Lesson 30: Impossible With Man, Possible With God, part 4

The cause of the weakness of your Christian life is that you want to work it out partly, and to let God help you. And that cannot be. You must come to be utterly helpless, to let God work, and God will work gloriously.

It is this that we need if we are indeed to be workers for God. I could go through Scripture, and prove to you how Moses, when he led Israel out of Egypt; how Joshua, when he brought them into the land of Canaan; how all God's servants in the Old Testament counted upon the omnipotence of God doing impossibilities. And this God lives to-day, and this God is the God of every child of His. And yet we are some of us wanting God to give us a little help while we do our best, instead of coming to understand what God wants, and to say: "I can do nothing. God must and will do all." Have you said: "In worship, in work, in sanctification, in obedience to God, I can do nothing of myself, and so my place is to worship the omnipotent God, and to believe that He will work in me every moment"?

May God teach us this! Oh that God would by His grace show you what a God you have, and to what a God you have entrusted yourself, an omnipotent God, who is willing with His whole omnipotence to place Himself at the disposal of every child of His. Shall we not take the lesson of the Lord Jesus and say: "Amen; the things which are impossible with men are possible with God"?


Remember what we have said about Peter, his self-confidence, self-power, self-will, and how he came to deny his Lord. You feel: "Ah! there is the self-life, there is the flesh-life that rules in me!" And now, have you believed that there is deliverance from that? Have you believed that Almighty God is able so to reveal Christ in your heart, so to let the Holy Spirit rule in you, that the self-life shall not have power or dominion over you? Have you coupled the two together, and with tears of penitence and with deep humiliation and feebleness, cried out, “Oh God, it is impossible to me; man cannot do it, but, glory to Your name, it is possible with God!"? Have you claimed deliverance? Do it now. Put yourself afresh in absolute surrender into the hands of a God of infinite love; and as infinite as His love is His power to do it.

But again we came to the question of absolute surrender, and felt that that is the lack in the Church of Christ, and that is why the Holy Spirit cannot fill us, and why we cannot live as people entirely separated unto the Holy Spirit; that is why the flesh and the self-life cannot be conquered. We have never understood what it is to be absolutely surrendered to God as Jesus was. I know that many earnestly and honestly say: "Amen, I accept the message of absolute surrender to God"; and yet think, “Will that ever be mine? Can I count upon God to make me one of whom it shall be said in heaven and on earth and in hell, He lives in absolute surrender to God?" Brother, sister, "the things which are impossible with men are possible with God." Do believe that when He takes charge of you in Christ, it is possible for God to make you a man of absolute surrender…and God is able to maintain that. He is able to let you rise from bed every morning of the week with that blessed thought directly or indirectly: "I am in God's charge. My God is working out my life for me."