Suppose that one Sunday morning you decide to rotate the tires on your Datsun. You get it up on jacks and manage to remove all four tires. Just then your wife calls you in for lunch.

Before you finish eating, your four-year-old daughter goes out to play in the front yard. Her ball rolls under the Datsun, and she crawls under the car to get it, knocking loose one of the jacks.

You hear her screams and look out the window by the table. You can see the car from where you sit and understand immediately what has happened. So you …

What do you do at that point? Do you lean back in your chair and say to your wife, “Looks like the car has fallen on Mary. Guess I’d better go out and jack it up again. But first, could you get me one more piece of that apple pie?”

Or do you rush to the front yard, exert superhuman strength, and lift the end of the car off your daughter so that she is freed?

Which would be easier for you to do? Wait-don’t answer too quickly. Which is easier in terms of deliberate effort? To sit at the table and have a second piece of pie, or to lift a car-even if it is a Datsun? Which takes more energy? Which burns more calories? Which gives you more exercise?

On the other hand, if you love your child at all, which would be harder to do? There’s no contest, is there? It may require superhuman strength to lift the end of the car so that your child can be saved, but it would require impossible effort to remain seated at the table!

The distinction between deliberate effort and spontaneous effort is an important one in understanding the effort involved in living the Christian life. Sometimes people get the idea when we talk about not fighting sin and the devil in our own strength, that we are talking about an effortless religion. There was a strange sect called Quietists in the last century, who believed that we should put forth no effort at all. We should just sit and rock-in fact, that would probably be too much. We should just sit. Whatever needs to be done, God Himself will take care of, apart from us.

But God never bestows salvation upon us apart from our effort. The problem we have so often had is misunderstanding where to direct our effort. This dilemma has often kept the theologians debating until midnight, but it is answered clearly in two texts that are a mini-course in righteousness by faith, as concise a statement on the subject of divine power versus human effort as you are ever likely to discover.

The two texts are John 15:5 and Philippians 4:13. The words of Jesus,

“Without me ye can do nothing,”

and Paul’s comment,

“I can do all things through Christ.”

Put the two together. If without Christ we can do nothing, but with Him we can do all things, then what is left for us to do? Get with Him and stay with Him.

“All that man can possibly do toward his own salvation is to accept the invitation, ‘Whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely.’” - Selected Messages, bk. 1, p. 343.

And don’t forget that the term salvation includes not only pardon for sin, but power for obedience, and heaven at last-justification, sanctification, and glorification.

How do we get with Christ? How do we take the water of life?

“In this communion with Christ, through prayer and the study of the great and precious truths of His word, we shall as hungry souls be fed; as those that thirst, we shall be refreshed at the fountain of life.” - Thoughts From the Mount of Blessing, p. 113.

For the parent, the deliberate effort that has been invested day by day in relationship with the child may have required hard work at times. But when a crisis comes, the necessary effort is wholly spontaneous. No parent who loves would stop to consider the energy required, but would rush to the aid of his child who is in trouble.

Thus it is for the Christian. All kinds of effort are required in the Christian life. But the one deliberate effort is to seek communion with God. Spontaneous effort toward the other things will surely result.