Let It Begin With Me

 Let It Begin With Me

Matthew 14:13-21[1]

Another slogan from the Twelve Step movement is “Let It Begin With Me.” In fact, it comes from what is known as the “Al-Anon Declaration”: “Let it begin with me. When anyone, anywhere, reaches out for help, let the hand of Al-Anon and Al-Ateen always be there, and let it begin with me.” Many Al-Anon and Al-Ateen meetings either open or close with this declaration. It’s a constant reminder that Al-Anon and Al-Ateen exist to help the families and friends of people who misuse alcohol and other substances. Their sole purpose is to provide a helping hand to those who suffer because a friend or a loved one is an alcoholic. I can tell you from personal experience that many people come to their first meeting and spend the whole hour sobbing because they are hurting so badly, their lives feel completely out of control, and they are terrified of what tomorrow will bring.

“Let it begin with me” is a call to action. It’s a reminder that we each bear responsibility for our choices and actions. If we want to see changes, we have to be the ones to make changes in our lives. That doesn’t guarantee we’ll get the outcomes we want. Most people come to Al-Anon hoping that the changes they make will change their friend or loved one so that they no longer misuse alcohol or drugs. Sometimes that happens, but mostly it doesn’t. What taking responsibility for our own choices and actions does guarantee is that we’ll learn to face life in a healthier way. This mindset applies not only to families and friends of alcoholics and those who struggle with other addictions. We all share in the brokenness of the human family. And when we find ourselves at the point of feeling overwhelmed, perhaps feeling like our lives are completely out of control and fearing what tomorrow will bring, we are right in the middle of the brokenness that everyone in this world shares.

Unfortunately, most of us don’t respond to being in that place very positively. Our first instinct is to blame someone else. If I’m hurting, someone else must be at fault. That approach might be characterized by the slogan, “it has to begin with you.” We look at our pain, we find someone to blame for it, and we put the responsibility for our happiness in their hands. If we’re going to get better, they have to change. Of course, that places all the power for our wellbeing in the hands of someone else. “Let it begin with me” takes the opposite approach. If I’m hurting, it’s my pain. I’m responsible for my feelings and what I do about them. I’m the only one who holds the key to my happiness in life. Nobody can “make” me happy by what they do or don’t do. If I want things to change in my life, I’m the one who has to make the changes.

I think there’s a part of our Gospel lesson for today that relates to this line of thinking. I didn’t really plan these sermons on the Al-Anon slogans. As I read the Scriptures each week, it just developed that way. And that applies to our Gospel lesson for this week. When it comes to our Christian lives, we’re wise to recognize that there’s much about this world that is bigger than we can control. Only God can handle those things. But we can control our choices. In our Gospel lesson, Jesus has been teaching a huge crowd: 5000 men, not counting women and children. And at the end of the day, when it was time to eat, they were all a long way from any place where they could find food. The disciples’ suggestion that Jesus dismiss the crowd so they could find food in the surrounding towns and villages wasn’t very practical. It’s doubtful there was enough food in the surrounding area to feed such a crowd. They were just trying to “pass the buck” and get rid of the problem!

Jesus ignores their suggestion. Instead, he tells them, “You give them something to eat” (Matt. 14:16)! The disciples responded as you might think: they asked how they could possibly feed such a huge crowd with the little food they had with them. But I think Jesus may have been trying to teach them something. They had seen him work miracles that amazed them. But in one sense they’d become spectators, watching what Jesus was going to do instead of taking an active role in God’s Kingdom, as he called them to. I think Jesus used this setting to challenge them to step out of their spectator role and to take a more active stance with their commitment to follow him.

The story that follows is intriguing, because although it’s the only miracle of Jesus recounted by all four Gospels, there’s no mention how Jesus was able to feed such a massive crowd with five loaves and two fish! Some have suggested that the example of generosity inspired those in the crowd to share their food with others. We don’t know that. Popular movies have depicted it as an instantaneous miracle—Jesus lifts the food in a basket to bless it, and when he brings it down the basket is overflowing with loaves and fishes. But we don’t know that either. We really don’t know and may never be able to explain how Jesus multiplied the loaves and fish. At the end of the day, all that we really know about this miracle is that Jesus gave the loaves to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds, and everyone had enough to eat and more!

