“But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.” – The Apostle Paul, 1 Cor 15:10
Have you ever wondered just how God’s grace works in our lives? This is one of the 
greatest mysteries for us who believe. Yet, the answer is here in plain sight if we are able believe it. So many of the truths of the Bible are so intermingled that when we start to unwind one of them, all the others become apparent.
Taking the verse above one could logically ask, is it then God who does the work or Paul? As Christians, we often want to fight over the verse and make it a much bigger deal than it is. Can it be that the answer lies right in front of us? To see it takes humility, something that itself is a miracle from God.
It is both God and Paul
Let’s try to thread this through very quickly. The answer is yes, Paul is the one doing it, clearly, but at the same time, were it not for the grace of God working in Paul’s life he would not be doing it.
The Bible teaches that the heart is the center of a human being. Jesus teaches that out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. So if we are full of sewage water, we spew out dirty water, but if we are full of living water, we spew out life. The truth is, we are often so unaware of how God is working in our lives that we often completely miss the miracle.
The miracle in this case is that a man like Paul would even seek to do the things he is talking about. Paul, remember, was the most zealous persecutor of the early church. What caused him to go from murderer to apostle? It isn’t as if Paul woke up one day and just decided to be a better person, in fact, he already thought he was a pretty good person (Phil 3:5-6). So good that he was killing those whom he thought were against God.
Evidence of the Miracle…
But the miracle is that Paul has been changed from sewage water to living water, and that is not something that we can do. That is the miracle. And so the fact that any of us would even think about, or have the desire to do a godly self-sacrificial act for the love of God is the very evidence that God’s grace is with us. We are that bad. We are even incapable of mustering up a truly good act for the good of another. That is what the grace of God produces.
So that Paul can say that it was himself that was “working harder than anyone” but that it was evidence of that the Grace of God was with him, that he would even want to do these things. And so grace, is far more subtle than we ever imagined. It changes our very desires. The problem is we don’t see ourselves as that bad. We don’t accept that without the grace of God we could do anything godly. But when we are brought to our knees to see this truth a whole world opens up to us.
Whose responsible for what
No longer are we responsible for producing Godliness, that is a work fully wrought by God, through Jesus. All we are responsible for is responding to God’s work in our hearts and minds. When we are given the urge to help another, or to read our bible, or to cast aside the anxieties of the day to just pray, it is our responsibility to do whatever action is 
presented, but it is not our responsibility nor are we even capable to produce that urge. The urge itself is from God, through the Holy Spirit, made possible by Christ and is evidence of a new heart.
So often we fret over whether what we are feeling or doing is from God. The problem is it goes much deeper than that to a point we can’t even discern. We have urges or desires and they are either godly or ungodly. Sometimes we don’t know until we act on them and the fruit is born. That is why we must walk by Faith, we simply cannot know sometimes until after the act is done.
We are dependent…
Now, of course there are some easy ways to discern what is from God or not, namely is it inline with scripture, but most of us live our lives in a whirlpool of neutral moral decisions where there is no clear indication from scripture as to the will of God. That is why Paul 
teaches elsewhere that we must walk by the Spirit. What God is after is a childlike, moment by moment dependence on him. That requires humility or rather is the result of being humbled before God, which itself is a miracle and an act of God.
So what I’m trying to say is God’s work in our life, his grace to us often flys under our radar’s ability to pick up what his work looks like. But the answer is right here in this verse. It is God’s grace in our lives that produces our “workings”. It is as if God is working under the surface changing our hearts, giving us new desires to do the works of God, and then we respond by doing them. It’s actually fairly simple, but we have to see that we are far more blind and ungodly than we had originally thought.
All because of Jesus…
All of this is made possible through the Cross of Christ. It is God reconciling the world to himself to open the door for realtoinship between Creator and Creation through faith in Jesus. He paid for our ungodliness, our sins, that we might be made new and gifted new hearts with the Holy Spirit, producing Godly affections in us, that we might walk in good works (Eph 2:10).
