Our Competence

Excerpt from post by Mark Batterson at Evotional

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One of my fall-back verses has always been II Corinthians 3:4-6:

Such confidence as this is ours through Christ before God. Not that we are competent in ourselves to claim anything for ourselves, but our competence comes from God. He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant--not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.

I've always loved the phrase: our competence comes from God.

In my experience, God often uses us at our point of incompetence. I had no pastoral experience, except for a summer internship, before becoming lead pastor of NCC. No one on our staff had even worked at a coffeehouse when we started building Ebenezers. We were totally unqualified. But calling is more important than qualification.

Noah wasn't qualified to build the ark. Nehemiah wasn't qualified to rebuild the wall of Jerusalem. David wasn't qualified to fight Goliath. Moses wasn't qualified to lead the Israelites. And Peter certainly wasn't qualified to walk on water.

It is our incompetence that keeps us humble and keeps us dependent upon God. But that awareness of our own incompetence needs to be coupled with the awareness that our competence comes from God. So the locus of our confidence isn't in our ability. The locus of confidence is God's ability. It's not self-confidence. It's God-confidence! It is the faithfulness of God that fuels our faith!