Independence?

Over the years I’ve met many patients with different illnesses who were finding it very hard to accept that they would have to continue taking medication for life in order to stay well. It was especially hard for young people. Most doctors are familiar with the scenario of the teenager who decides they can ‘go it alone’ without their medication and have to learn the hard way that unfortunately they can’t! They just find it so hard to accept that they are dependent on treatment. It seems there is something inherent in human nature that rebels against the idea of being dependent on anything or anyone else.

I was thinking about how as Christians we are dependent on God’s grace and it struck me our attitude to our dependence on God can be very much like those teenage patients.  Now, I subscribe firmly to the view that salvation begins and ends with God. The Bible says that we were ‘dead in trespasses and sins’, and dead men can’t do much to help themselves! It was God who first awakened a desire in us to seek him, and God who first showed us our need of salvation. God enabled us to repent, and God provided the way for our sins to be dealt with. I also believe that the ongoing process of making us fit to be citizens of heaven (sanctification) is entirely a work of grace too and I know by experience that we only conquer the sins we are prone to fall into through the power that God gives us. Similarly we only succeed in our endeavours for God when we are consciously depending  on him. We will be totally dependent on the grace of God from the moment of our conversion until we reach the gates of heaven.

Unfortunately, I don’t always live according to the theology I profess. All this talk of dependence on someone else goes right against human nature. Our first father, Adam, was sold the lie by Satan that he could manage without God and it is an idea that has clung unshakeably to the children of Adam ever since. As soon as it seems that we are starting to conquer some problem or have success in some Christian activity, we start to think we can do it on our own. And Satan is there at our elbow, softly whispering to us about our experience and maturity! God, in his wisdom, often allows us to carry on in our own strength for some time before he allows us to start to feel the consequences of self-sufficiency. But whether it comes sooner or later, disaster is always the eventual result. Self-sufficiency never ended anywhere but in sin, frustration, a sense of failure and loss of joy. We may blunder on for a time, deceiving ourselves that everything is fine, but eventually God stops us in our tracks. Then we look back and wonder how we could ever have been so foolish as to think we could go it alone, and how we would have wished to dispense with such an immense source of spiritual power.

We often, quite rightly, compare our relationship with God to that between parent and child. In this context, however, this is a misleading analogy. For children eventually become adults and outgrow their dependence on their parents. Hopefully a twenty year old daughter will not need a firmly held hand to cross the road, or their dinner cutting up for them, as she did when she was two! We, however, will always be dependent on God. Satan has taught us to kick against that fact, and caused us to believe that it is demeaning, but in fact we were designed to be dependent on God and can only flourish and be most productive when we are depending fully on God. To use another analogy, my CD player might decide it doesn’t like being dependent on electricity but that is the way things are. It can only play beautiful music that pleases me when it is plugged into the mains – without that it would just be a useless object that collects dust and takes up space!

Don’t let Satan deceive you into the same miserable trap as Adam but learn to rejoice and be fruitful in your dependence on God!