Hi, and welcome to the Five Word Prayers Daily, a five day a week, daily devotional where we share the word, prayers, in our heart.

I'm Lisa Whittle, and I welcome you to just five minutes with me, which I trust and pray will be five minutes well spent.

So here's the million dollar question for believers, I think. Should we try harder, or should we let God do all the work?

In other words, what does God think about all our human effort? And is it all about him, or should we let God do all the work? In other words, what does God think about all our

human effort? And is it all about him, or should we put some muscle into it when it comes to making

things work for ourselves? I struggle with this myself. Am I trusting God when I work hard and am

assertive in my work? Sometimes the whole thing can be confusing, and I want us to talk about

joy in relation to this

and where it all fits in. So let's go. As I said at the top of the show, I struggle sometimes to

know how much I should push in my work and my life and how much I should lay back and just

watch God work and work things out for me.

I know this is a universal struggle because I've talked with many of my friends about it, some of

you about it. Is it wrong to try to have success in your business or whatever it is? Does God want

that for us? I mean, we know people at the end of the day that are very worldly successful,

have lots of money,

have lots of fame maybe, but are miserable and lonely and do not have joy in their life

whatsoever. And so what that tells us for sure is that those things alone or those things as

the priority or human effort to achieve is not the thing that will bring us the ultimate in joy. That we can know for

sure. In fact, Paul says it clearly in Philippians 3.3. We glory in Christ Jesus and put no confidence

in the flesh. That's the latter part of the verse. And that's in the ESV version. And in the

NLT it says this. We put no confidence in human effort. By the way,

I'm in different versions for this study at times, and I've used Logos 7 online as much of my

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