God's Part - Our Part
By Dan Stone
Many people think the grace of God is like Him dropping a big, strong rope from heaven and giving you the privilege of trying to climb it. God does a little, then leaves the rest up to you. So you read The Art of Rope Climbing and Seven Steps to Successful Rope Climbing. You master those books and you get on the rope. But you climb about a tenth of the way up and you say, "This isn't going to work. I'm already exhausted."
So you start down.
I know, because I'm passing you on that same rope. I start up the rope and see you coming down. "What was your problem?" I ask. "Didn't you read that book on fifteen ways to climb the rope?"
Then I come down, exhausted, and here you are coming up again. "I'm going to make it this time!" you proclaim. Up and down, up and down, up and down.
That's what the Christian life is for most of us. It's all dealing with the false self, with below-the-line stuff, with trying to remold and remake the soul. The sad thing is that if we are successful in remaking it, the remade one isn't any better than the old one from God's point of view. It just knows how to cope better.
God's grace isn't a rope He dangles from heaven asking us to climb. We may understand that when it comes to our eternal salvation, but when it comes to living the Christian life, we turn around and ask, "Where is that rope?"
The Christian life is totally grace. God initiated it, God fulfills it, and God will complete it. He is the One who lives it in us.
Yet we may not know that it's totally grace. If we believe God has met 50 percent of His requirements by grace, then we think we have to fill up the other 50 percent by works. After all, 100 percent of His requirements have to be met, don't they? So if God has met only part of the requirement, it's up to us to meet the rest. Almost all of us have subtly been lured into that trap: "God saved me, He forgave my sins, but the rest is up to me."
A lady was telling me that John Wesley once said, "Earnestly pursue perfection."
I replied, "Good luck with that."
I earnestly pursued. Didn't you? I knew the forgiveness of my sins was by grace. But God had this demand, "be ye perfect, be ye holy." And though forgiveness was by grace, I was locked into doing the other part by works. I had to work to be holy. Even if 80 percent of it was by grace, I was going to have to do 20 percent by works.
The truth is this: it's all by grace. Not only is justification by grace, but sanctification is by grace. God does it all.
Hundreds of years before Christ came, God foretold that He would do it all. Through Ezekiel, He explained the New Covenant to the Jews:
"Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will be careful to observe My ordinances" (Ezekiel 36:26-27).
Who is the only one who can perform this heart transplant? God. Notice all of the "I wills" in this passage.
"I will give you a new heart."
"I will put a new spirit within you."
"I will remove the heart of stone."
"I will give you a heart of flesh."
"I will put My Spirit within you."
"I will cause you to walk in My statutes."
People often worry, "Can I keep the law? Can I live up to what God wants me to be?"
Of course, as Paul wrote, we have died to the law (Romans 7:4-6). We no longer have any relationship to it, nor do we look to it in an effort to fulfill it. But the law does reveal the character of God, and God's intent is to manifest His life through us. As He does that, He will Himself fulfill the law through us. Or, in other words, He will reflect His own character. So He says to us, "I will cause you to walk in them. After all, I'm the Lawgiver and the Lawkeeper, so I can cause you to walk in them."
Nothing of God has its point of origin with you. But everything of God will be manifested as you in your world. On the outside, it's going to look like you. But nothing is going to have its point of origin with you. The point of origin is God's "I will" in you.
Jeremiah was the first to record the New Covenant "I wills":
"Behold, days are coming," declares the LORD, "when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah"I will put My law within them and on their heart I will write it; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. They will not teach again, each man his neighbor and each man his brother, saying, 'Know the LORD,' for they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them," declares the LORD, "for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more" (31:31,33-34).
Aren't the "I wills" in Ezekiel and Jeremiah tremendous? God says, "I will do it." We are the benefactors of those "I wills." As those "I wills" are worked into us and become the reality of our lives, then we do walk in them. That's always been the desire of our hearts, to walk in the ways of the Lord.
