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Being forced to depend on God

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I’ve been making the case on this blog that brokenness is a good thing insofar as you’re forced to face the reality that you are in fact broken. But beyond that, it’s also good in that it’s a place where you are forced to depend on God. It’s a place of personal bankruptcy. When you have nothing…
By Seth Barnes
By Seth Barnes
swinging kid
I’ve been making the case on this blog that brokenness is a good thing insofar as you’re forced to face the reality that you are in fact broken. But beyond that, it’s also good in that it’s a place where you are forced to depend on God. It’s a place of personal bankruptcy. When you have nothing,
you look around for help. I’ve been there and I both loved and hated being there.
 
If you’ve been emptied and feel your
inadequacy, you’ll look for those who can provide what you lack. And on a
journey like the Luke 10 journey where your hands are empty and Jesus sends you out expecting you to find places to eat and sleep
that you know nothing of, and where he has given you the assignment of praying for impossible situations and expecting
miracles, your dependence will be total.
 
Whether you understand or
believe is almost incidental. Because your hands are empty and you need help, you’re forced into a trusting posture.

Look at Jesus –
even as a 12 year-old kid, Jesus understood that he had to be about the
Father’s business. Later in life, as a miracle-worker, Jesus’
dependence on the Father was total. “The son can do nothing by himself;
he can only do what he sees the Father doing.” (John 5:19), “By myself I
can do nothing; I judge only as I hear.” (John 5:30), “My teaching is
not my own. It comes from him who sent me.” (John 7:16).

Jesus modeled the kind of
life we as his followers are to imitate. If the Son of God had to learn
dependence on the Father, then so must we. The Bible says God has
stored up good works for us to do (Eph. 2:10). James 1:17 says every
gift comes from the Father. Understanding this, if we are to do the good
works the Father has stored up for us, we must learn to pay attention
to what we see and hear the Father doing, and we must learn how to
depend on him.

How do we practice this dependence? We
know that the Father is rescuing the lost, healing the sick, and setting
the captives free. We might begin by asking the Father for his heart of
compassion. Then we might ask him where he’s working and how we can
join him.

Of course the real test comes as we step out
in obedience based on what we see and hear him doing. The more
frequently we risk by trusting him to show up, the more he’ll prove himself trustworthy.

We humans are so
limited in what we can achieve. We need to plug into another power
source if we are to come close to doing what Jesus did. Dependence is
the plug connecting us to the divine power source – that place in the
journey where we experience another level of grace.

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