Inadequacy: The Surprising Secret to Being Useful to God

the following message by aleister begg is made available by truth for life for more information visit us online at truthforlife.org well thank you very much it is a privilege to be invited to deliver this lecture in the scripture and ministry series a lecture that i have entitled inadequacy the surprising secret to being useful to god and i think you would understand if i said that i feel myself entirely inadequate to give a lecture on the subject but i want to begin by setting a context in the bible and if you are able to follow along i'm going to read from second corinthians and chapter 2 and beginning to read at the 12th verse i'm going to read through to the end of verse 6 in chapter 3. and paul is describing the circumstances now when i went to troas to preach the gospel of christ and found that the lord had opened a door for me i still had no peace of mind because i did not find my brother titus there so i said goodbye to them and went on to macedonia but thanks be to god who always leads us in triumphal procession in christ and through us spreads everywhere the fragrance of the knowledge of him for we are to god the aroma of christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing to the one we are the smell of death to the other the fragrance of life and who is equal to such a task unlike so many we do not peddle the word of god for profit on the contrary in christ we speak before god with sincerity like men sent from god are we beginning to commend ourselves again or do we need like some people letters of recommendation to you or from you you yourselves are our letter written on our hearts known and read by everybody you show that you are a letter from christ the result of our ministry written not with ink but by the spirit of the living god not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts such confidence as this is ours through christ before god not that we are competent in ourselves to claim anything for ourselves but our competence comes from god he has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant not of the letter but of the spirit for the letter kills but the spirit gives life amen i want to approach this subject from our four perspectives first of all to consider uh here in second corinthians and largely in the section that begins in chapter 10 uh the biblical framework that underpins the thesis in the title then to change gears from that and move to the cultural setting which is ours in seeking to understand the bible then to change gears again and to ask a question concerning the contemporary church in relationship to the biblical framework and the cultural setting and then finally to look at the whole matter in relationship to ourselves as individuals so i'll try and make my points clear as i go along looking first of all at it if you like biblically the oxford english dictionary which is the only dictionary that anyone should really pay attention to defines inadequacy as quotes the condition or quality of being inadequate if you think about that you look up a dictionary for help and that's as good as it can do perhaps i misspoke in in commanding the dictionary at all but rather what it is pointing out is that inadequacy is an indication of being unequal to what a task requires being unequal to what a task requires and it is that very issue that in the niv from which i was reading uh paul addresses at the very end of verse 16 and in a simple sentence when he asks the question who is equal to such a task or in the esv who is sufficient for these things what paul is doing there is he's addressing the issue of adequacy and his expressions of confidence particularly in this second letter are not displays of self-assumption he freely admits as you would have noticed towards the end of our reading that he is unequal to the task in himself and he makes it perfectly clear that the secret to his usefulness in ministry cannot be traced to any natural competence so in verse 5 again not that we are competent or sufficient or adequate in ourselves to claim anything for ourselves but our competence comes from god now this is not an aberration on the part of paul this is true to his self-designation throughout all of his letters classically in first corinthians 15 he says on that occasion i am the least of the apostles unworthy to be called an apostle because i persecuted the church of god but by the grace of god i am what i am and his grace towards me was not in vain and it is this perspective which underpins paul's entire understanding not only of himself but also of the ministry to which god has called him and in addressing the corinthians in his second letter part of the challenge that he faces is found in responding to those who have opposed him and who accuse him of being cowardly and of being unworldly of being worldly i should say and of being something of a second class citizen when it comes to the things of christ you must take my word for that and then read chapter 10 and see if what i'm telling you is true and if you have an niv and you're open there chapter 10 has the heading paul's defense of his ministry and his defense of his ministry is a reluctant defense because he recognizes at the very end of chapter 10 that it's not the one who commends himself who is approved but the one whom the lord commends so he says it's really not something that i want to do to get into a classification of ministry my ministry against the ministry of others he actually says that directly in verse 12 somewhat ironically we do not dare to classify or compare ourselves with some who commend themselves when they measure themselves by themselves and compare themselves with themselves they are not wise they are actually writing their own cvs they're conducting their own interviews uh they have decided who they are and how wonderful they are and so paul says really we need to understand that it's not what you say about yourself that matters what you say about yourself means nothing in god's work what you say about yourself means nothing in god's work it's what god says about you that matters that's how he finishes chapter 10. and so he says if