Dependent On God

by Stacie DeWitt | Sep 9, 2021 | Life Advice, Love, Wisdom

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Now, enjoy today’s post from Stacie 🙂 

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Independence has been a battle cry and a point of pride for me for as long as I can remember. It has shaped who I thought I was and how I viewed my relationship with others. I thought because my dad was an alcoholic and absent from my life that I needed to be independent. Maybe you’ve had someone like that in your life. Because time and time again he or she wasn’t there when you needed them or better yet, when you wanted them, you made sure you would work to become someone who didn’t need anything from anyone. You believed you could be self-sufficient for physical needs, emotional needs and relational needs. You believed that you could take care of you! But the truth is that has turned out to be a false reality.  Turns out it’s a lie. As much as we’d like to believe that we’re “Miss independent, Miss self-sufficient…” the truth is, we’re not. As humans, we need a lot of things that, no matter how hard we try, we can’t provide all by ourselves.

We need air.

We need water.

We need nourishment.

We need love.

We need protection.

We need friendship.

We need purpose.

Over time and because of God’s grace, I have learned that I am not independent but instead, completely dependent. We were actually created to depend on the only one who actually is independent.

The amazing thing about God is that He is not human. He’s not even a super-human, He is wholly “other.” God does not need anything or anyone. He is completely self-sufficient. He is completely independent. He doesn’t need anything from creation because He created everything from nothing.

In Acts 17:24-28 Paul says it like this:

²⁴ “The God who made the world and everything in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples built by human hands. ²⁵ Nor is He served by human hands, as if He needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. ²⁶ From one man He made every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation. ²⁷ God did this so that they would seek Him and perhaps reach out for Him and find Him, though He is not far from any one of us. ²⁸ ‘For in Him we live and move and have our being.’”

Knowing that God is completely independent and needs nothing and no one gives us security and hope that He can’t and won’t be corrupted. God does not function out of necessity. He doesn’t need to do anything for the sake of survival, to fulfill a need or out of bondage to anyone. He has no outside influence which means he is free to be himself. The good news is God to his core is good. Being good and being free means he will do what is perfect and right and good all of the time.

Knowing that God needs nothing form us reveals how much He loves us. He does not need our love but He has given us love. He does not need our existence but He has breathed life into us. He does not need our work here on this earth but he has chosen to have us participate in His grand design. He does not need our worship but he has given us voice and song. He doesn’t need anything that we create but he has given us the capacity to think, design and build.

If God does not need us then why did He create us? Paul tells us that He has created each of us uniquely and purposefully in our time and place so that we would know Him. Isn’t it freeing to know that God does not need you and that the only reason you were created is that you would get to know Him? That is so freeing! Many of us carry the burden on our shoulders of “working” for God. We feel that we will disappoint Him if we don’t perform. We worry that we’re not fulfilling our purpose because we’re not doing whatever it is we feel we should be doing. The truth that Paul tells us here is that God created man simply to know Him. You were created to know God. So you can stop striving, working, looking for your purpose! Your purpose is to know God. You were created by a good God who only wants your heart.

He is so good that not only did He give us life, He gives us Himself.

Out of His mercy He’s given Himself to us. He’s given us His word so that we can know His character and the essence of who He is. He’s given us the Holy Spirit so that we can hear His call in our hearts. He has gifted us eternity with Him through the life, death and resurrection of our savior Jesus Christ. He is not an unknown god but instead, a God that can be known! Paul tells us that He is not far from you. He delights in you as His child. He loves you. He has chosen you. He created you so that you would know Him. He does not need you to be or do anything, He just wants a relationship with you so take a rest from the striving and just get to know your God.

You don’t need to be independent. What you actually need is to be completely dependent on the only one who fully knows you, the only one who is absolutely reliable and the only one who is always good because He is absolutely independent.

Attributes of God: LOVE

by Lauren Ruark | Sep 7, 2021 | Life Advice, Love, Wisdom | 1 comment

I was sitting on a plane at 4am on my way to Costa Rica for a mission trip when a song by Beyonce came on my Spotify. The words of this song unexpectedly hit me.

Hold up, they don’t love you like I love you
Slow down, they don’t love you like I love you
Back up, they don’t love you like I love you
Step down, they don’t love you like I love you

I got out my journal and wrote the lyrics down along with the line “From Beyonce. And also God.” I laugh thinking about it now but when I was sitting there two years ago, as I was coming out of a hard, growing season, I was struck by God’s love in a new way.

Jeremiah 17:9 says, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick, who can understand it? I, the Lord, search the heart and test the mind.”  In 2019, my first year out of college, I saw that play out in my heart. I knew God created me to love being with people, and I had seen how being in close community had changed my life. But my heart was deceitful and I so easily made people and relationships ultimate things. I wanted to be loved and to get married. Even though I felt grown up, I still wanted my dad to be proud of me. I wanted a peaceful relationship with my family. I watched my heart strive and work and compromise to try to get these things above anything else. But in those, my heart was actually craving a relationship with my Heavenly Father and Bridegroom. My soul craved love that I was not even able to comprehend the depths of.

