An oil lamp needs oil to produce light. Why? Because the lamp was made to function in that way. A car needs gasoline to go. Why? Because the car was made to function in that way.
Why does a human being need God to be functional? Because we were made that way. Long ago, God decided to make a creature on this little planet called Earth. He specifically designed this creature as the means whereby His potential, His Life, could be released and produce righteousness.
Man cannot produce righteousness on his own, however, any more than a car can go or an oil lamp can shine without fuel.
Trying to light an oil lamp with no oil is illogical and useless; you will remain in the dark. Trying to drive your car without gasoline is likewise utterly unreasonable; you will end up by getting out and pushing it, going only as far and fast as your physical strength allows, and bringing yourself to exhaustion.
The same is true with human beings. Simply urging them to be good, telling them to draw from the depths of their personality, introducing them to behavioral science, trying to legislate their actions with rules, regulations, and religion, and threatening them with punishment or prison—ultimately none of these can succeed in producing righteousness from human beings.
To get light from an oil lamp, filling it first with oil is entirely reasonable. To get a car to provide you with transportation, filling the tank with gas is completely logical. In the same way, divine logic affirms that obtaining righteousness from a man or woman happens only when that person is filled with God. Oil in the lamp, gas in the car … and Christ in the Christian. It takes God to be a man, and that is why it takes Christ to be a Christian, because Christ puts God back into a man, the only way we can again become functional.
It is called the new birth, being born again, as our soul is awakened by God’s Spirit. It can happen only on God’s terms, and it restores us to that for which God created us—of being functional only by virtue of His presence within us. God is indispensable for the truly normal human being.
Man was created uniquely, in such a way that he can enjoy a moral relationship between the creature and his Creator, because God is love, and the only thing that satisfies love is to be loved. The only thing that satisfies friendship is to be befriended.
Love and friendship cannot be forced, however. If God wanted a man who could love Him back, that man could not be like any other creature, without any moral capacity either to please God or displease Him. Such a creature would be amoral, doing what it does because it must, rather than evidencing any disposition toward his Maker.
You and I, however, were so created that by anything and everything we do, we are saying to our Creator either “God, I love you,” or “God, I could not care less.”
The human spirit is that part of us where God lives within us in the person of the Holy Spirit, so that with our moral consent (and never without it), God gains access to our human soul. This is where He Himself, as the Creator within the creature, can teach our minds, control our emotions, and direct our wills, so that He, as God from within, governs our behavior as we let God be God.
“If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit” (Galatians 5:25), and this is what it means to walk in the Holy Spirit: to take one step at a time, and for every new situation into which every new step takes you, no matter what it may be, to hear Christ saying to your heart, “I AM,” then to look up into His face by faith and say, “You are! That is all I need to know, Lord, and I thank You, for You are never less than adequate.”
The LORD is the strength of my life.
PSALM 27:1
How have you recognized your need for God in daily life?
In what you say and do, how are you saying to your Creator either “God, I love
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