As long as these things are just concepts to us, though, truths that seem separate from us, we try to make them happen ourselves. We are programmed to try to do it, but we don't know the inner life, so we are programmed for failure. We do have a new heart, and we want so desperately to do what God wants us to do, but we don't have the power to bring to pass what only God can do.
There isn't any way that we can make life succeed on any other basis than faith in God's "I wills." He will do it. That's the way it works. But it takes time for God to work His "I wills" into us and supplant our own "I wills."
Part of what God said He would do in Ezekiel is completed. He has given us a new heart. He has put a new spirit within us. He has removed our old heart and given us a new one, in which He has also placed His Spirit. That work, already finished, can't be touched. "He who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him" (1 Corinthians 6:17, NKJV). God can't do any more for us in the spirit realm than join His Spirit life to our human receiver spirit, and there be united with us in oneness.
The other part of God's work is ongoing. "I will cause you to walk in My statutes." That work of His proceeds in our soul and body. God is lining up our outer being with Himself. But until we see this unseen and eternal truth, we will try to line it up for Him. We will get hold of a new passage of Scripture, a new book, or a new concept, and say, "That's what I want to look like." And we will try to make it happen. I bought just about every how-to book ever written. I never did bother to ask if the authors could actually do it, but I quickly discovered I couldn't. God is the one who does it.
What role does the human being play in this divine encounter? Only one: to be willing. The only thing you can do is be willing and cooperate with the Person in you that can cause it to happen. God doesn't cause anything to happen internally that we don't want to happen. God never stomps on our will. He loves it, caresses it, enfolds it, and draws it to Himself, but He never overrides it.
It's a terrible blow to the ego to see that the only part you have to play in God's plan is willingness. A long time ago our foreparents bought a lie. In the Garden, they bought the lie of independent self and independent self-sufficiency. They believed that a real person was self-sufficient.
There are popular movements today built entirely on that premise. They're building up the self. You know what you get? More self. If you're successful, you get more vain. If you're not, you get self-condemnation. It's a dead end.
God does it all. Our part is to be willing. If we're willing and cooperate, "I will cause you to walk in My statutes and you will be careful to observe My ordinances." That's when it comes back to you - not as the point of origin but as the willing outward expresser of His life.
In Galatians 2:20, after saying, "I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me," Paul then talks of "the life which I now live in the flesh [the physical body]."
We do live, but Christ lives through us. "I will cause you to walk in them, but you will do it. I will cause it, but you will do it." That's the exciting part of this life, seeing God work out through us what He has worked into us. We see Him work out Whom He has worked in. And we are inwardly involved with all that He is doing.
God used the most disappointing chapter in my Christian life to begin to show me this. That episode became the necessary prerequisite for my greatest blessing. The Holy Spirit told me, "Look, you're trying to live a life you were never meant to live. But I can live the life in you, as you, that you're now trying to live on your own."
That's good news, isn't it? There is Someone who can live the life. He can live the life perfectly acceptable to the Father. Our primary role is to cooperate and be willing for Him to do it. He is willing, you are willing - that's the secret. He will live the life.
The Son has taken up His residence in us. His purpose is the same as it was during His earthly walk: to do the will of the Father. What the Holy Spirit does in us (not out through us in activity but in us as Teacher) is continually line us up with the true Person in us. That's why ongoing revelation is needed. The more understanding of His nature that He gives us, the more we fall in line with it, because that's the true desire of our new heart.
Previously, we were trying to produce this ourselves. Now, we're watching Him do it. We're being changed into His image from glory to glory by the Holy Spirit (2 Corinthians 3:18). More and more, without any kind of striving or effort, our whole will, indwelt by His Spirit's will, is just flowing with Him. We have always wanted to do His will. The Holy Spirit just brings that true desire to the surface, out from our spirit. Ultimately, we get to a place within where we don't know if something is our voice or His, because they become so one. So, like Jesus, we say, "My will is to do His will." Our will has been captured by God.