Was It Me or Was It God?

For it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for {His} good pleasure.--Philippians 2:13

How does a person become godly? How does a believer pass the test? How does a Christian reach the place where he says with confidence, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith” (II Timothy 4:7)? I regularly meet young men and women with attitudes of faith and trust beyond their years. Did they make themselves that way? Was it their choice? One fellow from Costa Rica at age five told his mother to stop going to the government’s housing application office, saying, “If the Lord wants you to have a house, you will.” A few months later, her employer bought her a home! From where did this five-year-old's faith and confidence come? How had he developed it? What discipleship courses had he taken? Which seminar was it that instilled such faith? Did he come to this place of faith through choice? If so, then he would have something in which to boast, but I do not believe it was choice. “For through the grace given to me I say to every man among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think; but to think so as to have sound judgment, as God has allotted to each a measure of faith” (Romans 12:3). I believe that there are no great men of faith; if the lives of those so named were examined with a magnifying glass, they would be found to be average persons possessed by great faith. “For consider your calling, brethren, that there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble; but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong, and the base things of the world and the despised. God has chosen, the things that are not, that He might nullify the things that are, that no man should boast before God”(I Corinthians 1:26-29). Ultimately, it is important to understand that it is God who is at work in any one of us. 

- Mike Wells