It leaves me wondering if it could be that it was in the act of the disciples being willing to step out of the relative comfort of a spectator role and taking a more active role in the work of the Kingdom that the miracle occurred. We still don’t know that for sure, but it does seem significant that Jesus instructed the disciples who wanted to send everybody away to serve their food to the hungry crowds. And perhaps the miracle happened somehow in the giving. By moving from spectators to taking an active role, the disciples became channels for God to do his miraculous work. Perhaps one of the lessons is that true miracles happen in ways we may never be able to explain.

We’ll probably never know for sure exactly what happened that day by the Sea of Galilee. But I think we can know that when we stay comfortably on the sidelines, adopting the role of a spectator, not much is ever going to happen. When we get stuck in our fears that there’s not enough or perhaps what we have to give isn’t good enough, all there will ever be is a bunch of hungry people. We have to take an active role in serving others if we want to follow Jesus. I think this is where the wisdom of the Twelve-Step slogan, “Let It Begin With Me,” can help us. Instead of looking at all that’s wrong in the world and trying to find whom we can blame, when we “let it begin with me,” we step up and do what we can do. As the Scriptures illustrate, when do so, even the little that we have to give can become more than enough. There is much about God’s work in this world that’s bigger than us. But there are things we can all do right where we are. I think that’s part of what Jesus wants us to learn from this miracle: when we step up and do what we can do, God takes what we have to offer and uses it to do more than we can imagine!

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[1] © 2026 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 8/2/2026 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.

Keep It Simple

Keep It Simple

Matthew 13:10-17[1]

Most of you know that I’ve been talking about some of the slogans of the “Twelve Step” movement lately. They’re not necessarily biblically based, but they represent the wisdom of those who’ve faced and overcome debilitating hardships in their lives. Their experiences of making the journey from trauma through healing to serenity provide lessons for us all. That’s true of today’s slogan as well: “Keep It Simple.” Of course, these days, that’s a slogan that’s not confined to the Twelve Step movement. But it is one of the Twelve Step slogans. And in that context, it refers to focusing on what you can actually do about the people, circumstances, and events in your life. And that means letting go the things you can’t do anything about. “Keeping it simple” this way helps us keep our heads on straight when we feel overwhelmed by the parts of our lives that we cannot control.

That’s not something we do naturally. At least I don’t. When life feels like it’s spiraling out of control, we pull out all the stops to try to make things run the way we want them to. It’s a normal response to stress and anxiety. But the problem is that the “normal” ways we respond to stress and anxiety usually make things worse. We misuse substances to numb our feelings. We take those feelings out on the people closest to us. We ramp up our efforts to control our lives to get the outcomes we want, which only increases our stress and anxiety, especially when there really is nothing we can do about whatever may be causing the problem in the first place. The only real solution is to accept that the problem is out of our control and focus on maintaining healthy attitudes and life choices. Usually that means “keeping it simple” by sticking to our daily routines. In the Twelve-Step movement, they speak of doing the “next right thing.” When that’s our focus, it helps us to keep things “simple.”

I think our strange lesson from the Gospel of Matthew reflects this in a way. It’s a strange lesson because it sounds like Jesus was saying that he was trying to prevent people from turning to God. I would say that in reality, he was trying to get people to acknowledge that all their efforts to control their own sense of self-righteousness was getting in the way of the simplicity of how God actually wanted them to live their lives! It was their own obsession with measuring their piety by external means that was preventing them from examining their hearts and responding to Jesus and his message. In a very real sense, they had “shut” their own eyes and “stopped” their own ears from hearing Jesus.

Even that perspective sounds pretty edgy. Part of the problem is that the Gospel of Matthew came out of a time of extreme crisis. The early Christians for whom Matthew was writing his Gospel were likely Jewish converts. But because of their faith in Jesus, they had not only been expelled from their synagogues, but also likely had been shunned by their families. They were treated like heretics and blasphemers. When we have to live with that kind of hostility, it can affect the way we treat people. We tend to react to hostility by becoming defensive and even angry toward those who are attacking us. We tend to “circle the wagons,” so to speak, and we may attack everyone outside the circle. When we do, we not only only harm others, including those who just happen be “in the way,” we also harm ourselves. When we adopt that kind of attitude, we see “enemies” everywhere.

