Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Philippians 4:6-7 (NIV)

We are a very pragmatic and result-oriented generation. Nearly everywhere we turn, we are being told what to do in order to achieve the desired results in life: eat this food and you will lose weight; do this exercise and you will have amazing abs. Adopt this discipline and you will succeed. Practice this meditation technique and you will have peace. Everything we do is to an end. It is easy for us, therefore, to approach the Christian life that way.

But I do not think God is into us doing things to achieve results. He is rather the answer to all the results we seek, and therefore the end to all our efforts to achieve them.

I have spent the past couple of weeks going through the book of Romans with my wife, and the thing that strikes me is how little our personal effort plays in salvation. That it is truly by faith alone, and faith – as defined by the book of Romans – is our recognition the gift of salvation is not by works. We do not achieve salvation by human effort; it is a gift freely given.

And salvation is not just a future eternal state. It includes all that God desires to do in our lives. It is the abundant life Jesus promises, the victorious life over sin and death God always intended for us. It is the successful life. The successful life, then, is not achieved by human effort. We do not do in order to achieve the results we desire. We rest and believe.

This does not me we sit idle, of course. But it does mean our activity in life is confined to doing only what the Spirit of God in us is doing. The word picture here is like a home improvement expert coming into your home to remodel after several failed attempts by you to remodel it yourself. At that point, you no longer are trying to remodel your home. You are learning to get out of the way and let the expert do his best work, assisting when called upon. This is the Christian life. We are not trying to rebuild our own life. We are learning to allow God to rebuild it for us.

And this is why we really can be thankful in all circumstances. We are not trying to be thankful in order to make things happen. We are thankful because God has sent the best Home Improvement Expert in all creation into our lives, and He is already at work. He may be kept from doing all he wishes from time to time If we are getting in his way or preventing him from remodeling some of the rooms, but even here he is at work, teaching us to yield to him, teaching us how to make more space that he might be the one to do it.

Thankfulness stems not from a frantic impulse to make things happen; it stems from the recognition he has come and he has things under control. This is why we can be thankful. And the remodeling work he is doing is beautiful. In every moment, whether there is a lost of dust on the floor or not, he is doing a beautiful work.

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