We are invited to entrust everything to the one who accomplished what we could not: living and bleeding and dying and rising again, so that “whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). To put it another way, when it comes to the kingdom of God, there’s no room for DIY’ers. Best leave it to the professionals.
The room was five feet by seven. There was barely enough space for me to lie down in. Granted, it was a bathroom. So the remodel project would have to be completed in phases: first the shower, then the floor, then the toilet, then the vanity. “But,” I thought, “I can do this. Like, I can really do this.” I’d never been much of a DIY’er, but how hard could it be? Demo the old tile. Remove the tub. Throw up some waterproofing. Reroute the plumbing. Tile & grout the new shower. Install shower doors. I would save half the cost of hiring it done, learn a new skillset, and feel more ownership. The siren song of the DIY’er was too much to resist. So I pulled the trigger, purchased a six-piece combo tool set at Menards, and dove in headfirst. “This might take a month. Two at most,” I naively informed my wife, with an unhealthy dose of totally unearned self-confidence. Seven months, countless YouTube videos, call after call to carpenter friends, and multiple borrowed tools later, I finally laid the last bead of caulk. And I’ll admit: It felt good to step back and admire something I’d built with my own two hands. But I also learned a valuable lesson: The DIY lifestyle is a complete and total myth.
Specifically, it’s the Y that lies to us: Yourself. You can do it all yourself…all by yourself! That lie is as old and shiny as the fruit in the garden of Eden. “You don’t actually need God. You can power through on your own steam. You are strong, capable, and independent. You don’t have to rely on anyone else’s resources but your own!” But it’s a myth. To be sure, it’s an incredibly compelling myth. But it’s still a myth.
When I set out to remodel my bathroom, I needed my neighbor’s help to reroute the plumbing and electrical. For the tile, I relied on the advice of the local flooring showroom owner, who was incredibly generous with his time. I borrowed a tiling saw from a different friend, and then another saw from another friend after some new needs arose. When the vanity sink didn’t fit quite right, that same friend showed up with a quick fix that would have taken me days to figure out. And installing shower doors, it turned out, was a two-person job, so my wife provided the other essential pair of hands needed to hang them properly. Bottom line: I did not complete the project myself. I needed help. A lot of it! Talking to other DIY’ers, it turns out even they first learned the ropes by apprenticing with someone. YouTube academy can only go so far.
The reality is that, as hard as it is to admit, we don’t actually accomplish anything in life by ourselves—ever. Maybe that feels like a blow to your ego. Maybe it feels like death. But maybe it’s supposed to. Maybe, just maybe, that’s exactly the sort of death our old sinful nature needs. In his Heidelberg Disputation of 1518, Martin Luther made this bold assertion: “It is certain that man must utterly despair of his own ability before he is prepared to receive the grace of Christ.” For Luther, the clarion call of the Christian is not “You can do it!” But “You can’t do it, and that’s why you need Jesus!” It is, after all, a cross—not a laurel wreath—that is the enduring symbol of the Christian faith.
The Apostle Paul touches on this reality in 1 Corinthians 1:20-25:
Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.
What Paul is driving at is that it’s precisely in our places of weakness that God is most present. Weakness is his modus operandi. It’s not the exception to the rule, but his preferred method of operation. Page through the stories of Scripture and you’ll notice that it’s not on the mountain peaks but in the valleys of trial and testing where God creates and sustains faith. From the belly of the whale to a lion’s den to second-born sons to barren women to a Roman cross, it is precisely in the crucible of suffering and death and helplessness that He shows up strong. In other words, for Christ to work in your life, you have to give up all your DIY efforts. His mercy is not for the strong but the weak. His grace is not for the righteous but the unrighteous. It is exclusively for those who can’t DIY that Jesus came because “otherwise, grace would no longer be grace” (Rom. 11:6).
Surrender, the epitome of the Christian life, can only happen when we despair of our self-help efforts and cease trying to rescue ourselves. Instead, we are invited to entrust everything to the one who accomplished what we could not: living and bleeding and dying and rising again, so that “whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). To put it another way, when it comes to the kingdom of God, there’s no room for DIY’ers. Best leave it to the professionals.