there's any boasting to be done it mustn't be about personal achievements but rather it must be about the lord and it is the lord who has been underpinning all that paul has done all the way through so that when for example in his first letter he writes concerning success and encouragement in evangelism in the sowing of the seeds of the gospel he puts it succinctly and with great humility i planted apollos watered but god gave the growth i did the job of planting he said and others did their part now when we reach chapter 11 we discover that his detractors have been boasting among other things about their jewishness and about their servanthood and that is why he says in verse 22 are they hebrews so am i are they israelites so am i are they abram's descendants so am i are they the servants of christ and then he says i am out of my mind to talk like this i am more. now when he then goes to the more what he goes on to describe is his experience of suffering for christ he does not list his credentials in terms of the numbers that had emerged to hear him preach he does not go back through his training with gamaliel he does not give a long list of his credentials but rather he says and i'm out of my mind to say this if you want to consider my life and my ministry then consider it distinctly in terms of inadequacy and then he goes through his list being imprisoned more frequently flogged more severely been exposed to death again and again and all the way through it's not dissimilar to what he does when he ends his letter in galatians he says i don't want to have any i don't want to really to have any trouble from any of you that i've written to and he doesn't then say because you all know how prestigious i am because you all know that i am the great mighty apostle paul you know if you recall what he says is i don't really want to have any trouble from you because i bear in my body the marks of christ in other words his credential is a credential of weakness his appeal is the appeal of a back that has been broken open in the service of jesus christ if there is to be any boasting he says let it then be boasting in the lord and perhaps to illustrate the very point at the end of chapter 11 he says if i'm going to boast i'll boast of the things that show my weakness the god and father of the lord jesus who is to be praised forever knows that i'm not telling lies and then he says in damascus the governor under king euretas had the city of the damascenes guarded in order to arrest me but i was taken away in a large limousine but some of my supporters came for me and removed me by helicopter no but i was lured in a basket from a window in the wall and i slipped through his hands not exactly an auspicious departure from damascus could he ever have forgotten the great contrast between the way in which he had proceeded to damascus in all of the pride of his heart breathing out threatenings and slaughter against those who named the name of jesus christ and now he leaves squeezed into a basket and pushed out through the wall and scarpering away to safety says wait it was there that the persecutor became the persecuted and in that new experience now of persecution in all of the weakness that unfolds paul declares the credentials of his ministry and so in chapter 12 which of course you are greatly familiar with he is aware of the fact that the opportunity for boasting concerning the peculiar experience of being caught up into the third heaven is a wonderful one if ever you had an opportunity to brag to go on the equivalent of christian tv and let everybody know what had happened to you in those strange moments it is there for you to do but he says i'm not going to do that i'm not going to use that as a basis for self-promotion i'm not going to use that as a platform to set myself forward and make these people know who are my detractors just how significant i am and just what i have experienced of god and all the things that are peculiar to me he says i'm not going to do that i could do that but i choose not to do that it's along the lines of his arrival in corinth isn't it first corinthians 2 when i came to you loved once i didn't come to you with this or with that not because he was incompetent in the term of his intellectual faculty but because he recognized the incongruity in the proclamation of a message that was so foolish there is a lesson in this in passing uh my boss in edinburgh all those years ago makes a wonderful comment on this he says of all the contexts in which boasting is inappropriate this surely heads the list any genuine experience of god is a gift of his love and provides no basis for us to elevate ourselves so he says i'm not going to use this as a basis of elevation and then he explains his thorn in the flesh in terms of god's purposeful intervention in his life there was given me verse 7 a thorn in my flesh this is his theologizing of his experience it's not our our jurisdiction here to go into this just now but the way in which he expresses this is striking peterson paraphrases it helpfully because of the extravagance of these revelations and to keep me from getting a big head i was given the gift of a handicap to keep me in touch with my limitations i find that very helpful because of the extravagance of the revelations and to keep me from becoming a fat head i was given the gift of a handicap to keep me in touch with my limitations says bengal how dangerous must self exaltation be when the apostle required so much restraint how dreadful must self-exultation be if the apostle required such restraint that god intervened in his life at the deepest level of his physicality in order to ensure that he would understand that actually it was in the experience of weakness and inadequacy that his greatest usefulness was to be found now let's finish this first point with just a couple of comments it is in the confrontation with inadequacy that he discovers that god's grace is sufficient you will notice that his weakness is not removed he asked for this thorn in the flesh to be removed that is not removed but the weakness becomes the conduit of god's power and i think verse 10 gives it to us perfectly in that sentence doesn't it