Monday: Self-Confidence Broken

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Charles W. Colson has a great insight into the Christian life. In his book Loving God, the former Special Counsel to President Richard M. Nixon from 1969-1973 tells of sitting on a platform in the crowded Delaware State Prison, where he had come to address the inmates, and thinking over a life which had brought him to high government service, followed by arrest, conviction and a seven-month imprisonment in connection with the crimes disclosed during the Watergate investigations. He thought of the scholarships and honors earned, the legal cases argued and won, the decisions made from high government offices. But then he realized: “It was not my success God had used to enable me to help those in this prison, or in hundreds of others just like it. . . . All my achievements meant nothing in God’s economy. No, the real legacy of my life was my biggest failure that I was an ex-convict. My greatest humiliation—being sent to prison—was the beginning of God’s greatest use of my life.”¹ 

This is a profound insight, as I say, because everything in us naturally thinks the other way. We think that our successes, earned by native ability and the hard sweat of our brows, are the great things God must use and recognize, even when they are achieved—as they often are—in violation of His moral laws. It is a great insight when that natural self-confidence is broken and we find ourselves thrown back utterly upon the good mercy of God. 

We have been looking at the work of God in the lives of Joseph’s sin-hardened brothers. Twenty-two years before these events they had sold their innocent and unsuspecting brother into slavery, and all the years since then they had lived with their terrible secret. No one knew—not Jacob their father, not Joseph’s younger brother Benjamin, certainly not their wives or children. But God knew, and He was working in them to expose their sin and bring genuine healing to their lives. 

We have seen some of the means God used: physical want, harsh treatment by Joseph, prison, small but unsettling circumstances, the pressure of an ordered necessity, affection. These were important and effective devices, even increasingly effective. But although they were working in the sense of softening the brothers’ hearts and awakening them to the awareness that God had not abandoned them to their sin but was still with them, they had nevertheless not really brought the brothers to confess their sin openly. The men had not thrown themselves upon the unmerited mercies of God. This necessary end God was now to bring about as the result of one swift blow. At the very moment when the brothers must have been congratulating themselves on how well they had done and how easily they had escaped the worst of what they feared lay before them, God suddenly struck like lightning and demolished their self-confidence. It was out of this death of self that they were spiritually reborn. 

¹ Charles W. Colson, Loving God (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1983), 24.