Unfortunately, that seems to be the context in which Matthew’s Gospel was written. The problem comes up when we internalize the attitude that everyone who is not “with us” is “against us” (contrast Mk 9:40!). When we do that, our religion becomes a convenient outlet for the stress and anxiety we may feel about the normal conflicts we face in life. Those conflicts come about simply because we live in a world full of other people who differ from us in all kinds of ways. When we view “difference” as a threat, it turns us into people who are closed-minded and hard-hearted, wielding our faith like a club, so focused on defending ourselves that we attack everyone who is “outside” what we perceive to be “our circle.”

But Jesus cut through all of that toxic religion and taught that our faith is about what God is doing in this world to bring peace, justice, freedom, and love to all people everywhere. Jesus called that the “kingdom of God.” He knew that his vision for the world was very different from the way things work. The Romans were still in power, and they wielded that power with cruelty and brutality. The wealthy oppressed the poor with no accountability. Religious leaders used their position not to serve the people but to gain wealth and power for themselves. Suffering, violence, injustice, and just plain meanness were overwhelming the world when Jesus was teaching about the “kingdom of God.” I can understand why some of his followers withdrew from the world in fear and hostility. And of course, we still face those challenges to this day. And it still leads many good people to retreat behind their faith like it’s a castle wall.

That’s why he told the disciples that there were some who wouldn’t get the point of his parables. He used parables to teach them about the “mystery” or the “secret” of the kingdom of God. And that secret is this: despite appearances to the contrary, God’s kingdom is working now to change all things and all people. God really is working to bring peace, justice, freedom, and love to all people everywhere. We see it in the “Parable of the Sower,” where the “fruit” produced by the good soil far exceeds all expectations. We see it in the “Parable of the Mustard Seed,” where a tiny seed becomes a “large tree.” We see it in the “Parable of the Leaven” where the yeast inevitably works its way through a large batch of dough. The idea is that the change the kingdom of God is bringing will inevitably work its way through this whole world.

One of the lessons I think Jesus wanted believers to come away with is an attitude toward others that differed from the religious people of his day. Despite all that remains wrong with this world, I think Jesus wanted those who followed him to fully embrace the hope that one day the kingdom of God will right all the wrongs. One day, God will restore all people and all creation to the way God intended when he made it “very good.” When we embrace this vision of what God is doing in the world, it makes it possible for us to extend the same generous welcome that God has given us to those we may see as “outsiders.” When we embrace Jesus’ vision of what God is doing in the world, we don’t have to worry about who’s “with us” and who’s “against us.” Because God’s plan is to bring us all together in his love. That means we can “Keep It Simple” when it comes to how we live our Christian lives. We can set aside our fears and hostilities and do our best to love God with all our hearts and to love our neighbors as ourselves. We “Keep It Simple” by keeping love as the focus of our faith.

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[1] © 2026 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 7/19/2026 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.

One Day at a Time

One Day at a Time

Romans 8:1-11; Matthew 13:1-9[1]

Last week we talked about the Twelve-Step slogan, “Let Go and let God.” Another familiar slogan from the Twelve-Step movement is “One Day at a Time.” It’s one of the tools that people who are trying to live in a healthy way use to deal with “bad” days. Because the truth is whether you’ve been practicing “recovery” for decades or for days, everybody has “bad” days. The idea behind the slogan “One Day at a Time” is that, even on the worst of your “bad” days, you can handle whatever comes your way for one day. To be sure, there are days when it all seems too much to handle. But usually, that’s because we’re viewing our problems from the perspective that they’ll never change. It’ll always be this way. When you think you’re going to have to deal with your  problems for the rest of your life, it can become overwhelming. But when you frame it as something you just have to handle today, it usually gets more manageable.

