The title of this post pretty much summarizes how I felt throughout my residency, especially during intern year. After the novelty of being called a doctor and having a pager on my belt wore off (which wasn’t very long), I quickly realized, in many instances, I had very little idea what I was doing.

Yes, I studied my butt off through four years of medical school, but unfortunately book knowledge didn’t transfer automatically over to real life application. I still remember doing my first lumbar puncture on a baby and having the mom and grandmother both in the room asking me if I had ever done this before. Thankfully I had a great senior resident, and everything turned out just dandy.

It’s a bit of a strange paradox, being officially a doctor as a resident in title, but lacking the skills and knowledge that patients expect you to have. And it is through residency training that you acquire (hopefully) the skills necessary to be a competent physician. In many ways, it is pretending to know what you are doing until you actually figure it out.

It’s interesting how this parallels our spiritual lives. Apart from God we have all fallen short of God’s standards, and as a result, await judgment and God’s wrath. But because of Christ’s death on the cross, through faith in Jesus, all our sins are put onto Him, and all His perfect obedience is given to us. And so, instead of standing before God as sinners, in Christ we are justified, positionally perfect before God.

But yet, in our character, attitudes, and behaviors, we are far from perfect. We still struggle with sin, and we will continue to until the next life. And while Christ’s death made us right with God, the Holy Spirit then comes and makes us perfect within as we are perfect positionally before God, the process of sanctification.

So from this knowledge of who we are, holy and redeemed in God’s eyes, we are then commanded to obey even when naturally we might not. Not that we are to pretend and put up a false image of being all put together(although there might be a temptation to do that). But none of us are as loving, as patient, as considerate, as whatever as we know we should be. And in our obedience, the Holy Spirit gradually transforms us so that eventually the reality of positional holiness will be true of our inner self as well.

We are saved only by God’s grace. Let us not forget that we also grow only by God’s grace, through the work of the Holy Spirit. And while there is nothing we can do on our own to produce this kind of change, let us position our hearts in a way that allows the Holy Spirit to do His work.

“I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.” John 15:5