LET ME DO IT! Was my mantra as a kid. I’m smart. I can figure it out. Don’t help me. How will I learn? And little did I know but it crossed over into my faith life too. And yet many of us have heard or read the poem “Footprints in the Sand”. At the end the man looks back at the footprints he has left in the sand and where God walked with him there were two sets of prints. But he notices in the hard times there was only one set. This prompts the man to ask God where he was in those times. God replies, that it was in those hard times that he carried the man. This is a great image but only one problem. I don’t like the beach.
I can do it myself. I’m smart. I can figure it out. It still echoes in my head from time to time. It isn’t me though. It’s a lie that I have been telling myself for a very…very long time. And you may have the same voice telling you the same thing. You can do it. You can do it. Or maybe its. “I think I can,I think I can,I think I can,I think I can” There is a reason why loners don’t succeed as often as they think they should. That little voice in the back of your head. It’s not pride, it’s not ambition, it’s not confidence, it’s Satan. He gets in your head and gets you to believe whatever it is you think you need to justify why you don’t need anyone…even God. You can do it yourself, right?
We weren’t created to do it alone.
God created us with the purpose of spending our lives in community with other humans. Genesis 2:18 states, “It is not good for the man to be alone.” God recognizes our need and our desire to be a part of a community. Even Cain, after he killed his brother and was exiled found other people to surround himself with. If you want to go through your life alone, prepare to be viewed as odd because that is not the norm. There is an innate desire to be with other people.
And let’s be honest, no one is creative enough to be successful on their own. We need the help of others. Bill Gates had Paul Allen. Steve Jobs had Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne. Mark Zuckerberg had Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. Even these men who are extremely successful needed someone else to become who they are today. You aren’t the person you are today without others helping you form and develop who you say and think that you are. We were meant to be with other people
We simply can’t do it alone.
Ephesians 2:8-10
For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works so that no one can boast. For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.
We were not created to do it alone. In fact, we cannot.
Romans 3:23-24
For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.
All the way back with Adam and Eve, created for community broke the community they had with God. We could and can’t stand in the presence of God any longer. There is nothing that we can do to EVER be good enough. God has one criteria to be in a relationship with Him. That criteria is that you have to perfect. So who among us is? The answer is no one and so we are born into this world already in debt with no form of payment or way to get back into God’s good graces. We are born into a war that we have already lost. Do it alone, go ahead. Try to perfect, I wish you the best, but we are born imperfect and being born imperfect makes being or becoming perfect something that is already out of reach.
However, that is not where the story ends, my friend, no. Because it is this beautiful thing called Grace. No not that cute girl down the street but this amazing redemptive power given to us by the one person who can be perfect. Someone born without sin. Someone already in the black. Someone who isn’t indebted to God. That person was Jesus because He is God. But he took all our negative balances, he took our red and spilled it out onto the cross. Finally making that payment towards the debt which not one of us could pay.
We are now soaked in Jesus blood but that doesn’t make us in the red. His resurrection made sure that his blood makes us debt free and that what we could not do ourselves, he has done for us.
He has made the payment. He has justified our lives. He has redeemed our souls. We can
now spend eternity in community with Him. And that is what he wanted all along.
You can’t do it alone. But you can do anything in HIM.
I still don’t like the beach.
Opinion of Awesome 