There’s another point to the slogan “One Day at a Time.” It’s related to the fact that we’ll never perfectly fulfill our goals in this lifetime. But if we keep our focus on doing the best we can today, we may wind up pleasantly surprised with how well we do. And after a while of doing our best “One Day at a Time,” we usually realize we’ve made a whole lot more progress than we could have imagined when we first started out. I think those of us who take living the Christian life seriously have a similar experience. There are wonderful times when we know the joy and peace and freedom we have from God through Jesus Christ. And then there are other days when the way we practice the Christian life can best be summed up by the phrase, “three steps forward, two steps back”!

I think we see some of this reflected in our lesson from Paul’s letter to the Romans for today. There, Paul emphasizes that the Holy Spirit poured out on us is the one who makes it possible for us to experience this new life of joy and peace and freedom right now. And when you pay close attention to what Paul says, it sounds very much like he is promising that we already have the fullness of salvation, right now. That’s because everything necessary for us to experience the fullness of joy and peace and freedom in this life has already been done for us by God in Jesus Christ. And it’s also because of what God is doing in our lives through the Spirit right now, to this very day. Paul puts it this way: because the Spirit of the one “who raised Jesus from the dead” lives in us, that means God is also working to give us a new life like the one Jesus has now in the presence of God (Rom 8:10-11, NIRV).

That’s quite a promise. We can have a life like the one Jesus has in the presence of God right now because of what God is doing in our lives through the Spirit. And I would absolutely affirm that’s a true statement: we can have a life like the one Jesus has in the presence of God right now because of what God is doing in our lives through the Spirit! But the other side of the truth is the fact that we never experience the fullness of the life of the risen Lord Christ in this life. We do experience joy and peace and freedom as a gift from God in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit. Theologically speaking, we already have everything we need to know this new life now. But practically speaking, our experience (and the teachings of Scripture) remind us that we will not know that new life fully until we are standing face to face with him. In the meantime, we live our Christian lives in the tension between the promise of new life now and the full experience of it when we stand face-to-face with Jesus.[2]

I would say that our Gospel lesson for today also addresses this question, but from a different perspective. The parable is a familiar one. A farmer goes out to plant seeds in a field. In those days, planting seeds was much less precise and involved perhaps even more risk (if that’s possible!). Farmers would just scatter seeds, hoping some of them would take root and grow and bear fruit. Of course, Jesus wasn’t really talking about agriculture in this parable. Among other things, he was trying to warn those who want to follow him that not all the seeds they planted would bear fruit. Faithfulness doesn’t always guarantee results. Sometimes we find ourselves sowing and not reaping.

But there’s a deeper issue here, one that goes beyond the typical observation that the seeds need the right “kind” of soil in which to bear fruit. That kind of thinking leads many Christians to wonder which kind of “soil” they belong to and even to doubt whether they’ve “done enough” to bear fruit in their lives. Or it leads to a too easy assumption that because we’re in church we’re automatically in the “good soil” category. But something that the famous Swiss Reformed Theologian Karl Barth pointed out is that in this parable, the farmer isn’t planting four fields. The farmer is planting seeds in one field.[3] Therefore, he suggests that we must reckon with the truth that we all—including those who are within the Christian community and those who are not—are among “those who hear” the “Word” of the gospel. That means there is always a mixture of “ignoring” the “Word” that fails to put it into action on the one hand, and on the other hand responding to the “Word” with “understanding” that leads to fruitful Christian living.[4] And that mixture of “ignoring” and “responding” to the “Word” is in all of us.[5] We all respond to the gospel in all these ways outlined in the parable in differing measures.

That brings us back to where we started. We all have good days and bad days when it comes to the Christian life. There are times when our experience of can best be summarized as “three steps forward, two steps back.” That brings us back to “One Day at a Time.” I think the slogan applies to our Christian living as much as it does to the recovery movement. We do our best “One Day at a Time” to respond faithfully to the promises of God’s word and the demands that go along with them. We do our best “One Day at a Time” to live fruitful lives as followers of Jesus Christ. That doesn’t mean that we have to wonder every day whether we’re doing it “good enough.” But it also means that a faithful response to Jesus Christ can never be something that we do once and then we sit back and think we’ve done all we have to do.

