How often have we heard this kind of prayer prayed? ”Let it be your work, Lord, not my work. May it be all you, Lord, and none of me.”
It’s a humble, dependent and heart-felt prayer – without doubt – and we know exactly what the person means: they want to be doing what God wants, not merely following well-intentioned human enthusiasm.
But … is that actually a biblical way of expressing it…?
Well, it certainly sounds as if it should be. Surely, only an ‘unspiritual’ person could think otherwise? Someone who thinks that their own human skills are what count. Boo to that!
There are certainly some things we pray for that ‘we’ simply cannot do, it has to be ‘God’. Where, if something is going to happen, then only God can do it. Prayer for desperate situations, for example.
And we can certainly find a number of biblical texts that seem to lend support to the idea. Zechariah 4:6, for example, is probably the most often quoted: “Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit says the Lord.”
But is ‘all of him and none of me’ the way God has chosen to work, and is such a divide even possible?
The Western world suffers under the pervasive influence of Greek philosophical thinking, which separates the physical realm (which is ‘bad’ and ‘corrupt’) from the spiritual realm (which is ‘good’ and ‘pure’). We call this ‘dualism’ – dual, in the sense of two separate realms.
But this is not the Hebrew thought process reflected in the Bible, so we ought not to be reading the Bible through that ‘lens’. The Bible’s view is more holistic. According to Genesis, creation is ‘good’ and humankind ‘very good’. The fact that what we call ’sin’ has come in and polluted both creation and people doesn’t stop God thinking it’s very good. In fact, it’s because it’s so good that God set about a costly plan to redeem it.
We must be careful about constructing doctrines based on ‘proof texting’ (i.e. extracting individual Bible verses, like the one from Zechariah, from their contexts and stringing them together to constitute ‘what the Bible says’ on a subject). That’s generally not a good way to use the Bible, even though it’s commonplace. Better to look at what the overall tenor of scripture is on a subject. This would include how God deals with people, looking for guidance from the narratives (stories) as well as the propositional (instruction) texts.
What we find is that God has this curious way of wanting to work with and through people. That, rather than denying human contribution, he wants to be in partnership. Since God doesn’t start from the standpoint “physical = bad, spiritual = good”, we may need to rethink our categories a bit. Indeed, in the Hebrew way of thinking, there is no rigid divide between the spiritual bits of us and the physical bits of us.
So are we saying, then, contra the apostle Paul, that we should have confidence in ‘the flesh’ (Philippians 3:3,4) after all? Not at all. However, Paul’s context here is not talking about the alternative to being spiritual. ’Flesh’ here is referring to who one’s parents and grandparents were, and whether that has any bearing on our standing before God (answer: it doesn’t, so don’t place your confidence in it).
In fact, while we’re on the subject of the flesh, 1 John 4:2 and 2 John 1:7 tell us that recognizing Jesus came in the flesh, as a real human being, is a critical doctrine. Can’t be all bad, then.
Which bits of Jesus were ‘of the Spirit’ and which bits were ‘of the flesh’? When was he speaking ‘as a human’ and when ‘as God’ (or perhaps, when was it ‘him’ and when was it ‘the Spirit’)? Absurd questions, aren’t they? Again, Hebrew thinking wouldn’t even ask these questions.
Now the person of Jesus is not fully paradigmatic for us, for all sorts of reasons. Not least, that he was ‘without sin’. But when we surrender ourselves to God through Christ, seek after him and look for him to increasingly mould us into his likeness, then what we love begins to shift towards what he loves. What we desire, notwithstanding some momentary lapses along the way, starts to become conformed to what he desires.
So phrases like “May it not be what we want, Lord, but what you want”, begin to become less meaningful. God might say in response, “But don’t you want the same thing that I want? Aren’t we working together?” Indeed, when we ask, “What shall I do, Lord?”, he is quite likely to reply, “I’m flexible – what do you want to do?”
The Spirit of God wants to make us ‘naturally spiritual’ people who are, at the same time, ’spiritually natural’ too (how many people have you met whose idea of being ’spiritual’ seems far from being ‘natural’?). No dualistic divide, then, between when we are being ’spiritual’ and when we are being ‘natural’. The Bible doesn’t recognise that divide.
We are whole people: body, soul, spirit, fused into one. When we do things for the Lord, in cooperation with the Spirit, we are doing so in our humanity.
Who and what we are is not temporarily parked to the side, awaiting completion of the job. No, it’s naturally fused, and that’s precisely how God would have it be.
This is an uplifting perspective. It has always struck me that a notable feature of God is the extent to which He does not intervene in the world, which seems to suggest He expects us to get on with it, whatever it is.
And yet … we are encouraged to pray, and expect that God may do things in response.
So, we need to reconcile the two.
The modern mind (which doesn’t like any messy-ness) would say surely it must be one or the other – (a) no intervention, we’re all on our own, or (b) there would be continuous intervention, if only we had enough faith …