Watch the vid from my main man Steve McVey, Lie #16, “God Wants You To Do Your Best” and my comments are afterwards!
This goes along with lie #15, and boy is it a common one…
“God wants you to do your best”…
“Pray for God’s help so that you can do your best”
“Doesn’t God deserve nothing less than your best effort?”
I heard these all the time growing up — all LIES!
The thing about these lies is they sound so “good”… like they’re correct… and that’s why they’re so easily believed by Christians who sincerely want to please God.
But even Jesus Himself said that “trying your best” is NOT the way to please God…
Steve rightly quotes John 15:4-5 (Amplified Bible, emphasis mine):
“Dwell in Me, and I will dwell in you. [Live in Me, and I will live in you.] Just as no branch can bear fruit of itself without abiding in (being vitally united to) the vine, neither can you bear fruit unless you abide in Me.
I am the Vine; you are the branches. Whoever lives in Me and I in him bears much (abundant) fruit. However, apart from Me [cut off from vital union with Me] you can do nothing.“
Jesus says apart from Him we can do NOTHING.
Even our “best” is no good!
Even our best, most righteous acts are like filthy rags apart from Christ (before salvation) (Isaiah 64:6)…
And if our most righteous acts couldn’t even bring us salvation, only faith… then… our most righteous acts (out of our own self effort, “trying our best”) are just as useless after salvation. Like Paul told said in Galatians 3:1-14, “if you were justified by faith… don’t you think you should live that way now that you’re a Christian?” (Caleb’s paraphrase translation)
So no, you don’t live a great Christian life by “Trying your best to please God” — that’s a LIE — you live a great Christian life by letting Christ express Himself in and through you each day, each moment, by faith.
Have you heard this lie before? What do you think? Leave a comment down below…
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5 Things I’m Grateful For Today:
- Steve McVey’s awesome videos
- God speaks through EVERYTHING…
- My apartment
- Being self-employed and able to ignore that early morning phone call (and no alarm clock!)
- Kettlebells
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