Sustenance in your walk with God is far beyond anything your own strength can carry. It is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure.
John 15:4-5 (NKJV)
It's the early 16th century — Erfurt, Germany, around 1510. A young monk sits tormented over his relationship with the divine. He has given his everything: penance, fasting, confession that runs for hours, punishing pilgrimage, even self-flagellation. And still it all feels like an empty endeavour — an overwhelming, grinding ordeal he would later call a spiritual assault, so thick with fear and distress that it left him on the floor. It was the same loop over and over: try to build, fail, try harder, fail again, all in his own strength. And he was exhausted by it.
Little did Martin Luther know that he had it backwards. Legalism would never birth a relationship. There is nothing Works can do to earn salvation.
Sadly, that's the position many believers find themselves in. Relationship with God has been reduced to performance: many are trying harder to be more loving, more patient, more gentle, all by their own rules and strength, and end up exhausted, because the trying produces nothing that lasts.
John 15:4-5
New King James Version
4 Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me
5 I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing.
This is the only formula there is: abide in Christ. There is no other way to sustain a growing relationship with Him. Jesus says it plainly in verse 5: “without Me you can do nothing”, and that is all there is to it.
You see, you need God to serve God. His life is the very foundation for anything you would do with Him. Any devotional endeavour that is devoid of God as its source and shifts the focus to what you can do is utterly futile. You cannot prove anything to a God who is, in Himself, all-powerful, all-knowing, and holy.
And here is the relief: God already knows you — your strengths and your weaknesses, your failures and your victories, your struggles and your triumphs. He knows it all. So you can come to Him boldly, knowing you come to a God who already sees everything you carry.
Philippians 2:13
New King James Version
13 for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure.
This was Paul's impassioned cry to the Galatian church: that you cannot maintain in the flesh what you received in the Spirit. So if you truly believe that salvation is by faith in Christ alone, then your devotional sustenance (your growth) is rooted in that same Christ alone.
Many times you might have read about the fruit of the Spirit, and perhaps all you have seen in the text is a mere distinction in morality: the one who is in the flesh set against the one who is in the Spirit. But there is a capacity lens through which this text must be read.
Galatians 5:19-23
New King James Version
19 Now the works of the flesh are evident, which are: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lewdness,
20 idolatry, sorcery, hatred, contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, dissensions, heresies,
21 envy, murders, drunkenness, revelries, and the like; of which I tell you beforehand, just as I also told you in time past, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.
22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness,
23 gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law.
Verse 22 continues with the word “but,” signalling a contrast with what was listed in the previous verses. It presents the fruit as the natural result of a life led by the Spirit (a reality made possible only by the Spirit). The flesh has no capacity for such things. This fruit can only become evident as you abide in Him, just as John wrote earlier.
God desires a relationship with you. He is more willing to lead you than you want to be led. And as Martin Luther would later discover, sustenance in your walk with God is far beyond anything your own strength can carry. It is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure.
So, dear believer, trust and abide in Him.
Prayer
Father, thank You for desiring a relationship with me; thank You that I do not have to perform or feign being at my best before I come to You. I trust Your leadership, and I will see Christ fully formed in me day by day.
