Apart from Me...

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John 15:3
“Apart from me you can do nothing.” – NIV

This is one of the foundational truths of our discipleship. If we do not learn this early, we may spend years of frustration trying to be the Christian God calls us to be. Our natural tendency is to try hard, be sincere, study diligently and basically train ourselves to be the disciples we were meant to be.

And there is a sense in which all of this is good – even necessary – if it is done with the knowledge that God is working in us all the while as our enabler. How come, then, with all of these good and genuine intentions, do we always end up as failures?

Ironically, most of the Christian life is God stripping us of our self-effort so that He can live His life in us without our interference. We stress and strain over our discipleship that, in reality, should be effortless by nature.

God will often place us in a situation over our heads – even going as far as letting us fail miserably – all in order to teach us this one thing. We are never to depend on our own self-reliance, we are to be utterly dependent on the power of God that works in all our circumstances.