the paradox of grace when i am weak then i am strong when i am weak then i am strong here i suggest to you is the principle of all effective service and if i may jump outside of my first point for a moment and this is why some of us will never amount to anything for god because we revolt against this principle and i'm going to show you in a moment just why we are prone to do so the glory does not lie in our inadequacy this is not a plea for going around like uriah heap trying to tell everybody i'm a very humble man mr copperfield i am your ambush servant master copperfield if you know david copperfield the glory does not lie in our inadequacy but lies in the adequacy of christ which is discovered in our weakness and in our insufficiency so again peterson's paraphrase at the end he says now i take limitations in my stride and with good cheer these limitations that cut me down to size and so the weaker i get the stronger i become well there we have it that's enough on the first point i think instead of my insufficiency proving to be a barrier to usefulness the reverse is the case since dependence is the objective weakness is the advantage secondly let's look at it in terms of the cultural setting in which we read our bibles and in which we respond to these truths a culture that to borrow our phrase from david wells has quotes a bloated sense of human capacity a bloated sense of human capacity in keeping with that assessment and writing in the wall street journal in july 2009 peggy noonan observed in one of her columns quotes for 30 years the self-esteem movement told the young they're perfect in every way it's yielding something new in history an entire generation with no proper sense of inadequacy an entire generation with no proper sense of inadequacy those of you who are sociologists will be familiar with the book therapy culture written by a professor from kent university in the south of england frank furdy or furidy and in that book he records at the beginning he has some very helpful graphs and in one of them he records a search of 300 united kingdom newspapers in 1980 he searched 300 newspapers looking for a reference to self-esteem in 1980 they couldn't find a single one in 1986 they found three citations by 1990 there were 103 a decade later in 2000 there were a staggering 3328 references who knows how many there are today 11 years on but what we do know today is that living for oneself and feeling good about oneself is increasingly the central and controlling feature of human existence and such an orientation has no place for thoughts of inadequacy because to tolerate such notions works against the absolute essentiality of maintaining a favorable opinion of oneself whatever else happens we must never ever lose that it is the key to everything our world tells us says fiordiana's book low self-esteem is one of the most overused diagnoses for the problem of the human condition and if you care to read the book he works it out very helpfully earlier this year around the time of college and university graduation david brooks wrote an editorial in the new york times entitled it's not about you he described the graduates setting off into the world with what he refers to as the baby boomer theology so often iterated in commencement addresses ringing in their ears and then he articulates that theology follow your passion chart your own course follow your dreams find your self this says brooks is the litany of expressive individualism which is still the dominant theme in american culture again quoting him today's graduates enter a cultural climate that preaches the self as the center of life but says brooks in his concluding sentence the purpose in life is not to find yourself it is to lose yourself are we going to have to turn to the editorial pages of the new york times in order to correct the warp theology of contemporary evangelicalism and we shouldn't assume that this kind of pushback to any realistic proper sense of inadequacy is a 21st century phenomenon because it isn't in 1946 john sloan who was then president of dartmouth college told the graduating class quotes there is nothing wrong with the world that better human beings cannot fix in 2010 last year the current president of dartmouth jim young kim referenced the statement from 1946 and then told the graduating class quotes you are the better human beings we've all been waiting for now if you found the statement in 46 staggering what do you make of such a statement in 2010 the starting point for this mentality actually is not high school graduation it's beginning a lot earlier than that as those of you who are doing child psychology know the time when children could relax and be children and fall off their bikes and fail has faded into the dim and distant past achievement is aspired to from the moment of birth if not before william cohen in new york times says nowadays parents hire tutors to correct the pitching motions of little leaguers because the one thing we couldn't possibly tolerate is for little freddie to be a failure or to find out that he has an inadequate little left arm and he's just going to have to live with it for the rest of his life now you're sensible people you read the papers you you review culture every so often a discordant note sounds someone introduces the idea of inadequacy or failure as important to usefulness someone is significant in steve jobs in his now legendary graduation speech at stanford university in 2005. steve jobs at least moved in the direction of paul's perspective when he tied his being fired from apple at the age of 30 to significant progress in his later life this is what he said it turned out that getting fired from apple was the best thing that could have happened to me the heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again less sure about everything hmm but actually that perspective is still more than a sabbath day's journey away from the biblical framework let me give it to you the most trivial level that i have that i have noticed it this goes back to when i was still a teenager to bushy and heart for sure the first time that i ever saw an american football game the the army the united states army were