What God has done

Martha Olawale

"And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony." Revelation 12:11

There is a balance to living truthfully that we can't achieve by reasoning things out without the help of the Holy Spirit. Even something that sounds noble, like humility, might transmit pride if we don't engage the help of the Holy Spirit. Our neglect of boasting about the power that works in us (Ephesians 3:20) makes us come off as proud and arrogant people capable of changing ourselves. God did it, and when we don’t celebrate it, we deny God's grace over our lives. Timothy writes, "Having a form of godliness but denying the power thereof" 2 Timothy 3:5.

For instance, in the name of humility, we might fall prey to covering the power of Christ to transform our brokenness while hiding behind our ‘strength.’ An adulteress who has no desire to be what she once was because God changed her should sing her deliverance from the mountaintop. If she testifies to the power of the Holy Spirit in her, it's not pride; it’s gratitude to God and His ability to take our messes and make beautiful things out of them. In doing this, she’s telling other broken people, "If God did this for me, He would do the same for you."

One of my Dad's favorite songs is, "Go, tell it on the mountain." I can still hear his raspy voice singing it around the house. It's a song that urges us to be spreaders, not controllers of God's grace. God is Good; He is the Almighty, all-powerful, and He can do abundantly, above all, that we can ask or think (Ephesians 3:20), including overcoming our broken nature to walk in His fullness.

I'll be the first to acknowledge my broken human nature, but I must also be the first to boast about the transforming power of the cross. I am not the same person I was before I met Christ! While I still have spiritual and character wounds under surgery, I am already a new creature by virtue of my new birth. A transformation that sets me in the process of a complete overhaul through the washing of the Word. Like the creature Paul writes about in 2 Corinthians 2:17, I can only be called 'new' because something new springs to life in me each time something old dies.

As I bathe in the flowing river of grace, I celebrate every victory in my history because I owe it all to Jesus, my Savior. As a human, I still have many struggles and always will, but as a Child of God, willing to lay it all down, continued triumph over my faulty nature is guaranteed. Like Paul said, "I die daily" (1 Corinthians 15:31). Daily death honors the progressive work of Christ in me; it does not celebrate my brokenness, and every good in me flows from Calvary’s stream.