Trust and Rest, Not Works and Striving

Ron Block is a musician with Alison Krauss and Union Station. He wrote the following words on how life in Christ is a life of trust and rest:

"Most believers accept that 'Jesus died for me, to pay for my sins.' But in Eden stood two trees: the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil complicates everything. It's a performance-based mindset: 'I work to achieve goodness, and so I become good by my effort. I perform, and then God and others accept me.' We complicate the truth when our minds are still infected with the wrong Tree.

"Before we are in Christ that wrong Tree infects our minds, so we go right into the Christian life thinking, 'Now I've got a second chance to become good; I am going to show Jesus how much I appreciate His love for me by working really hard for Him.' So we go on living in the foyer of the great Mansion of the Gospel--the foyer of Forgiveness of Sins. We camp out there and try to be good. Major Ian Thomas [says]: 'God did not send His Son, incarnate in this world, to die upon a Cross and shed His own precious blood and then rise again from the dead and ascend to be with the Father simply that guilty sinners might get out of Hell and into Heaven. It's gloriously true but it's entirely incidental. Entirely incidental.'

"Paul says, 'Did you receive the Spirit by works of the Law, or by the hearing of faith? As you began in the Spirit, so walk in Him.' We walk the same way we began--by faith. We didn't get the Holy Spirit by working for God, so we don't bear fruit by works. We need to move into and appropriate the rest of that Mansion by faith. It belongs to us in Christ.

"The eternal Realm flips the world's thinking upside down. What seems rational and logical--working to pay God back--is illogical to God. In every other world religion we are to climb the mountain of holiness, or self-actualization, or becoming one with God. They are all religions of effort: 'Do this and that and these other things and you will be walking the path.' Life becomes an agonizing effort to maintain that path, and so, like the Pharisee, we can feel like we're ahead of the Pack. Or, if we are failing, we feel behind the Pack. This is performance-based acceptance; this is salvation by works; this is the world's way.

"But the Bible turns all that upside down. As we read it prayerfully, it destroys all worldly patterns of thinking in us. We live not by trying to save our life, but by dying to 'our life.' We are exalted not when we climb the mountain, but when we are humbled and recognize our total weakness and inability to 'be like Christ.' God's strength is not perfected in our self-actualization or our works or our power, but in our weakness. That's the real Biblical shocker. Jesus didn't come to show us how to be strong, but how to be weak and let God be strong. 'I can do nothing of Myself,' and 'The Father in Me does the works.' That was what the Son lived by; He became a man totally dependent on the Holy Spirit, setting aside all His omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence as the second Person of the Trinity to become a servant. That's the beauty of Jesus--He is now one of us forever, though of course He is still God. As Major Ian Thomas said, 'The gospel of the grace of God was designed not just to get sinners out of Hell and into Heaven but above everything else to get God out of Heaven and into men.'

"Christianity sets us on top of the mountain at conversion and says, 'Now, here you are. Be this. Be on top of the mountain.' 'For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live, then, as children of light.' And then life becomes a process, not of climbing up, but of taking off grave clothes that do not belong to us anymore. Jesus Christ is the Tree of Life; when we become rooted in Him, and built up in Him, we begin to bear real fruit, the fruit of reliance on Him and not the false fruit of 'working for God.' We learn we are totally weak in and of our human selves, but He is our indwelling Sufficiency, our strong Savior, and then we are prepared to live the Christ-trusting life, to be one with Christ in our thoughts, attitude and actions, without self-commendation or self-condemnation.

"That's real freedom. It's the freedom we were designed for."