hosting a team i had no clue really what was going on but i stayed there because i liked the girl who'd taken me still do she's my wife i believe she still likes me as well i trust so but i was i was struck by the the uniqueness of the game and the and these cheerleaders as a teenager you would expect me to be struck by the teenagers but it wasn't how they looked it was what they said and they must have said more than this but they definitely had this as their central cheer and it went like this you can do it you can do it you can you can you can do it you can do it you can you can the fundamental problem was they couldn't because they were annihilated by the army the army thrashed them and i remember the score becoming so unbelievable i'm used to to football played with your feet and the score is relatively minor but they were like at 37 3 as the sun began to wane in the sky but still they were there you can do it you can do it you can you can somebody should have had the courage to say stop that well that's enough on the culture let's change gears once again and ask the question where then does the contemporary church fall in relationship to these things if there is any sense of accuracy in what we're suggesting from the biblical model here as it relates to paul and if once generalizations from the culture hold any water then would it be fair to say that the church is firmly grounded in its understanding of inadequacy as a foundation for usefulness or do you think that the church has capitulated to the spirit of the age and that the average seminarian is about to launch himself or herself on an unsuspecting church and let them all know how brilliant she is or how terrific he is and how they just can't wait to discover it now i'm going to spend less time on this purposefully i'm also going to put my sentences in the interrogative rather than in the declarative am also not going to give specific examples with people's names and therefore i run the risk of falling down in a morass of generalizations having said all of that by way of disclaimer let me play my hand you will recall that when nehemiah was assigned the task for the rebuilding of the walls and the re-hanging of the gates in the broken down context of jerusalem the first thing that he did was pray then he did a reconnaissance and after his reconnaissance under cover of night and with little fuss and he didn't arrive in jerusalem under a great ban or saying your greatest fears are over i am here nehemiah has arrived now he finally got the people together and he said to them you see the trouble we're in or in the king james version it puts it in the interrogative do you see the trouble we are in well the fact of the matter was they saw it but they didn't see it they had grown accustomed to the trouble that they were in they had begun to live with it they were it was so familiar to them that it took somebody coming from the outside to let them see that the real predicament was not actually in the fact that the walls were broken down but the broken down walls were a metaphor for the fact that the glory of god was being dragged in the dust of a judean hillside and so his prophetic role is to call the people in the midst of the situation to stand back far enough from it for a moment and to view it from the perspective of god and then to determine what needs to be done from there and so it is that in every generation the role of the prophet is in part to say do you see this do you see the trouble we are in i wonder are we alert to the way in which our pulpits increasingly sound like popular therapy rather than unpopular theology are we aware how little the call of the kingdom rings out he who would be first should be last he who would be master of all must be the servant of all the radical claims of jesus cutting across the preoccupations of our contemporary society a narcissistic culture that is intensely interested in feeling good about itself and the incumbent pressure that is on the pulpit to try and make sure that we do not lose the ears of those whose agenda is so different from christ's he is the one who calls for the renunciation of the self you want to save your life then lose it if you lose your life for my sake and the gospel says jesus you will find it it is in loss that you find it in trying to hold on to it you lose it i wonder have we embraced such a notion of triumphalism that we are now embarrassed by any notion of inadequacy or insufficiency we must ask the question why it is that the least the last and the left out in our communities the marginalized are not coming in droves into the context of our churches and it may be a simplistic response it's certainly a generalization and i understand that but nevertheless part of the answer may lie in the fact that we portray ourselves as the company that has it all together as the company that understands everything that has got it all buttoned down and so the person says well i dare go in there and tell people how i really am because if they find out what i'm really like none of them are like that at all now because you see we're all shiny porcelain pictures makes it hard for an old crackpot to nestle in amongst all that shiny stuff is it possible that our churches are more akin to lake wobegon the little town that time for god and the decades cannot improve where all the women are strong all the men are good looking and all the children are above average i'm just asking you to think that's all smugness evangelical smugness such a smugness such a pervasive smuckness that the smug don't know how smug they are it will take unsmugness to expose it are we prepared to tolerate the thought the observation again by david wells that quotes efforts to build character have been replaced by efforts to manage the impressions that we make on others efforts to build character are sidelined in a preoccupation with personality what what if we are actually focused on the unashamed promotion of ourselves than on the unequivocal proclamation of the gospel what if we have answered the first question in the shorter scottish catechism so many times that we don't realize where we are what is the chief end of man the chief end of