Galatians 6:3 - The Little Engine Who Can't

"For if someone is thinking to being something being nothing, he is deceiving himself."

-Being nothing.  What did Jesus say?  Apart from Me, you can do... Wait for it... Nothing (John 15.5).  God’s power is perfected in our... powerLESS-ness (2Corinthians 12.9).  Paul here is not talking about identity.  There is no question that we are of infinite value in God’s economy.  In His eyes, we are precious, fearfully and wonderfully made, one of a kind, so valuable to Him that He paid the ultimate price to get us back, back into His family.  So, rest assured, we are all equally loved, not one person loved one ounce more than the pilgrim next to them.  No one more special or qualified or better than any other, and for that matter, we are all equally filthy, just as morally bankrupt apart from Christ as anyone else.  Wonderful impossibles, yes.  Diamonds in the rough, for sure.  But generally speaking, we all show up as would-be princes and princesses in beggars clothing.  Which is Paul’s point - it is not about our identity, it is about our ability.  Our best efforts are nothing more than filthy rags.

-Some suggest here that Paul does in fact have in mind a form of self-conceit, of me-better thinking, which could indeed prevent me from deigning to help the poor schmuck next to me, to crawl under his rock and help him with his heavy load.  And that is an attitude which of course is crippling to the body of Christ, no place for that whatsoever.  But Scripture, however, generally does not say that we ARE nothing.  It states that we can DO nothing.  I think the author here is speaking to that all-american quote-unquote rugged individualism, to a kind of pride or rather a self-sufficiency which reinforces that little-engine-who-could mindset in each of us, where I think I can, I think I can do it, i.e. without any assistance whatsoever, where we are loathe to ask for help and to let ourselves be vulnerable enough to where folks could be positioned to even know about our burdens, much less help us bear them.  Spiritually-speaking, we are in actuality the little-engine-who-can't, but we really don’t like to let other people see our weakness(es), we are uncomfortable with being needy.  But this is Paul’s point - we in the body of Christ DO need each other, and desperately so.  And we desperately need to be aware of our desperate need.  A cord of three strands is not easily torn apart, right (Ecclesiastes 4.12)?  God help us... to need each other.