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No one has to listen long to hear this popular saying, “We can do it.”  That saying has its place in certain things.  When it comes to moving a large rock with poles, the men may say, “We can do it.”  The saying indicates encouragement and determination to do what can be done if we try hard enough.  A new baby can bring that saying from the lips of the husband when they consider the awesome task of raising a child.

But is it appropriate to say that when we encounter problems we know are too large for us?  A man wakes up from the night’s sleep.  After considering the day before him, he has no right to say, “I can do it.”  He has no idea of what lay ahead.  The probability that he can’t do it is far more than the likelihood that he can.  Things happen beyond our control and we are forced at many times to realize that we couldn’t do it.

Billions of people have thought they could whip a problem into shape.  But notice the past tense of that sentence.  By our very nature, we are not designed to handle life alone.  We band together to build a city.  We band together to invent new means to do what we couldn’t do without that invention.  Has anyone asked why?

It’s hard for people today to imagine living life with a simple campfire, tent, and stone tools.  What did those folks do?  How did they cope?  Though they banded together to accomplish more than could be done alone, they were never-the-less helpless in the face of a storm.  Things too large constantly emerge to threaten our lives.  And the saying, “We can do it.”, falls on deaf ears in the aftermath.

We are designed to rely on something larger than ourselves.  That’s who we are.  And even the greatest of our inventions will never thwart sickness, hunger, alienation, and death.  Even our ability to think is sent off into oblivion when we are faced with a series of thoughts necessary to accomplish something large.  We’re “one thought beings”.  That’s a fact that can’t be denied.  Oh, we can manipulate a few thoughts within a minute or two.  But this only gives us the appearance of being able to think more than one thought at a time.  We are quite fragile and helpless, in the sum of things.

Why is this so?  And why is this ignored today?  Liars have emerged to convince us that we can do something that should not be done.  Where this is so very blatant is in society itself.  We are being told that if we want to change the world, “We simply need to try harder.”  Lie!  The entire world is under the rule of Jesus, the King of Kings.  It is He who sets up leaders.  It is He who has created this place of limitations.  And it is He who determines how far man will go and what he will be able to accomplish.

This is the “hole” in our lives that we keep trying to fill with invention.  We were never intended to live independent of His Rule.  But look at how man is striving to replace Him.  Cell phones, TVs, central heating, cars, roads, a fragile economic system, and more.  None of this can do what God can do in a moment.  Yet we continue to try.  God has called all this what it is, “The works of man’s hand.”  And He has promised that godless men will never forsake these works.

Something to consider folks.  I encourage you to give this some thought.

By His Grace.