We live our Christian lives “One day at a time.” Sometimes we respond to the Word of the Lord like the hard path: it just “bounces off.” Sometimes we respond like the rocky soil: initially, we’re enthusiastic, but the Word never really takes root. Sometimes we respond like the thorny ground: we respond to the Gospel but the other things in our lives that distract us choke it out. Sometimes we respond to the Word of the Lord in a way that bears fruit in our lives and in the lives of those around us. This is true for all of us. That doesn’t mean that we get discouraged because we don’t always get it right. We live our Christian lives in hope: the hope that the light that shines in this world through the love of God in Jesus Christ will always be more powerful than the darkness in this world that we all participate in and at times may even contribute to![6] Despite any apparent success or failure, we keep on following Jesus “One Day at a Time,” not because we put our confidence in ourselves, but because we trust in God to fulfill his promises to us. And somehow, someway, God always turns our imperfect faith into fruit that benefits not only the Christian community but also all those with whom we share God’s love.

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[1] © 2026 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.

[2] Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 105, calls the hope of new life that Paul holds out in Romans as the “impossible possibility of our redemption.” Later in Romans 8:23 Paul talks about “groaning” for the full experience of new life.

[3] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, 4.3.1:189. I realize that the “interpretation” of the parable of the Sower in Matthew 13:18-23 encourages the idea that the different “types” of soil represent different “types” of people who hear the Gospel and respond in different ways. I would agree with the view that this so-called “interpretation” reflects the views of the early Church as much as and perhaps even more than they represent the views of Jesus. It is perhaps a very early understanding of Jesus’ parable, but not necessarily the only “authoritative” one. I think Barth’s interpretation, which is based more on the primary parable itself, reflects insights into how the early Church transformed into “Christendom” and how the original parable challenges the sense of entitlement and exceptionalism that arose from that transformation.

[4] Barth summarizes this dilemma well when he says that we all alike “both those who know and those who do not know” (ibid., 192).

[5] Cf. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, 4.3.1:188-93, where he interprets the parable of the sower through the perspective that it describes the “antithesis” in which we all live out the Christian life: “the light of life shines in the darkness.” That is always true whenever the light of the gospel shines: it shines in darkness. And we are still a part of that darkness.

[6] Cf. Henri Nouwen, The Wounded Healer, 76, where he says that this hope is the true motivation for Christian leadership. I would say it is also the true motivation for Christian living in general. It is the hope that enables us to “keep pointing to new life even in the face of corruption and death” and that what God has done for us through Jesus Christ, especially in raising him from the dead, is a definitive affirmation that there is “light on the other side of darkness.” I would say it also points us to the hope that this “light” in the world will always and inevitably overcome the “darkness.”

Letting Go and Letting God

 Letting Go and Letting God

Romans 7:7-25, Matthew 11:16-30[1]

Many of you may know that “Let go and let God” is one of the slogans of the Twelve-Step movement. It’s based on the principle that many have learned to be true: when we try to control circumstances and people we wind up with a life that’s too much for us to handle. We feel overwhelmed, we feel frustrated or anxious or both at the same time, and we may feel defeated. All that comes from the “insanity” of thinking we can get the outcomes we want in life with enough effort. Some of us don’t think that’s “insane” at all; it’s simply stepping up and taking on our responsibilities. But even if we don’t feel the frustration and helplessness of trying to control other people, they most certainly do.

Last week we talked about how making our religion a matter of following rigid rules leads us to a way of life defined by whom we exclude. But the other side is what we do to ourselves when we take that path of religious perfectionism. When we think we can “do it all by ourselves” when it comes to following Jesus and honoring God, it’s a lot like thinking we can control our lives and the people in it. We wind up frustrating ourselves, or those around us, or both. More than that, we tend to express our religion by condemning people. On one side we see people who are more conservative than we are and we think that they’re too strict. On the other side we see people who are more progressive and we think they’re too lax. It seems like what we really want is to be in control of everyone around us.

