Where does our sufficiency come from according to this teaching?
Our sufficiency is of God. It does not come from ourselves, nor from our own ability to think anything as of ourselves, but it comes through Christ to Godward. Even a highly educated man like Saul of Tarsus did not trust his training or background; his sufficiency rested in God alone.
Les explains that our sufficiency is not of ourselves; we are not sufficient of ourselves to think anything as of ourselves. The trust we have is through Christ to Godward, and our sufficiency is of God. He points to Saul of Tarsus as an example: Saul was highly educated, the most educated Jew of his day, having sat at the feet of the greatest rabbi of that time, and was a Pharisee of the Pharisees. He could have claimed qualification by his training, but he never did. In Philippians he called all of that just so much dung and cast it aside as worthless so that he might become the very workmanship of Christ and never lose sight of that. His sufficiency was never because of his background, not because he was a Hebrew of the Hebrews or a Pharisee of the Pharisees, but because he was a humble servant of the Creator God. Les also notes that the following verses illustrate the difference between law and grace.