“This is not your own doing” (Eph. 2:8).
One author calls it “the most contrary line in human history”—six words that run against our culture, schooling, and experience.
We push ourselves from bed to answer the alarm we set just hours before. We wash and eat and ready clothes for work, conscious that one slip in our performance may unravel all the day. We move ourselves to work to push through hours built on grit and weary bodies. Then we cycle back again, preparing for the round that starts with that insistent first alarm. What, in all of this, is not of our own doing?
And yet the Scripture is insistent: none of this, for all its stress and sometime glory, can make us right with God—even if our work is feeding homeless people or lighting candles in a church.
But the phrase that cuts against the grain begins with something only God can do: “By grace you have been saved through faith” (Eph. 2:8). In undeserved mercy, each of us is offered hope and light and daily joy if we will trust Christ’s hand to make us whole. Even the alarm sounds kinder; the labor of the day becomes our gift of gratitude.
“Salvation belongs to the Lord” (Ps. 3:8). Only He can turn grit into grace, our work dirge to a song, our inability into witness.
So stay in grace.
—Bill Knott