Dependence, my unexpected path toward joy
For much of my life in Christ, I believed that the purpose of relying on God’s strength in my weakness was to learn to be strong. It sounds almost right, doesn’t it? But God’s gentle correction to my self-sufficiency-loving heart has been this:
God invites me to rely on his strength not so that I can learn to be strong, but so that I can learn to be dependent.
In a culture that highly values independence, self-sufficiency, and continual self-improvement, the perpetually dependent are often met with scorn. For a long time, I had an underlying fear that God shared the world’s scorn—or at the very least mild disappointment, a fatherly sigh, a grimace, a shaking of the head—when I came to him in my need and inability yet again. In truth, I’ve spent a lot of time in prayer projecting onto God my own frustration with my own neediness without bothering to ask him if he felt the same way about my weakness.
Throughout Scripture, God has given us a very different picture of his response to our need. In Psalm 71, the psalmist comes before God, begging to be rescued, saying, “Be to me a rock of refuge, to which I may continually come” (emphasis mine). Our Rock welcomes us—over and over again—in our weakest places, that we might know him in his strength.
We were created from dust, dependent on the breath of God to give us life. And this is no result of the Fall. We have had limits from the beginning. God is Creator. We are created. Wholly dependent and called “very good” by the one who made us.
Jesus speaks to the goodness of our continual need when he calls us to a life of abiding in him in John 15. He says, “I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.” We are united to Christ, our Vine, our sustaining source of life. We are never asked to be anything more than we are: a branch, constantly receiving its life from the Vine. And this is no source of frustration for Jesus. “By this my Father is glorified,” and “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full,” Jesus says. Dependence is the path to joy, to being fully who we were made to be.
Yet Jesus not only dignifies our dependence with his words, but shows us the way into the fullness of it by his own reliance on the Father. We so often praise Jesus for his strength (and rightly so!), his miracles, his physical healings, and displays of divine power. But I wonder if we don’t expose our love for strength rather than our love for the fullness of who Jesus is when we aren’t sure what to do with his obvious human limitations: his exhaustion, his temptation, his poverty, his anguish in the garden, his tears, the many people who did not experience his physical healing.
His entire life—not just in the weakness of his Cross, but also in the victory of his rising and ascending and in his present ruling and reigning—is defined by and rooted in his total, complete, continual dependence on the Father. And it is in and through Jesus’s perfect, ongoing dependence on his Father that we who are united to him can experience “the power of Christ” resting on us as we find “contentment” in our limitations, and find that his grace is actually is sufficient in our weaknesses (2 Cor. 12).
For so long, I feared that acknowledging my inherent, continual need would bring shame. Yet as I have been faced with my limitations and my neediness in new and deeper ways in my current season, I could not have anticipated the joy, the love, the purpose, the freedom, the rest that I have found in accepting—even imperfectly—God’s invitation to live fully into my dependence on him.
In these next few weeks as we follow Jesus on his journey to the Cross, l want to watch closely for his dependence, his reach toward the Father in word and deed, and mimic what I see. What might happen if I let the weakest parts of me abide in his love?