Oftentimes, I feel like there is nothing more to say.
What is the significance of “my contribution” to any of this world? Writing, thoughts, opinions, convictions, definitions, loves, hates?
What on earth do I have to offer? Hasn’t everything already been felt, expressed, acted on enough times?
I am a small woman attempting to serve her Maker. I have been given gifts and circumstances, but everything I am doing is because of God working through me. It is a humbling gestalt to realize that, despite my abilities to create, illumine, influence humans, do a good work here or there–I am incapable of doing anything outside of God, who gives me a breath and a heartbeat, a breath and a heartbeat, but I am furthermore incapable of doing anything to please him unless he changes me and works goodness through me. Praise his name eternally, for he has, by the blood of his Son and the power of his Spirit.
Let me explain.
In the Scriptures, the concept of regeneration is reiterated in a variety of fashions. John makes much of it: being “born of Him” is necessary to practice righteousness (1 John 2:29), to stop walking in sin (3:9), to love one another (4:7), and even to believe that Jesus is the saving Christ (5:1). The Lord told Nicodemus that he “must be born again” by the Spirit’s work in order to enter God’s kingdom (John 3:5). The Spirit must make us a new creation in order for us to receive the gift of faith, which God gives us in order to profess Christ and receive salvation (Eph 2:8; Rom 10:9).
I cannot merit this. I cannot make the Spirit change me. He, like the wind, is invisible; but he, like the wind, leaves a noticeably wonderful effect in his wake (John 3:8).
None of us deserve so great a transformation, to be made new in order to know God and be with him in eternity. And yet, he gives it to those who have been made ready.
My eyes have been opened, and since that precious moment when I received the gift of Christ, my heavenly prescription has grown sharper and sharper. the progressive nature of the Christian life, as God works out what he started in our hearts, is a beautiful, perilous journey of blinding light that causes everything to finally make sense. Knowing God, truly, is the key for true sight.
So, in one sense, I don’t have anything to offer–not in my own self. Sure, everything kind of has been said and thought and done by the millions and billions of humans who have plodded the ground before my heart was pumping. But none have walked my specific lane on the road. Fewer still have been rent and remade by the Lord’s transforming might, by the message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and through the Holy Spirit’s sweet, wondrous work. I have something to offer because God says he made me, started something in me, and is empowering me to glorify him and build up his church.
I have something to say because God has endowed me with the capability to speak in a way that can honor him–he has changed me himself in order to do so. That makes me speechless that he would bother, loving and caring and even seeing me down here to put me in a position to do anything at all that could possible bring him praise.
What about you? Do you see?