Tim Keller wrote, “Jesus must become more beautiful to your imagination, more attractive to your heart, than your idol.  That is what will replace your counterfeit gods.  If you uproot the idol and fail to “plant” the love of Christ in its place, the idol will grow back.” (Tim Keller, Counterfeit Gods, pp. 172-173)

So to here’s what I learned when I was trying to live my life for human love:

-I will feel insecure

Relationships change so much. If they are my compass, if they decide that I am okay, if I measure up, if I’m where I should be in life, if I have a certain status—I will be insecure. I’ll need others’ affirmation to prove something about myself. Even the best, safest, closest people in our lives believe lies and false narratives about us sometimes, say the wrong things, and have struggles that we can’t even see. I will be crushed if I am leaning against those people as my only support and source of truth.

-I cannot trust my heart

My emotions are helpful indicators of things that I’m feeling, but my heart is selfish and flawed and if I follow it, it will lead me down the wrong path. In my pride, my heart also wants to earn love because of something that I bring to the table that makes me worthy. But I don’t bring anything good besides the fact that He made me—I am not enough, and that’s okay. It is so freeing that I don’t have to do anything to have it all together—if I’m being obedient to my perfect Savior and using my life to glorify Him, I can’t go wrong. He has PLANS—Jeremiah 29:11. He has multiple plans—to give me a hope and a future. I don’t have to worry about how things should look in my life. Hard things will always be apart of life on earth. His plans will not look the way we think they should most of the time. But he is good and so worthy of being trusted.

-I don’t have control.

“For we are powerless against this great horde that is coming against us. We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on You.” (2 Chronicles 20:12)

I’m a three on the enneagram. I love setting goals and achieving them. But relationships aren’t like this. They aren’t boxes that you can check off if you work really hard. The Lord has to be the One to do it. In this season especially, relationships within my family consumed a lot of my heart and mind. I thought that if I said the right things, read my Bible, and prayed, certain harder areas would change in the ways that I thought they should change. I felt powerless when it wasn’t happening. But God had something so much better. It involved so much change in my life that only He could have set into place—when I had thought it would require change in the lives of the other people. All I needed to do that was to give Him my whole heart—trusting Him, talking to Him, reading about how He has done miraculous things in the past, knowing He will do it again, and asking Him to direct my steps.

And here is what I learned about God’s love.

-His love is personal 

He is not a distant or vague idea. His love is active in our lives if we are looking for it and talking to Him. For years, I didn’t understand how my deep desire for love could be found in someone I couldn’t even see in front of me. I didn’t think I could find a perfect, loving father in someone who I couldn’t sit across from. But He knows us so intimately and loves us more than we can ever imagine.

“The Lord did not set His love on you nor choose you because you were more in number than any other people, for you were the least of all peoples; but because the Lord loves you, and because He would keep the oath which He swore to your fathers, the Lord has brought you out with a might hand, and redeemed you from the house of bondage.” (Deuteronomy 7:7-8)

“There you saw how the LORD your God carried you, as a father carries his son, all the way you went until you reached this place.” (Deuteronemy 1:31)

-His love is perfect

On that same plane ride, another song came on shuffle and again I wrote down the lyrics in my journal, on the page next to the Beyonce lyrics. This one was a worship song that I knew well, called “Pieces.”

Your love’s not fractured
It’s not a troubled mind
It isn’t anxious
It’s not the restless kind
Your love’s not passive
It’s never disengaged
It’s always present
It hangs on every word we say
Love keeps its promises
It keeps its word
It honors what’s sacred
‘Cause its vows are good
Your love’s not broken
It’s not insecure
Your love’s not selfish
Your love is pure

For years, a world full of broken, human love had convinced me over and over again that I wasn’t good enough. It had tried to tell me so many things about my identity. But all along, He was looking at me, standing with open arms, and speaking identity to me that was louder—louder than any human voice, even from those that I loved—just to show me that I am His. That His love is truer. That He gets the glory from beginning to end, not me or another flawed person.

-His love can be trusted. He the absolute BEST in store for me. He’s not holding out on me. 

God is the BEST storywriter. He totally did not have to answer this prayer for me but in April I got married to the love of my life—a man I hadn’t met yet when I had journaled these things in 2019. 1 Samuel 12:15 says, “Now therefore, stand still and see this great thing that the Lord will do before your eyes. And you shall know and see that your wickedness is great, which you have done in the sight of the Lord, in asking for yourselves a king.” Jesus is king. He stands by us. He fights for us. He is a better king than any relationships we can try to use as stand-ins. “Do not turn away after useless idols. … They can do you no good, nor can they rescue you, because they are useless.” (1 Samuel 12:21)

Lauren Ruark is the artist and designer behind Lauren Fuhr Design Co. She loves ministry and making life more beautiful through art and design. She leads student ministry with Highland Park KLIFE, works full time as a digital designer for Fossil, and at night and on the weekends she creates paintings and products that promote an effortless, artful, and beautiful lifestyle. She loves being outside and her years going to college in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains (go Rams!) inspire much of what she creates. Lauren sees the world differently because she sees art everywhere– in big windows and natural light, in decor and interior design, in landscapes and sunrises, laughs and life chats on the kitchen floor, linen bedspreads and neutral colors, and everything in between. She loves Jesus with everything she’s got and lives everyday to the fullest with her husband and their dog, Wilson.