DO All That You Can DO - or BE All That You Can BE?

Think about this. I am a golfer. I have loved playing golf all of my life. When I used to play regularly, I must boast that I used to be pretty good at the game. I have heard the old golf criticisms such as:

Golf is: the ineffectual endeavor ... to put an insignificant ball ... into an obscure hole ... with completely inadequate instruments!

Or golf is: a game of placing a small ball an inch and a half in diameter on top of a large ball 8,000 miles in diameter and the object is to hit the small ball and NOT the large ball!

But I still enjoy it. And it does make a good illustration. Let us suppose that I had to play golf in order to get to heaven - more than that, I had to shoot below par every time I played. I am sure that I could become much more adept than I ever was, but shooting below par every time would put me in that class mentioned in Romans 3:23: “All have come short.” I will promise you one thing, however. I would be found trying, and trying hard. But I am sure that it would be the same old story of hooking, slicing, topping, and marking up the balls that I didn’t lose.

But suppose one day someone walked up to me while I was in a torrid session on the practice tee and told me that there was a serum that could be injected into the veins and, “ZAP”, everything would be different. Suppose I was told that the serum was the result of years of research; that it contained the best of conditioning, love for the game, driving, chipping, and putting from all of the great golfers of this century - Hogan, Nicklaus, Player, Snead, Palmer, Tiger Woods, and all the rest. I am told further that if I will give up on myself ever being a below par golfer and submit to this injection, by some miracle of metabolism, my golfing becomes the consummate result of all these great golfers as if they lived in me. They, dwelling in me, would be my hope of shooting below par. I ‘LL TELL YOU, I WOULD JUMP AT THE OPPORTUNITY!

Well, we have been given a divine arrangement whereby the Living Lord Jesus comes to live on the inside of us and the perfect Player will play the game of Life for us - all we have to do is hand Him the clubs. How beautiful is this arrangement! There is still in me that “can’t break par” self, but there lives in me another, Jesus Christ Himself, who “breaks par” constantly.

The key to the Christian “golf game” is staying aware of our invisible union with the Master Golfer. When the time comes for each swing, we invisibly hand Him the club and He does the work.

Once a person becomes a Christian he is faced with one monstrous dilemma. He is supposed to live, love, walk, and talk like Christ. He is commanded to love his enemies, abstain from the very appearance of evil, and grow in grace. We are to worry about nothing and be thankful for everything. We are ordered to rejoice always, deny ourselves, accept the fact of our death, and follow Christ every day of our lives. We are to set our affections on things above and not on things of the earth. Added to these and dozens of other demands made upon us, we are supposed to be of good comfort, cheerful, and kind in the midst of an unkind world. This is our dilemma. Paul reflected it when he said, “I have a desire but how to perform I do not find” (Rom. 7:18).

Finally Paul said, “It‘s hopeless!” What a discovery when we find that we cannot live the Christian life – that we can never be good enough to shoot below par..

Humans are geared against giving up. “Get in there and DO all that you can DO!” is often our motto. DOING our best was not enough to get us salvation, and DOING our best will not be enough to get us to victory. In fact, DOING our best, as much as we seem to revere it, IS OUR ENEMY, in that: (1) It will never work and thus is a waste of time. (2) If it did work we could and would take a part of the credit for our victory. (3) As long as we DO our best, we disallow God from doing His NORMAL in us!

This makes “DOING our best” a terrible enemy. We are not encouraged anywhere in the Bible to resort to DOING our best. There is not evidence in the Scripture to be found that God expects anything of us but total and abject failure. This is the reason for the cross in our salvation - and the cross in our inner daily life. The Self of the soul would do its best and take the credit. Self can live a life of DOING that has some appearances of Christlikeness, but self cannot BE Christlike. Our dilemma is clear. . .we cannot DO what God desires and what the Bible requires. The great question is, as Paul said, “How to perform?”

Go ahead and admit it! Your egotistical soul is your greatest problem. Your soul is your chiefest enemy. Of all the four-letter words, SELF is the worst. If you can just face it and acknowledge it, you will be one step closer to victory. Before we can properly observe the glories of salvation and a life in Christ, we must come face to face with this enemy who lives within our soul who would occupy the throne of our lives by self DOING and keep us from triumph.

Self is not subject to the law of God, nor can it ever be (Romans 8:7). Self cannot be domesticated. This is a vital point which can keep a Christian from a victorious daily life for years. We tend to think that something must have happened to our “self” part when we received salvation. But Christ didn’t come in to improve self but to replace it. Self DOING has no place in the plan of God.
Neither can you discipline it. How busy we are trying to discipline self. But it is hopelessly incorrigible. You can educate it, change its living conditions, and expose it to the highest kind of morality, but self is still unable to perform. The self-life represents everything foreign to the nature of God.
Self must not be dedicated. How prone we are to try to do that! The accumulated result of the effort to dedicate self is a system that operates on selfish motivation and selfish rewards. We have in our churches acres and acres of dedicated self. Self will do anything before it gives up. It will pray, work and tithe. It will teach a Sunday school class or become a deacon. It will even preach! It will steep itself in religious tradition to cushion itself from God. But self DOING remains an enemy of God. As long as self DOING and Christ remain in the same person, there will be frustration.

