Your Bootstraps Just Broke

Long ago, when I was a boy, people used the expression "pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps" --those were the loops at the top of some boots that helped you get them on your feet. It meant something like "trying to succeed all by yourself" and usually included "and failing" because
physically, it's an impossible stunt! Studying Colossians 1:28-29, it strikes me once more me that being formed in Christ, or following God -- however you want to call it -- doesn't happen because we managed it. No, sirree! As Paul writes to the Colossians, and throughout the word of God, we find that our good intentions get us in trouble, and that in fact, any good intentions or ideas we have come from him, not from us.

Paul says in these two verses how hard he has worked for them. But in verse 27, just before that, he says "And this is the secret: Christ lives in you. This gives you assurance of sharing his glory."  So when he says "I work and struggle so hard" in verse 29, (meaning, in the Greek, to push himself to the point of agony) he finishes it with "depending on Christ’s mighty power that works within me." Trying to obey God in ourselves, by our own energy, will break our bootstraps! Only he can make us over in Christ's image (Romans 12:2). 

The "grace of our Lord Jesus Christ" (2 Cor. 13:14) is necessary for us, not only for forgiveness, but every day, in every part of life. He gives us forgiveness of sin and full acceptance at the family dinner table with the Father, but he doesn't just bring us in and dump us there. His grace continues, every day, to bring us his plan for us and give us the power to fulfill it.

So yes, let's work and struggle, no question about it! But let's never think that we somehow knew what to do for God, or how to do it, or could manage to do it, with our own effort. To quote Paul in another letter, "Be energetic in your life of salvation, reverent and sensitive before God. That energy is God’s energy, an energy deep within you, God himself willing and working at what will give him the most pleasure" (Phil. 2:12-13, The Message). 

"Let go and let God" is the other way to say this -- and that one works a lot better than bootstraps!