The Balance of God’s Effort and Ours

Yesterday I was sitting on the couch doing some private prayer time with my lovely quilt lying over me. My mother hand-quilted it for me about 10 years ago. She had wanted to make me one, but I didn’t like any of the ones in her books until we came to a book of Amish quilts where there are brighter, block colours rather than the old-fashioned kind of fabric with lots of patterns on.

So she ended up making me one like that, with rainbow kinds of colours which I love; my favourite kind of landscape in the middle with hills, trees, sea and sunset; and Bible verses around the picture.

As I was looking at it today I reflected on the Bible verses that I had chosen to go around it – my favourite four verses. And again it struck me, as it has many times recently, that the Bible is quite clear on there being two sides to our Christian walk and growth. We are told to make effort, but we are also told that we need to depend on God who will help us. And both sides are necessary for us to grasp.

These are the four verses I asked my mum to put around the quilt:

This is something we are commanded to do, to work for God and not for men, and for me it is an inspiring challenge.

A command that puts the responsibility on us, to seek God first, but with a great promise which means that if we do, God will take care of the rest.

Again this is something we are told to do, but if we do this and draw near to God, God also promises to draw near to us.

All those commands are balanced with this comfort – that God will give us strength and make us perfect, even though we won’t get all the way to perfection till heaven! So we can rest in that knowledge.

If it wasn’t for this last one, we could be cast down by the seeming impossibility of the others. But when we know it is God who is behind the scenes transforming us, it is so comforting. And then we also need to remember that God has lots of grace for when we fail.

If we neglect dependence on God, we will get discouraged when we don’t get where we want to, and we can get proud as we rely on our own strength. But if we neglect doing anything ourselves then we will not be going forward very much towards greater holiness, because even though God could do the whole thing by itself, he wants us to take our part.

A balance is needed, where we strive for holiness, but also ask for and depend on God’s help, and realise that God has grace for when we fail.

I think it’s a bit like climbing a ladder – where we are making the effort to climb, but prayer is the ladder put there by God to support and help us get higher, and God’s grace is the cushion at the bottom that helps us get back up again when we fall.

The balance of God’s effort and ours is summed up in these verses: