In “other” Words: I Can Do Everything through the One

 “Rely­ing on God has to begin all over again every day as if noth­ing yet had been done.“
~ C.S. Lewis ~

When I first read this quote, it did not res­onate with me. The sec­ond por­tion of the sen­tence, “as if noth­ing yet had been done,” is what both­ered me.

“What do you mean, ‘as if noth­ing yet had been done’?” I found myself ask­ing the com­puter screen. “What about all of my hard work up to this point? What about my accom­plish­ments? What about my spir­i­tual growth? I’m not the same spir­i­tu­ally imma­ture per­son I was yes­ter­day or the day before or last month or last year or … ”

And as I walked around think­ing about the quote for a cou­ple of days, the bril­liance of its sim­plic­ity began to come into focus.

“I can do every­thing through him who gives me strength.” (Philip­pi­ans 4:13) Every time I thought about the quote, that verse popped into my head.

In the mod­ern trans­la­tion, The Mes­sage, Philip­pi­ans 4:12–13 reads as follows:

I’ve found the recipe for being happy whether full or hun­gry, hands full or hands empty. What­ever I have, wher­ever I am, I can make it through any­thing in the One who makes me who I am.

It is human nature to be self-centered and take credit for what we accom­plish. Being human and inher­ently flawed, I read the quote and responded in a pre­dictably con­ceited way, ask­ing myself, “What about all of my hard work up to this point? What about my accom­plish­ments? What about my spir­i­tual growth?”

I used to hear peo­ple say things like “all the glory goes to God” or “I couldn’t have done it with­out God’s help” and not really think too much about it. Per­sons of faith say things like that all the time, right?

But such phrases are, like C.S. Lewis’ words, pro­foundly pow­er­ful when under­stood and appre­ci­ated fully.

Any­thing I have accom­plished and any growth or matu­rity that I have expe­ri­enced came about only because of “the One who makes me who I am.” I can “do every­thing” through the One, but, con­versely, can­not man­age to do any­thing with­out the ever-present guid­ing light of the Spirit in my life. So my accom­plish­ments are only mine because of the ulti­mate renew­able resource, grace.

You’ve also heard the cliched expres­sions about “grace in defeat.” Again, when prop­erly ana­lyzed, that expres­sion has bound­less mean­ing. Because even when we fail, falling short of the goal we have set for our­selves, that fail­ure is part of the plan for our life and the lessons we learn from our fail­ures also come only through “the One who makes me who I am.”

Just as our sins are washed away in the waters of bap­tism, so are our worldly accom­plish­ments and defeats. Every day presents new oppor­tu­ni­ties to be happy “whether full or hun­gry, hands full or hands empty” because our reliance upon the One must be full, com­plete and unbur­dened by our own self-centered sat­is­fac­tion with yesterday’s suc­cesses or dis­ap­point­ment in yesterday’s fail­ure. For a Chris­t­ian, those things are, quite lit­er­ally, his­tory.

C.S. Lewis elo­quently told us that today is what mat­ters and in order to fully live out our bap­tism, our human, con­ceited self has to yield so that we can put our full faith and reliance in the One who cre­ated us and recre­ates us anew each and every day.

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