That’s what’s going on in our Gospel lesson with the strange comment Jesus makes about people being like children who whine, “We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn” (Mt 11:17). John the Baptist lived simply and practiced a rigorous form of discipline. And because he wouldn’t “dance to the tune” they were playing, they wrote him off as demon-possessed (Mt 11:18).[2] On the other hand, Jesus came and lived life and laughed and welcomed all kinds of people, and, perhaps worst of all, shared meals with so-called “sinners.” Because of that, they wrote him off as a “glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners” (Mt 11:19).

Here’s the problem with making religion about following the rules: we always wind up making ourselves the measure of all things spiritual. Like the crowds responding to John and Jesus, we condemn those who are too conservative in our eyes, and then we turn around and condemn those who are too liberal. But the hard truth is that making yourself the measure of all things spiritual boils down to appointing ourselves as the official rule-makers. And in the process, we make religion into something oppressive. For ourselves, and for others. In contrast to all that, Jesus announced that he had come to set people free from their burdens. He came to free people who, no matter how hard they tried, could never live up to the religious rule-makers’ demands. But he also came to free the rule-makers, because what gets hidden beneath the façade of a “holier than thou” attitude is the lingering doubt about whether you can ever fulfill all the rules perfectly.

I think we see some of that burden in St. Paul’s anguish over his inability to keep the law. In our lesson from Romans for today, he talks about the freedom that comes from letting go the effort to control all things spiritual and letting those things rest in God’s hands, which is where they belong. I’ll be the first to say that Paul’s teaching about sin and the law in this chapter is another example of the challenge we face when we try to read Paul’s letters: it gets really confusing really fast! But I think the main point of what he’s trying to say is that any means we can come up with by which we try to attain a “righteousness” of our own making is doomed to fail!

The logic of Paul’s argument here is complicated, and it’s difficult to sort out. But I think it points to the truth that all our efforts to serve God in our own strength are flawed. All of it comes under the heading of “religion”, and religion can only remind us of how far we fall short.[3] It’s no wonder Paul is torn—not just about the fact that his own conscience is guilty, but because he recognizes that anything he could possibly do to gain eternal life by his own effort is ultimately futile. The only way to find freedom is to turn to Jesus Christ. That’s where Paul winds up: “I’ve tried everything and nothing helps. I’m at the end of my rope. Is there no one who can do anything for me? Isn’t that the real question? The answer, thank God, is that Jesus Christ can and does. He acted to set things right in this life of contradictions where I want to serve God with all my heart and mind, but am pulled by the influence of sin to do something totally different” (Rom 7:24-25, MSG). I think that sums it up pretty well.

The truth is that we will always struggle with “this life of contradictions” as Gene Peterson puts it in The Message translation. And all too often, we respond to the frustration of trying to practice our religion on our own by simply trying harder. When we do, it all becomes a burden that’s too heavy for any of us to bear. More than that, this approach to religion brings with it other burdens. There’s the fear that what we do may never be good enough. Sometimes we convert our frustration and fear into anger. And we take it out on those we think are a “threat” to us. The final burden is pride. When you put it all together, it’s all too heavy for any of us to bear.

At the end of the day, as Paul recognized, the only path to freedom from these burdens is through God’s love for us in Jesus Christ. That’s where the wisdom of “Let go and let God” comes in. When we try to control our lives, we take on a burden that will crush anyone who tries to carry it. The wisdom of the ages has taught us that the burdens that we carry only trap us in prisons of our own making. Jesus said come to me, lay down your burdens, and I will give you rest. Of course, that’s not something we do once, and call it good. Sometimes, it’s something we have to do every day: come to Jesus, lay down our burdens, and accept the rest he offers. Sometimes we may have do that multiple times a day. When we let go our own efforts to please God by ourselves, to make our lives turn out the way we want, we can lay down the frustration and fear and anger and pride that burden us. When we let God be the one on whom we depend for everything, not only salvation and eternity but also today and tomorrow, we can open our hearts to receive the joy, and love, and life, and rest that Jesus promises.

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[1] © 2026 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm on 7/5/2026 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.

[2] Douglas Hare, Matthew 123-24.

[3] Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 252: when we undertake this effort on our own, “we do but display the catastrophe of human impotence in the things of God.”