Christ in me

God has given us talents and gifts and these enable us to do things for others and for God. The temptation when faced with success is to get proud. To attribute the good to ourselves and seek glory. This is not the Christian attitude.

I was struck by this when reading some of Saint Patrick’s confessions earlier this year. Speaking about his work in Ireland, he writes, “I am greatly in debt to God. He gave me such great grace, that through me, many people should be born again in God and brought to full life.” Patrick did not view himself as one accomplishing God’s will through his own strength, but as a channel for God to accomplish His will. 

This was Paul’s attitude also, “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2:20). This is how we respond to success. It is grounded in an understanding of what we are and what God has done.

What we are

For us to view our success correctly we need to understand what we are naturally capable of accomplishing. That answer is easy to find but difficult to digest, “apart from me you can do nothing.” That was what the Lord told His disciples before His crucifixion. He was speaking to men who were fallen just as we are fallen. We are sinners (saved by grace but sinners nonetheless) and sinners sin. 

Consider what we are without Christ. Without the Spirit in us, all that is left is the flesh, and all the flesh ever did was earn us a place in hell. All we did prior to salvation was make the mess that Christ came to fix. After salvation, our flesh is not removed or improved, this means anything we do in our own strength will still be a mess. In our own strength we can do nothing, this truth tells us that when something good is done in our lives it is not ultimately us who are responsible.

What God has done

God definitionally is good. Every good thing comes from God; it is not possible for anything other than good to come from God (James 1:17). He is the ultimate good. This means any good we see in the world has its ultimate source in God. This includes us. Our sinful nature is so opposed to God it had separated us from Him, this meant it was naturally impossible for us to produce fruit for God. By being separate from goodness itself how could we produce true goodness? However God has done an amazing thing for us in Christ. Because of what Christ has done, God has given us His Spirit and made us channels for Him to accomplish His good. As Christians, God has guaranteed that we be conformed into the image of His Son. He is working in us and His Spirit is causing us to produce fruit. 

We should be expected to produce fruit if we are true believers. When we see fruit in our lives, our instinctive reaction should be to say “That is too good to be me!” That is not to be a prideful boast of how good we think our deed is, it is an acknowledgement of how weak we are. Even the smallest good can only come from Christ, that means even the smallest good in our lives can only have been Christ in us.

This should be our answer to pride. When we feel ourselves getting big headed over something we have done, we can remind ourselves that the source of that goodness was not us. If it was completely left in our fallen hands we would only wreck it. 

But God has promised to work in us. When we see that happen let’s give Him all the glory.