I read the following recently, words of Ray Stedman, a wonderful man of God who was pastor for 40 years at Peninsula Bible Church in Palo Alto, CA:
"If we will admit our inadequacy, we can have God's adequacy....The greatest problem in the church is trying to do God's work with man's strength....The key to Christian sufficiency is realizing that everything comes from God and nothing comes from me."
This is exactly what Jesus said: Without Me you can do nothing (Jn. 15:5)! Jesus said these words to His disciples in the Upper Room, as He sought to prepare them for living without His physical presence among them. That preparation centered around the idea that He would be their life. By His previous words to them He had made it clear that they were in Jerusalem so that He might die and be raised from the dead (Mark 10:32-34). It was difficult for the Twelve, seeing Him die on the cross. They went into hiding, confused about the road ahead. We were hoping that it was He who was going to redeem Israel (Lk. 24:21). The confusion was the result of not understanding the “resurrection” (Mk. 9:10) and of being afraid to ask Him about it (Mk. 10:32).
We see the same thing with Job. There is hope for a tree, if it is cut down, that it will sprout again (v7) … But man dies and is laid away; indeed he breathes his last and where is he? (v10). This was the fundamental issue with Job. He was a blameless man, according to God’s estimation. But he needed to come to grips with the truth of “resurrection.” He needed the faith of Abraham, that God was able to raise up, even from the dead (Hb. 11:19). So he prays that God would appoint me a set time (for resurrection), and remember me while in the grave (v13). If a man dies, shall he live again? All the days of my hard service I will wait, till my change comes (v14).
How did the story end with Job? In 19:25-27 we have one of the greatest affirmations of a future resurrection in all of Scripture. Job was confident of that. But in Job 38-41, when God speaks with Him, Job learns that the God who raises the dead in the future is to be trusted to be that God in the present!
Jeremiah struggled with the grievous task God had given him, that of calling men to repentance and being assured that his message would fall on deaf ears. This was his “death” experience. When he finally died to himself (Jer. 15:10-18), having conformed himself to the death of Christ, he was then able to attain to the resurrection from the dead (Phil. 3:10-11), and Jeremiah affirmed, Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD, and whose hope is the Lord (Jer. 17:7-8).
Someone said this of Ray Stedman: "In Ray's book Authentic Christianity, he tells the story of Paul's escape from Damascus by being let down over the wall in a basket. Ray commented that Paul was useless to God until he became a basket case! He adds that we also are useless until we are 'utterly bankrupt before some demand of life, and then discover it to be a blessing,' because it forces us to 'depend wholly on the Lord at work in you.'"
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