man is to glorify god to glorify god not to glorify myself to glorify god paul says if i want to glorify myself i can run through my credentials any day you want i went to the right schools i came from the right family background i had everything by the tale but i'm not here to do that that's why i would all the more gladly glory in my infirmities and in my insufficiencies in order that the transcendent power might be seen to belong to god you can't have it both ways you cannot from the pulpit if i may just illustrate it for me for a moment you cannot from the pulpit make people believe that you're fantastic and that jesus is fantastic simultaneously now they may look at you and say you mean a little pip squeak like that was able to expound that passage that's amazing we must have a great god and a great bible is it conceivable that we suffer from humility in the wrong place humility in the wrong place do you remember how chesterton on one occasion observed that a man was meant to be doubtful of himself but undoubting about the truth doubtful of himself undoubting about the truth this has now been exactly reversed we are producing a crop of preachers who are very sure about themselves and creatively vague about doctrinal orthodoxy so they're very very sure about who they are and they believe that it is the great apologetic to let the world know that they are equally unsure about just everything between the covers of their bible it's humility in the wrong place i think on that occasion chester sin said we are now breeding a group of individuals who are too humble to acknowledge the validity of the three times table in a strange leap to ronald reagan if you've ever gone to the reagan library in simi valley and put on the earphones and gone into the mock-up of the oval office you will have heard president reagan's voice in your ears and like me you will have been intrigued by much that is said and like me you may have been arrested when he reaches the point and he says i never regarded this as my own office i regarded this as the office of the people i served in this office and then he says i took it so seriously that i never removed my suit coat when i was working in the oval office and then there's a pause and he says you see you can take the office seriously without taking yourself too seriously is it possible that contemporary evangelicalism is increasingly fertilized by those of us who take ourselves too seriously while not taking that to which we've been called seriously enough that brings me then to my final point as the the the uncomfortable nature of the challenge turns its turns as gaze uh on us as individuals if we consider it in terms of the biblical pattern and then in terms of the cultural context and then in terms of if you like the ecclesiastical framework then now what about it personally it's the challenge to ask ourselves whether we're prepared to face up to our extreme feebleness to face up to our impotence to face up to what jonathan edwards referred to as quotes the bottomless depths of secret corruption and deceit in our hearts or are we going to kid ourselves are we going to start to believe our own press clippings are we going to start to be imbibing some of this elixir that makes it very difficult for your wife to sleep with you in the evening because she can't find a pillow big enough to accommodate your gargantuan cranium like a grapefruit on a toothpick says c.s lewis and the four loves those like myself whose imagination far exceeds their obedience are subject to a just penalty we easily imagine conditions far higher than we have actually reached if we describe what we have imagined we may make others and make ourselves believe that we have really been there and so fool both them and ourselves you see here is one of the arenas in which we face the danger of allowing the world the world to squeeze us into his own mold many times when we expound romans chapter 12 one and two it has more of a flavor to it of dealing with some of the um bits and pieces and often in in in a teenager's life i remember i listened to so many sermons on that that was all it was all about a sort of second level of christianity and if you wanted to be a missionary you had to be a romans 12 1-2 christian but if you just wanted to be a christian you didn't really have to worry about it very much i hope we're all saved from that but what is striking to me is that after he says this is your service of reasonable worship what is the very first point of application do not think of yourself more highly than you are he starts right there with humility you offer your body as a living sacrifice to god your mind your influence all that you have all of your training all of your studies all of your everything you offer it all up to god with your reasonable service of spiritual worship that immediately says now listen don't think of yourself more highly than you are but rather with sober judgment let's think about pastor just for a moment let's turn the where is most uncomfortable the searchlight that shines right in my eyes that i cannot avoid avoid as pastors and church leaders we have to ask ourselves whether we can honestly say with paul we do not preach ourselves 2 corinthians 4 5. we do not preach ourselves but jesus christ is lord and ourselves as your servants for christ's sake can we really say we do not preach ourselves let me tell you we preach ourselves when we seek to advance our reputation our influence and our own well-being we preach ourselves when our pulpits become the occasion of conjecture and personal opinion rather than the exposition of the text we preach ourselves when we intrude continually with stories about ourselves or attempts to display our cleverness the commentator barnes puts it simply when he says we preach ourselves in one word when self is primary and the gospel is secondary when we prostitute the ministry to gain popularity to live a life of ease to be respected to gain influence to rule over people and to make the preaching of the gospel merely an occasion of advancing ourselves in the world so we need to pray don't we that god in his mercy will do whatever it takes in order to drive home to our