Good News Quote #16

From Chapter Three, Why You Don't Have to "Let God Take Control": Or, How Obedience Is for Responsible Adults.

The misunderstanding on which much of the new evangelical theology is based is the idea that when God is working in you, then you're not working. It's as if his working replaces yours, so you're not doing anything -- you're just letting God do it. But that doesn't really work, because then you have to make sure that you're really letting God do it -- and so you get all anxious about whether you're really doing that -- and "letting God" becomes one more thing you have to do on top of everything else -- and it's the worst of all because it's so inward and psychological and hard to see -- and you have to wonder: how do you know if you're really letting God do it -- or are you still just trying to do it in your own strength? As usual, the obsession with "how do you know?" questions is a sign that something's wrong -- there's a false presupposition here. The truth is that you don't have to know whether you're really letting God do it, because in fact you're always the one who's doing it. The inner acts of your heart are always your own, even when they're a result of God working in you. That's the both/and. The false presupposition is that it's an either/or proposition: either you're doing it or God is, so if you're at work, God isn't.