There is great power in knowing what you are not. Know your limits. Know what you can do, be confident in your actual abilities, but do not overstate them. Know the line that your abilities cannot cross.
Part of our broken “sin nature” that comes from Adam’s choice combines itself with the nature that we remain the Image of God. In a sense, it almost makes us get a feline complex—where we reinterpret reality to presume that everything centers around us. We sneeze just before lightning and thus conclude we caused it. Someone gives us an inch and we think ourselves to be rulers.
We are the Image of the Omnipotent, Omnipresent, Omniscient God—all powerful, everywhere present, all knowing—, but we do not have those specific qualities, but our sin nature presumes that we do.
Part of good theology includes that those qualities are unique to God—He is the Almighty, which means that we are not. Everyone will face the sin nature’s tendency to forget what we are not every day of our lives. The more you get in touch with what you are not, the less you will try to do things that you cannot do, the less you will be offended at results that can’t be, the less you will waste what time and energies you have, the more you will focus on whatever things you can do. Once you focus solely on things within your ability, you will find yourself accomplishing seemingly impossible tasks.
Arguably, this is the key to efficiency: Only attempt what is possible.
There are many things that may seem impossible, but that presumes that we will try methods that fail or that only God can use. If we stay within our limits and only use the powers we have, many purported “impossibilities” will become easy. As for those things we truly can’t do, by knowing that only God can achieve them, He is more likely to achieve them through us, all the same achieving what is impossible without God. So, there is no benefit in telling someone what cannot be done, but only in who we are not and what only God does through us.
Job 38-42, Micah 6:8