Live Dependent

Living dependent is a journey of increasing awareness of the immensity of God’s love for us. It is a growing understanding that the things we desire in life cannot compare to the good gifts God desires to give us. This life of dependence is the place where our true identity is revealed—we are God’s beloved. It is in living dependent that we can say with the psalmist, “The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing” (Psalm 23:1) and we can say with the apostle Paul, “I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances” (Philippians 4:12).  

A life of dependence on God is a partnership. While God supplies all we need and empowers us for the Christian life, we have an active role to play. While we depend on the Spirit of God to transform us, that transformation takes place as we become willing vessels of God’s love and grace.  

The beginning place of this partnership and the pathway to a life of dependence on God is prayer—specifically, the practice of prayer as a way of life (see 1 Thessalonians 5:17). It is the practice of prayer (as well as other spiritual disciplines) that nurtures a connection with the Father through which we hear the voice of love sing over us and the voice of wisdom speaking to us. Notice the life in Jesus nurtured by a practice of prayer in Luke 6:12-19 and John 13:1-5. The picture of healing and freedom begins in prayer (Luke 6). The strength of Jesus’s ministry, even in the face of resistance, is rooted in a strong sense of identity (John 13).

Watch and listen as Steven Carrizal, our Associate Minister, describes Live Dependent from his experience.