord is your joy.

I know it's mine.