Jesus says in John 5:30, “I can do nothing on my own.” A few verses down he tells us that the Father has given him works to accomplish (5:36). What’re the implications of this for our lives? In Ephesians 2:10, Paul writes “we are his [God’s] workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”
Meditating on these passages makes me think that I (and maybe others) end up living life swimming in the wrong direction and in a situation that is hopeless without rescue. I imagine that many of us have been to the beach for family vacations. Growing up, beaches along the Florida panhandle would often put out colored flags to indicate the relative danger for riptides and undertows on any given day. Red flags meant “Stay out of the water!” Unfortunately, life in the flesh is constantly a red flag with riptides and undertows peppering the shores of life. When we live in the flesh, we are constantly battling a tide of sin and idolatrous desires that carry us swiftly away from the safety of our Father.
Riptides, on average, will carry a swimmer away from shore at about three miles per hour. This is much faster than any of us can swim. Yet our natural instinct when we see safety receding in the distance is to paddle directly towards the shore. Our spiritual lives often look the same way. God has made each one of us with a knowledge that He is a safe haven, and many of us, including myself, spend much of life (consciously or unconsciously) attempting to swim back to that safe haven by helping the needy, living morally, giving to charities, performing sets of disciplines that make us “better” people (whatever we’ve decided that means), trying to differentiate ourselves from the rest of humanity. How arrogant! We see those around us being carried out to sea and think that we can make the swim back to shore. We are all being swept away from the arms of God by the desires of our flesh more quickly than we can ever hope to overcome on our own. Instead of drawing closer to shore, each action we take fatigues us, miring us in our fate. We continue to push back towards shore, but slowly our arms fatigue, feeling more like lead weights hanging limply from our bodies than instruments to save us. Even treading water becomes difficult as the shore become all but a distant memory. Our lungs slowly fill with water as we struggle to keep our head above water. As our lives become consumed with good works all performed in the sake of “getting to safety,” we are, ironically, slowly killed by those works. We’re drowning.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Riptides don’t have to be a deadly situation. In fact, the paradox is that if we will just stop swimming against this tide, if we will stop trying to get back to shore, we will be saved. You see, I too often read the passages in John and Ephesians too quickly and in the wrong order. I read that the Father has given Jesus works to accomplish and forget that just a few verses earlier Jesus himself said “I can do nothing on my own.” I read Ephesians 2:10 and see the words “we” and “good works,” immediately throwing myself into those works as a way to return to shore. Wrong. Many of us can quote the verses before Ephesians 2:10, but we don’t often live it. We are saved “through faith.” It is not of our own doing, but is God’s gift. He comes to us and rescues us. We have to forsake saving ourselves; we have to rest. We have to stop struggling in an attempt to swim back to shore ourselves and instead cling to the lifesaving cross that Jesus, our rescuer has given to us so that we can be plucked out of the riptide of sin and performance.
By his strong but gentle nail-pierced arms we will be rescued and forever safe.
Matt Rigney's Blog 