Well, if you can’t domesticate it or discipline it or dedicate it, what can you do with it? Are you ready to give up on all your methods of self DOING? If you are, we are ready to go to God’s method.

The cure of self is death to self DOING. Jesus Christ alone offers this cure. He said, “If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me” (Luke 9:23). Such a proposition deserves closer investigation. Let us draw some facts from that statement.
it is possible to follow Jesus. He invites it. But there are rigid qualifications. One must choose against himself. Further, one must take up his cross daily. What could this mean? It simply means that if I am to follow Christ, I must accept the fact of my death and keep on accepting it.

The cross is God’s answer to the problem of self. On that cross Christ died. But something else happened there. We died with Him! As we reckoned His death for us, our sin problem was cared for. As we reckon constantly our death with Him, our self problem will be cared for.

So there was a two-fold cross. An OUTER cross, the payment of sin’s penalty, the death of the Substitute, to reconcile us to God was only one part of God’s plan. When that cross becomes the INNER cross applied to self, then there is new and complete liberty.

There is a simple secret to the Christian life. It is, in fact, so simple that millions miss it. There is a truth so mighty that no life can remain the same after discovering it. I bless the day I began to see it! True Christianity is simply:
“CHRIST-IN-YOU-ITY” and
“CHRIST-IN-ME-ITY”.

BECOMING a Christian comes about by inviting Jesus Christ to come to live inside of us. BEING a Christian simply means that the Christ who came to dwell in us is going about acting like Himself in us. If I am a Christian, I can say, “Jesus Christ is alive in my life right now!” I may not feel worthy of it. I may not understand it. I may not feel it all the time. But the beautiful truth is that all the time, every night and day, at work and at play, when I feel down and when I feel up.... JESUS CHRIST IS ALIVE IN ME.
“The mystery. . . which is Christ in you, THE hope of glory” (Col. 1:27). THE hope, the ONLY hope, of my ever BEING what I was made to become (able to shoot below par consistently) is that Christ lives in me to assure it and achieve it! This is a truth beyond all our capacities to understand. It is the prime fact of our faith.

Christianity then is simply Jesus Christ living in our bodies and us allowing Him to go about His own business. When that concept dawns upon the Christian, it changes his whole life. It alters his outlook and disposition. It changes the nature of his work and worship.

If Christianity were nothing more than a man deciding to worship Jesus and DOING his best to imitate Him, there indeed would be little hope. But if Christianity is Jesus coming into an available human body and acting like Himself, then there is abundant hope. In the one, all is based on human strength. In the other, all is based on the dynamic strength of the indwelling Christ. If my salvation depended on my ability to be like Christ, I could be lost again and again. But if my salvation depends on Jesus, then I cannot be lost.

Thus my salvation is secured not by my imitation of Christ but by my participation in union with Christ – by my BEING all that I can BE. He, Himself, living in me, is the security of my salvation. I need no other.

Not only is our salvation secured, but our conquest of daily life is complete. I often feel that when the final accounting is done, much of the work that we have sought to DO for God will not stand. It has been done in the flesh, with self motives and toward self goals. Man working for God is one thing. God working in man is quite another. What we have in our world is a system of religion that, in most part, encourages people to work for God. This kind of work is bothersome, fruitless and frustrating. You can get burned out by church work.

No work of self DOING bears the mark of divine certification. But if Jesus in us does the work, that work will stand when the stars have fallen.

Living the daily Christian life had eluded me until the hour I recognized this fact. My desire was such that if victory in the Christian life is a mountain peak toward which I struggle with all my human effort, then struggle I must. But if victory is a gift I receive in the Person of Jesus Christ, then my struggle is useless. Victory is not something I win, but Someone I receive into my very BEING.

All that I have been but did not want to be is gone before Him who walked into my life, who has all power in Him. ALL THAT I HAVE EVER WANTED TO BE AND COULD NOT BE, HE COMES TO BE IN ME - the Bread of Life, Rivers of living Water, the Light of the World, THE LOVE OF GOD.

Instead of being busy straining and complaining, I find now that I can BE ALL THAT I CAN BE in just containing Him, and staying aware of Him living in me.

In this way, BEING ALL THAT WE CAN BE IN CHRIST gives us the ability to DO ALL THAT WE CAN DO! Simple, isn’t it?

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