Our Dependence on God

As I wrote "Happy Independence Day" in my journal last night, I thought about our dependence on God. We depend on God for the necessities of life, for guidance through the scriptures and through the Holy Spirit, and for extra strength and courage when our own strength and courage fails us. We rely on Jesus' Atonement  to overcome help us overcome our past and move forward, and we rely on the Resurrection to give us any real hope for the future. This is God's plan and we're following it through His power. I'm not sure that there's any part of this plan that we could successfully complete completely on our own. We are, as I understand it, entirely dependent on God.

Yet, some people pretend not to be. They think they're doing pretty well in life without any help from God at all. Those people, if I'm not mistaken, are either getting a lot more help from God than they realize, or aren't doing as well in life as they think they are. Possibly both. I know I wouldn't be doing so well as I am without God's help, and I'm not doing was well as I'd like to be anyway. Perhaps I'm not relying on God enough.

In each of us, there's a temptation to do things by ourselves and to do them our own way without any help from anyone, even God. Doing so would give us ultimate bragging rights. "I did this, by myself. It was my idea, my plan, my skill, and my accomplishment. I have no one to thank for this but me." But that's never true. We are always getting at least some help from God, which is fortunate because we always need it. Being as imperfect as we are, we always need God's help, which He's more than willing to give us if we're humble enough to ask for it.

But will we always be dependent on God? Are we ever going to be grown up enough that we don't need God's help anymore? Possibly. See, the goal of this plan is so we can become like God, and God is omniscient and all-powerful. I'd be surprised if He needed anyone's help for anything at this point, and that's part of what He wants for all of us. When we become as God is, we will become as wise and as powerful as He is now, and I doubt we'll still need Him to give us directions and extra strength at that point because He will have already given us all the strength and help we'll need. Part of the plan seems to be to eventually become independent from God - That is, we'll no longer rely on Him for everything, as we do now.

I'm not sure how much I'm looking forward to that. Actually, right now I'm not even sure if it's even true. This is just my speculation and logic. I could very easily be wrong. We might still be dependent on God for everything forever, which is a little bit depressing. Are we never going to become so wise that we won't need His counsel? Are we never going to become so capable that we won't need His help? It would seem that we don't have much of a future if we'll continually need God to hold our hand forever. But on the other hand, the thought of doing things without God's help is frightening. It means that, at some point, He's going to cut our spiritual umbilical  and we'll be completely on our own. Perhaps He'd still let us turn to Him for advice and comfort occasionally (I can't imagine God ever turning His back on us completely unless we turn our backs on Him), but still, we'll be expected to pretty much handle things on our own. We'll be expected to do what He does - to govern a world - which is really daunting, but then again, we'll also have a God's wisdom and power at that point, which is kind of exciting.

The bottom line is that, right now, we are utterly dependent on God. That may or may not always be the case - I'm really not sure on this point, but it's certainly true for now. While we celebrate having declared our independence from Great Britain, let's not be too quick to declare any kind of independence from God. We're certainly not ready for that yet. In fact, we may never be.