Natural Virtues

"But blessed is the one who trusts in the LORD, whose confidence is in him."  -Jeremiah 17:7

I took this photo of an abandoned car in the Arizona desert years ago.  It looked like it had been there 40 years already.  Eventually, it will rust away completely and become dust.  Oswald Chambers writes on the subject of confidence and uses the imagery of withering and drying-up. . . .

Our Lord never patches up our natural virtues.  He re-makes the whole man on the inside. "Put on the new man," i.e., see that your natural human life puts on the garb that is in keeping with the new life...Watch how God will wither up your confidence in natural virtues after sanctification, and in any power you have, until you learn to draw your life from the reservoir of the resurrection life of Jesus.  Thank God if you are going through a drying-up experience!

I was not at all confident as a child or young adult.  I found myself thinking, "If I could just have some confidence in myself, my life would be much better because I could then do anything I wanted!"  Even after I came to realize that I had no power to change on my own, and that it was the Holy Spirit in me that would change me from the inside out, I still clung to the idea that if I just had a little more confidence in myself I could achieve my goals.

When I read Oswald Chambers's words this morning about a "drying-up experience" I realized that my quest for more confidence in myself was long overdue for this drying-up experience.  I need to let it finish shriveling up and become dust to be blown away by the Spirit.  Only them can I achieve what God has planned for me.  Chambers continues. . . .

The sign that God is at work in us is that He corrupts confidence in the natural virtues, because they are not promises of what we are going to be, but remnants of what God created man to be.....It is the saddest thing to see people in the service of God depending on that which the grace of God never gave them, depending on what they have by the accident of heredity.  God does not build up our natural virtues and transfigure them, because our natural virtues can never come anywhere near what Jesus Christ wants.  No  natural love, no natural patience, no natural purity can ever come up to His demands.

Yes, it is time to let the last of the dust be blown away so that the life of Christ in me can shine through.

I am grateful that true confidence can be found in Christ.