Understanding that our Triune God is self-sufficient and does not need us.
A quote attributed to Archbishop Desmond Tutu says:
"We have an extraordinary God. God is a mighty God, but this God needs you. When someone is hungry, bread doesn't come down from heaven. When God wants to feed the hungry, you and I must feed the hungry. And now God wants peace in the world."
I hope this statement is relatively uncontroversial to you. God does want peace in the world. God does want the hungry to have food. And God does want us to be involved in his plan of redemption. The Story of the Good Samaritan, I think, covers these points.
Yet I respectfully disagree with the idea that God needs you - or that God needs me.
Depending on your church, you might hear this message in more subtle ways. God needs you - to give money, serve in the nursery, and go on a missions trip!
In college, occasionally I even heard that sometimes a guy would tell a girl he liked that, after praying about it, he felt it was God's will for them to date. God needs you - to be my girlfriend! I've been married for over a decade and I don't recommend this approach. This is how spiritual language can get twisted and create abusive situations.
This is speculative, but I think one reason that Christians can slide into thinking and feeling that God needs us is we have an inflated view of ourselves. We've taken our ambitions and then said that these are things God wants for us and then that God needs us to do them. Putting God's name on these goals then justifies overworking and selfishness and all kinds of dysfunction.
There are many ways we can respond to this problem. One way, and the way we are going to explore today, is to better understand what it means that God is Triune. As we understand, love, and adore our Triune God, we will see that God is far greater than we are. He is self-sufficient.
As clearly as I can say it: God does not need us.
As the theologian Fred Sanders writes, "When evangelicals lose their sense of proportion, they begin to talk as if they no longer care about the character of God unless they get something from it. The best defense against this has always been the doctrine of the eternal Trinity in itself."
The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.
What problems result from thinking that God needs us?
In what areas of your life might you be tempted to conflate your own plans or desires with God's will? How can you discern the difference between the two?
How does meditating on the eternal, self-sufficient love between Father, Son, and Spirit humble us and re-orient us toward God himself, rather than just what we can 'get' from him?
How does participating in God's mission from a place of security and humility (rather than indispensability and pride) change our approach to service, evangelism, generosity, etc.?
Examine your motivations for serving God. Are you serving out of a sense of indispensability, or from the security of knowing God is fully sufficient in Himself?
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