hearts the reality of our insufficiency until we know not just intellectually but experientially that jesus meant when he what he said when he told his followers apart from me you can do nothing we're in real difficulty sir malcolm sergeant the fellow who's responsible for creating the tedium at high school graduations when a half-baked orchestra plays ad nauseam um that sergeant we have him to thank for that on one occasion he's listening to a very fine singer the girl is a soprano she is singing an operatic piece she is apparently flawless in her technique the clarity of her tone is exceptional she finishes to great applause and the person who had taken sir malcolm sergeant to the occasion turned to him and said so what do you think he said i think she will be brilliant when something happens to break her heart when something happens to break her heart you see fellas girls what paul is displaying here is a reliance on christ alone for life and power to rely on christ for life and for power demands that i seek to rely upon myself that i renounce my confidence in any of my own wisdom and my own willpower and i turn entirely to christ asking him for the wisdom and power that is needed you can do the research on your own now we started in corinthians with paul we might easily have gone to the psalmist psalm 127 unless the lord builds the house the builders labor in vain unless the lord watches over the city the watchman stands guarding they in other words we build and we watch in vain apart from the lord solomon call out he says to his son call out for wisdom call out for these things in other words pray seek god ask him for this insight joseph i hear says pharaoh that you are an interpreter of dreams i had a particularly bad night last night can you help me what does he say you've come to the right man boy if there was ever anybody that knew about dreams it's me i've done a couple of books on dreams and i have a cd series as well i i've got to run off at the moment i'm doing an interview but i could leave you a cd in your blue now what does he say i cannot but god can i cannot but god can't what was joseph saying there was he saying he was irrelevant no he was a conduit he wasn't the key this is not some call to passivity this is not some old-fashioned you know early 20th century let go and let god notion and i'm not even approaching that i'm a thousand miles away from that i cannot but god can or what about the leadership of jehoshaphat when he assembles all the people together in the square and somebody comes and says there's a vast army coming against you it will annihilate us josh if i said you don't know who you're dealing with i'm joharsha fred i mean did he no he called out to god oh god he says we do not know what to do but our eyes are upon you we have no power to face this vast army coming against us do you find that in any leadership books lately wall street today has a number of principles of how you're supposed to be a successful leader i guarantee you this isn't one of them the one thing you don't do is stand up in front of the congregation say i don't know what to do we're completely overwhelmed that's jehoshaphat no surprise because god isaiah 40 gives strength to the weak full circle to paul god chose the week he says first corinthians 1 2 corinthians 4 he put his treasure in old clay pots in old clay pots there you are trinity graduate take that big diploma put it up on the wall and have your wife or your mom or your girlfriend or somebody just draw a picture of an old flower pot that's kind of cracked and musty and put that up beside it just to remind yourself that that's what you are because even the christians we admire most for their godliness and for their giftedness are just as much jars of clay as are we brother will you give me that little book that's there sir yeah just throw that to me thank you the people that we admire the most are as much jars of clay as ourselves this is this is study just before he dies someone says to him start what about you what are you this is what he said i am simply a beloved child of a heavenly father an unworthy servant of my friend and master jesus christ a sinner saved by grace to the glory and praise of god how do you explain starts usefulness because he got a double first from oxford because he's arguably the best sanctified scholarship brain in a pulpit in the 20th century no i don't think so i think you'd have to explain him in terms of his willingness to accept that all that god had given him still brought him to the place where he realized apart from you jesus i can do nothing and then we will finish with augustine augustine says when anyone knows that he has nothing in himself and has no help from himself the weapons within him are broken and the war is ended when anyone knows he's nothing in himself and has no help from himself the weapons are broken and the war has ended but unfortunately the war never ends does it i haven't found the war ends that's why i like the westminster confession it says that christian is involved in a continual and irreconcilable war it never ends and so it is to the gospel that we have to turn to remind ourselves that christ bore the sins of our proud adequacy in himself that he clothes us with the garments of his righteousness and that it is this unmerited grace that stirs us and enables us to press on to the gates of heaven but says rutherford you must remember be humbled walk softly down with your top sail stoop stoop it is a low entry to go in at heaven's gate now that we are sufficient in ourselves to claim anything is coming from us but our sufficiency is from god father we offer ourselves a fresh to you we pray that under the search and gaze of your word and in obedience to the direction of the holy spirit you might be pleased to use the considerations of the last hour to help us live our lives to the praise of your glorious grace and this we humbly pray in jesus name amen this message was brought to you from truth for life where the learning is for living to learn more about truth for life with aleister begg visit us online at truthforlife.org

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Published: Tue Aug 04 2020