Not that we are competent in ourselves to claim anything for ourselves, but our competence comes from God. 2 Corinthians 3:5 (NIV)

My buddy Paul Carlisle says you have to confess ‘I can’t’ before you can agree that God can.

The danger is — if we rush past ‘I can’t,’ we’ll never fully embrace the notion that only God can.

We’ll just keep thinking there’s still some ability (sufficiency) in us. We’ll continue to believe, wrongly, that we can do some things, perhaps all things, apart from God. We’ll lock into a mythology that, if we keep all the rules — or even just a few of the rules — we’ve somehow made ourselves into good, little Christians.

But these rules we keep and uplift are merely a “ministry of condemnation” (2 Corinthians 3:9) designed to get us to finally admit ‘I CAN’T and only GOD CAN.’

They’re part of the Jesus-Yoke, meant to show us we’re not as strong as we think we are, to show us there is a limit to how well we can carry out the rules apart from God.

Being Spirit-led means you recognize that the rules written on stone are outside us and, therefore, inferior to God’s full plan - which is to write the new rules on our hearts with His very own hand.

He’s placed His Spirit inside us in order to change us from the inside out. My fear is that you and I sometimes hinder the handwriting of God because we’re so busy pursuing the rules that we stop pursuing the God who created the rules.