“Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think of anything as being from ourselves, but our sufficiency is from God.”
Good news! If you feel insufficient to meet all of the challenges of your life, you are in good company. The great apostle Paul declared in this verse his own insufficiency. No one suffered for the sake of Christ more than Paul, and through it all he depended on the sufficiency of the Christ that he served. This is a lesson that we need to learn. I think that we unconsciously try to take on the challenges of our lives on our own without considering that we have a resource in Jesus that can take us over all of the challenges and trials of our lives. We just need to confess our insufficiency and trust the eternal sufficiency of our Lord and God. What does it mean to depend on the sufficiency of God? It means that we can depend on Him in whatever we face in life. We find that when we get to the end of our rope that there is a greater rope to grasp. We do not know what it means to depend on God’s sufficiency until we run out of our own resources. I have testified that after eighty years of life on this earth, and after over fifty-eight years in Christian ministry, I fully realized the sufficiency of God when I had to battle illness over a two year period. I thought that I knew something about faith, grace, prayer, and all of the great things of the Christian faith, but when I could do nothing but trust God, He proved sufficient to meet all of my needs. Sometimes God brings us to the end of ourselves and our puny resources in order for us to see His real strength. We just need to trust that we can depend on God in all of life through the good and the bad. Someone has written, and rightfully so, that, "When we are flat on our backs, we can only look up." It means that we need Him to teach us how to really live the Christian life. This world is rife with temptations that call us away from the life that Jesus wants us to live. Our Lord Jesus Christ experienced all of these temptations without sin. He emerged victoriously, and enables us to contend with all of the issues of life. One of the most difficult lessons that Christ teaches us is to love people as He loves us. This means that we should love people unconditionally. This is not humanly possible. We can’t live out the sacrificial love of God on our own. That is one of the reasons that Jesus sends the Holy Spirit to indwell us and guide us into the wilderness of life. It is only by the power of the Holy Spirit that we can love as Jesus loved. All of the virtues of the Christian life are possible for us because we have the sufficiency of our God to help us live them. Keep in mind that none of us lives them perfectly, but we can live good lives because of God’s sufficiency. It means that if we try to live the Christian life on our own without depending on the leadership of the Holy Spirit, we will make a big mess of it. There are Christians all over the world who are not enjoying the victorious life because they are trying to live it in the flesh and not in the Spirit. Lest I seem too self-righteous here, I know this is true because I have tried it myself. I have found that after God has done a great work in my life, I can take credit for it myself if I’m not careful. This is when Satan has come into the picture and turns victory into defeat. When we stop thanking God for His sufficiency in our lives, and when we stop giving Him the credit that He deserves, we are defeated in our spirit. There is not a person on this earth who is sufficient unto himself or herself. All you have to do is look at what a mess the world is in to see what human beings do when they do not lean on God’s sufficiency. Just take this as a reminder that He is your sufficiency too and lean on Him. Bro. Joe
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AuthorDr. Joe Beauchamp is the author of this blog and website. Categories
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