We Are Unable

Does God expect us to have anything from ourselves? Who expects anything from a barren wilderness? That is what our hearts are like, and God knows it well enough. There is no goodness in us, no more than there is moisture in a stone or a rock. He looks for us to depend upon him to open our eyes with the Spirit of illumination, to reveal his love to us, and then to sanctify us, to work out all corruption little by little, and to work us more and more to glory. He expects us to depend on him for the Spirit in all we do.
Christians, therefore, are much to blame. They try to work and to hew out of their own nature the love of God and keep going by their own efforts, as if they had a principle of grace in themselves. They may work that way for a long time. But that is not the way. Instead we must acknowledge that in and of ourselves, as Paul says, we cannot do anything (Phil. 4:13). We cannot so much, by all the power in the world, as think a good thought. If we should live a thousand years, there cannot rise out of our hearts, of ourselves, a wholly good desire. It is all from outside of ourselves, from the Spirit of the Lord.
It was folly in Peter to presume of his own strength that though all others might forsake Christ, yet he would not (Mark 14:29, 31). God left him to himself, and you see how he fell. So it is with us all, when we presume upon the strength of our own nature and abilities.
We must open as a flower that opens when the sun shines on it. We open as Christ shines on us. As things around us are light only when the sun shines, so we are light and open and flow and are carried only when Christ by his Spirit flows on us. We listen and do good works, but the activity and power and strength all come from the Spirit of God.

Devotional Readings taken from Puritan Richard Sibbes 'Refreshment for the Soul.'
Glorious Freedom, pp. 173-75 [188-90]
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