Wholly Dependent and Valuable Together?

Can we be wholly dependent and valuable at the same time? Let us chart that over the next half million years or at least this lifetime. I track family history and see that really our lives are just a puff and then we are gone. Yet, in each of us is the desire for something more and something unending. God made us for the garden of Eden. Adam and Eve were in perfect dependence on God and decided they wanted to go it alone. God initially gave them the job of caring for the garden.

First, dependence is hard for us. Might I say it is even harder for men? Yet it is key to our lives in Christ.  Shocking to note how deep our desire is for independence. See also Crushed and Moving for more on this.

Yet, we are overwhelmingly dependent creatures. Just now, when I talk about being dependent and try to feel it, a growing sense of fatalism falls upon me. I become a kind of victim and care not at all. Furthermore, I lose energy for life in some way.

Yikes, I am in dependence and yet try to not think about it as it disempowers me. Wow.

Day to day I somehow do my best to live as God. Nonsense lives within me. Yet why do we live in such nonsense?

Dependent and Valuable Indeed

I find I like to say I am a Captain in God’s Army. It empowers me somehow and gives me my own space.

God could spread the good news 100% by angels and leave us to just play around.

He made us to be more than dependent. He longed to give us some important work. Thus, He has. We can share eternity with those around us. We can help all grow in eternal ways. So great.

So I need to be dependent and need God to vastly empower me. I need to grasp both at once somehow. Let’s look at 2 Corinthians 5.

¹⁷ Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come:^[a] The old has gone, the new is here! ¹⁸ All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: ¹⁹ that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. ²⁰ We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. ²¹ God made him who had no sin to be sin^[b] for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

Amen. Thank you, dear God, for a life in dependence and significance like this.