I’m not into Christian T-shirts, but I recently saw one I’d like to own. Walking downtown in our city, I passed an elderly man with this caption across his chest:

Step Back and Let Jesus Do What He Do

Bad grammar aside, that’s a pretty good thought. All the evil and sadness and poverty and darkness in our world ought to compel us to haul ourselves off our comfy couches and do something about it. As one writer put it, “Jesus rose from the dead; and we’ve got work to do.”

However, the psalmist, along with the steady theme of the whole of Scripture, cautions us against ever thinking that we are the central cause or effect in any of our efforts. God’s engagement with the world is not swinging on a thin thread, barely hanging on in anxious hope for us humans to show up.

All our exertion and skill and expertise fall fallow without God’s intervention. “Unless the Lord protects a city,” the psalmist writes, “guarding it with sentries will do no good” (127:1). In fact, “it is useless for [us] to work so hard from early morning until late at night” (v.2) because frantic activity ignores the truth that we are dependent on God’s kindness and mercy.

Oblivious to this truth, we toil and worry and sweat. We plan and manipulate and fret. We seldom rest. We rarely pray. And as a result, we find ourselves in the foolish place of living as though we are God.

This is no argument for a flaccid life, for living drowsy or inert. Rather, this is a call to be engaged with God’s redemptive work in the world-remembering always that it is His work in the world.

Tyler Wigg Stevenson put it well: “The world is not mine to save, but I can serve the mission of the God who has already done so.”