Have you ever prayed a prayer that immediately scared you? When I ask God to help me live in total dependence on Him, I get a little nervous. I am desperate to live my life in total dependence on Him. I don’t want to be independent and self-sufficient any longer. It’s an illusion, anyway. We aren’t self-sufficient. Jesus gives us the very breath we breathe each moment. We don’t create it, and we couldn’t if we tried.
Everything we do is because our Creator has given us the ability to do it. Without Him, we could do nothing. The reality is we already live in a state of total dependence, but we spend our lives in a state of denial. We convince ourselves that we are the rulers of our destiny when nothing could be further from the truth. It’s all lies brought to us by the father of lies himself.
Satan has been pitching his lies since the very beginning, telling us that we can be as powerful as God (Genesis 3:1-5). The lies are so preposterous; it is a wonder any of us believe them. And yet, tragically, we all do. We think we are in control, so we work harder to prove our worth and dominance. We forget Jesus has already ascribed infinite worth to us. He put us in dominion over all the earth (Genesis 1:26).
Satan lies to convince us to abandon God in hopes of acquiring all that He already entrusts to us. Do you see the lunacy in this? When we align our hearts with Jesus, He gives us everything we could ever want or imagine. We live our life as co-heirs with Jesus, privileged to receive all God offers. But we believe the lie and think we will be better off making our own way rather than surrendering to a life of total dependence on Christ.
Brian Tracy, the famous speaker and author, has a well-known phrase that says, “If it’s to be, it’s up to me.” That is the essence of living a lie. No one who has ever achieved anything has done so without the gifts God has entrusted to them. Some use them for His glory, others abuse them to bring glory to themselves. I suggest a better statement for us would be, “If it’s to be, it’s up to Thee.” Jesus is our provider, our help, and our sustainer. Anything we accomplish in life is because of His provision and gifting.
Without Jesus, our destiny is the same as that of everyone else’s. We will be here for a little while, and then we will die and spend eternity in Hell, forever separated from the love of our Savior. We control nothing. Everything we do, everything we accomplish, we achieve through our total dependence on Jesus. But what if we realized this to be true? What if we stopped worrying about how we would make money, what we would eat, or where we would live? How freeing would that be? When we learn to live in total dependence on God, we will finally be honest with ourselves and with our Lord. We will be free to experience the life He created us to live.