Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved
We are often counseled to look at the difficult requirements of the Christian life from the perspective of comparing what we are asked to do for God with what God did for us on the cross. This counsel is valid, but the reason for presenting it is sometimes flawed. It is true that what was accomplished at Calvary involved unfathomable action and pain, not only for Jesus but also for the Father who turned away from His Son for the first and only time in all eternity. The problem is that the way this truth is preached often involves a spirit of guilt-manipulation rather than the spirit which accompanies a speaker’s desire to make grace manifest. The fact is that the motivation to live our lives for God should never come out of a sense of guilt about what He went through to save us. Instead that motivation should come from the love we feel towards Jesus for what He did for us, along with an ongoing realization of the sheer power unleashed through His Resurrection. What God in Christ did for us 2000 years ago should be freeing and empowering, not guilt-inducing and self-effort producing.
The enormity of the power released by the Resurrection of Christ is beyond human reckoning, but it is not beyond human-harnessing. The child of God has available all the strength necessary to live out a truly spiritual life and not in some minimalist sense. This power to live is superabundant; it is a supernatural cup running over. That such strength is available should be a supreme comfort for it speaks to us of the provision of deity itself to enable us to fulfill what that deity requires.
It has become a bit of a cliché to state that living the Christian life is not just difficult, but impossible. What this phrase means is that we sooner or later realize trying to be Christlike in the power of the flesh is an exercise in utter futility. For many of us it is only then that we begin to despair of our own resources and actually look to God for what only He can give us. Abandoning spiritualized “self-help” for God’s provision for our victory is often in the form of a crisis followed by acceptance of a process. The process itself is a lifelong one and requires encouragement along the way. One source of this encouragement is the understanding that what God did for us profoundly equips us to do what He calls us to do for Him.
The truth of this is not easily received. In our fallen-ness we often cling to an ingrained tendency to try to measure-up on our own. The original lie of Satan is that we are gods onto ourselves, somehow self-equipped to meet any and all requirements anyone could ever put before us. When this is combined with a common inability to trust in someone else for our wellbeing the result is a stubborn root of “works-righteousness”, an oxymoron if there ever was one. It is a root not easily pulled-up, but the good news is that God even provides the power necessary to accomplish this task once we have decided we no longer want to live in the misery of self-effort. The Bible tells us that it is the power of God that works within us to will and act according to His good pleasure. This means that it is, in a sense, the power of God which allows us to receive the power of God. No part of our spiritual development is accomplished by us alone and this realization can be unspeakably comforting to the tortured soul of a Christian still trying to make it on his or her own.
It is absolutely appropriate to remind ourselves of what God has done for us when we ponder what His loving expectations are for our lives. But this should never be allowed to produce a sense of daunting guilt in the child of God. Rightly received this reminder can instead open us up to rightfully claim the power made available through Christ’s sacrifice on our behalf. That power can then set us free to triumphantly live in and through Him as we have never lived before.
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