NILS VON KALM provides his take…
“Apart from me you can do nothing” – Jesus in John 15:5
“Our righteousness is as filthy rags” – Isaiah 64:6
“The heart is deceitful above all things” – Jeremiah 17:9
Many years ago, a pastor of mine said to me, “I don’t trust you, but I trust God working in you”. How would you feel if someone said that to you? I felt a combination of confusion, being taken aback, and deflated. Here was a leader in my church telling me, for nothing I had done, that he didn’t trust me.
But isn’t that what the Bible says? Isn’t it true that we are not to trust ourselves because the heart is deceitful above all things? And doesn’t Proverbs advise us to trust in the Lord with all of our hearts and lean not on our own understanding?
Indeed it does. So, why was I left deflated, confused and taken aback by my pastor’s comment towards me? It was because anyone would be. What if I told you the same thing?
PICTURE: Kamonwan Wankaew/iStockphoto
When I was first shown how to explain my still quite fresh faith in Jesus, I was taught the four spiritual laws. The second of these laws is that we are born sinful and that nothing we can do can make us fit to match the requirements of a just and righteous God. So, thank God for Jesus, who instils a righteousness within us and who has paid the price on the cross so that, because of His righteousness, rather than our own, we can now be assured of an eternity with Him in Heaven.
While that’s true, it’s not the whole story.
“What I do believe is that the Holy Spirit has been given to us to help us to live a Christlike life. The more surrendered we are to Christ, the more human we become.”
It is true that our hearts are deceitful and that apart from Jesus, we can do nothing. But that doesn’t mean we are worthless beings. Jesus didn’t come just to save us from our sin; His mission was bigger than that.
What I do believe is that the Holy Spirit has been given to us to help us to live a Christlike life. The more surrendered we are to Christ, the more human we become.
The problem with the second of those four spiritual laws is that it implies that our sinfulness defines us. That has brought untold toxic shame on millions of believers and ex-believers alike. We certainly are sinful; we would have to be walking around with our eyes wide shut to not see that. But, more importantly, we are made in the image of our loving Creator God, the Word made flesh. That means we are made with an inherent dignity that if we only knew the magnitude of it, we would not fear anything. It is that inherent God-given dignity that defines us.
This all begs the question of whether or not it is Christian to trust ourselves. If without Jesus we can do nothing and our righteousness is as filthy rags, as Isaiah says, then it wouldn’t appear to be very smart to trust ourselves.
But what if, as I mentioned above, surrendering more to Jesus makes us more human, more the people that God has created us to be? And what if doing that gives us a confidence that we can be trusted to make good and healthy decisions in our life. To be told that we are not worthy of making good decisions and that we should therefore “trust in God” more leaves us forever in a pit of shame that is toxic because it says that we are worth nothing. Such shame is not of God. We have a God who delights in us.
I mentioned in a recent article that when Jesus healed the demon-possessed man in Mark 1:21-28, Jesus looked not at any inherent deficiency in the man’s worth, but looked past the man to the demon that was tormenting him. Jesus didn’t even speak to the man, but with godly authority ordered the demon to leave him. The man was then left in his right mind, able to live a more Christlike life of following Jesus without the inner torment of demon-possession.
Much of the problem with believing that it is sinful to trust ourselves lies in the way we view God. Jesus though calls us to address God as out heavenly parent. We love to call God, “Father”. A good father (or mother) would believe in their child and say, “you can do it”. A good parent is an encourager.
The U2 song, Moment of Surrender, has a brilliant line which says, “It’s not if I believe in love if love believes in me. Oh, believe in me”. We often talk about believing in God, but God believes in us too. Both are about trust. God encourages us by cheering us on to love and good deeds, as God calls us to do for each other (Hebrews 10:24).
The other problem with wondering whether or not it is sinful for us to trust ourselves is that it leads to a doctrine of sin-management. This is exactly what Jesus gave the Pharisees and Teachers of the Law such a hard time over. A gospel of sin-management, where we constantly anguish over whether we have committed a particular sin or not, is also not the Gospel – not the good news – of Jesus. True transformation into Christlikeness does lead us further from sin. I John 3:9 tells us that; but that is not to be our focus. Our focus is to be surrendered to Jesus; totally abandoned to Him. Our behaviour can then take care of itself.
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Jesus is a God who believes in us. He is an encourager. A great example of Jesus believing in someone is found at the end of John’s Gospel. When Peter denied that he even knew Jesus at the moment of Jesus’ greatest need and pain, and then Jesus reinstated him after His resurrection, it was a wonderful moment of Jesus believing in the disciple. As NT Wright points out, when Jesus reinstated Peter, He didn’t stop at saying, “there, there, I forgive you. It’s all OK”. Jesus gave Peter a job to do. He effectively said to Peter, “no matter what you’ve done, even denied me in the hour of my greatest need, I believe in you. I know your heart. So, I have a job for you to do.”
So, yes, we can trust ourselves. It is always linked to surrender to Jesus because we are never apart from Him. When He says that without Him we can do nothing, He is just stating what is inherently true. He is declaring who He is. If it wasn’t for Jesus, we wouldn’t even exist. Nothing would exist. So, of course, we can do nothing without Him. It’s a bit like saying that without oxygen, we can’t breathe. It’s obvious. We don’t even think about it.
The more we abandon ourselves to Jesus, the more fully human we become and the more we are transformed into His likeness to make good, just, right and loving decisions in our lives. This gives us increased confidence and joy.
Trusting in yourself or trusting in God is not an “either/or”. It’s a “both/and”. The more we trust in Jesus, the more confident we become as we are transformed into the likeness of Jesus. And it happens without us even trying.
Having said all that, trusting in yourself sometimes, of course, does mean denying God. But to say that a Christian should never trust themselves is not the way of Jesus. The more abandoned we are to Him, the more we will begin to trust ourselves and develop a healthy sense of self-worth.
Developing a healthy sense of self-worth is sorely missing in many evangelical circles. Too many Christians just don’t have a healthily developed sense of self. They are insecure, often judgmental, and obsessed with avoiding certain behaviours.
Abandonment to Jesus is the answer to a healthy sense of self. We can be confident that we can make healthy decisions in our lives because we have a God who believes in us. We can then respond in deep gratitude and awe and worship at such a God who gives us such a wonderful gift.
A person with a healthy sense of self knows who they are. They know they are a person deeply and inherently loved by the Creator of everything that is. They can then go out in that trust, surrendered to the Creator, confident that they have the ability to live a life that is loving, just and righteous. Just like Jesus.
