A Shelter in the Time of Storm: Meditations on God and Trouble by Paul David Tripp

Author:Paul David Tripp
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Crossway Books
Published: 2016-06-07T16:00:00+00:00

Take a Moment

1. Where in your life is God exposing the inadequacy and unreliability of the places to which you have looked for safety?

2. Humbly consider if there is a person or thing that you would rather have in your life than the security the Lord has promised you in his care.

23 | The Delusion of Independence

Hide not your face from me.

Turn not your servant away in anger,

O you who have been my help.

Cast me not off; forsake me not,

O God of my salvation!

PSALM 27:9

Do you view yourself as a person in need of help? Do you seek to live more independently than you should? How do you respond when God sends someone your way to correct or confront you? Do you bolster yourself with evidences of your righteousness, or do you regularly look in the mirror of the Word of God and admit how needy you actually are? Do you live with a sense of need for the heart-educating classroom of grace or do you think of yourself as a grace graduate? Do you think of others as needier than you? Even as you minister to others, do you think of yourself as one in need of ministry as well? When you seek to understand why you do the things you do, do you look outside or inside yourself for the answer?

One of the sad results of sin is that it causes all of us at some time and in some way to buy into the delusion of independence. Independence is what the serpent sold Adam and Eve, but this independence was as counterfeit as the proverbial three-dollar bill. The counterfeit currency of independence is the reward that the enemy continues to wave in front of each one of us. The lie goes this way: “You can be whatever you want to be and do whatever you want to do.” This lie is designed to make me believe that I’m wiser and more righteous than I actually am. It makes me think that I’m a mature person living in a colony of the immature. It causes me to reason that if I do bad things, I do them not because of what’s inside of me, but because of the pressures that I am forced to deal with that are outside of me. This lie is meant to convince me that I’m capable and okay.

Here’s what the Bible makes blatantly clear; the quest for independence never ends in independence. It always ends in slavery. Why? Because I was carefully designed by the Creator to live in a dependent, obedient, and worshipful relationship with him and in humble, interdependent relationships with other human beings. The quest for independence is not simply a spiritual mistake; it’s a fundamental denial of my humanity. The pursuit of independence always leaves me addicted to a list of things that I’ve looked to for hope, life, strength, and rest. In a vain attempt to distract myself from the evidence that I’m not, in fact, independent, I get hooked on things that have the ability to distract me but can never give my heart rest.

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