Scripture says, “His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness” (2 Peter 1:3). So what do we need to live righteously that He has not given us in Christ? Nothing.
The source of strength we call upon is not our own, which is insufficient, but God’s, which is infinitely powerful. God says, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9). You bring the weakness, He brings the power.
Does any of this imply that it doesn’t take a lot of effort to live the Christian life? Of course not. But notice the intertwining of effort in this partnership with God—“To this end I labor, struggling with all his energy, which so powerfully works in me” (Colossians 1:29). We must make every effort to be righteous, to obey Him. Yet all the while we must do this appealing to His strength, not our own.
One caution is important here. Some people approach the concept of “allowing God to work through me” as if it were some passive condition whereby God invades you and takes over, automatically causing you to live righteously, bypassing your own will. Not true. The spiritual life is warfare. To win the fight you must take on the armor of God and wield the sword of God’s Word, which requires diligence and hard work (Eph. 6:10-18). As J. I. Packer says in his book Keep in Step with the Spirit, “The Christian’s motto should not be ‘Let go and let God’ but ‘Trust God and get going!’”
In Great Joy, Packer wrote:
Sanctification, we now see, is both a gift (that is one side: God working in us to renew and transform us) and a task (the task of obedience, righteousness, and pleasing God). And we must never so stress either of the two sides that we lose sight of the other. Think only of the task, and you will become a self-reliant legalist seeking to achieve righteousness in your own strength. You will not make any headway at all. Think only of the work of God in your life, and the chances are that Satan will trick you into not making the necessary effort and not maintaining the discipline of righteousness so that, in fact, even as you rejoice in the work of God in your life you will be dishonoring it by your slackness. Hold both sides of the matter together in your mind, if you want your living to be right.
There is no contradiction between God working in you and you working to follow God. This is the nature of the spiritual partnership He establishes with us. He works, and so must we. If you pray that God will keep your thoughts sexually pure, then turn around and look at pornography, you act in contradiction to your prayer, showing it to be only words. You must demonstrate that you are serious about your prayer by taking all the steps to avoid sexual immorality of the mind and body. In other words, it matters what you do.
For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, mutual affection; and to mutual affection, love. For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. (2 Peter 1:5-8)
Notice that it says “make every effort.” The good news is that God makes His resurrection power available to us to walk in victory over sin.
The Christian life is not a choice between loving and trusting Jesus, and making an effort to avoid temptation and sin. It is not either/or—it is both/and.
