Made in the Shade
How common it is to strive, attain, and then give ourselves a title of self-sufficiency? Am I right about this? Do you think it is common for us to want self-reliance in all things? Now think about this: how many times do the scriptures warn us not to get smug about our salvation? Many, we can be sure of this. Our need for connection to God, the source of life and fulfillment is not a box we check, and it is not a position we achieve without God, without grace. For salvation, we never want to glibly declare, “We’ve got it made in the shade.”
To engage the love of God is to be aligned with the Being who affords us our being. It is also to be an ongoing process. We are never done with it. Pursuing it authentically convinces us our need is perpetual. To seek God genuinely makes us love and want God in our lives even more. Again, to stress the point, I say loving God stirs us to love God more. Consider also that shifting our attention to a different object brings not happiness, but dismay. The Prophet Jeremiah delivers God’s stern warning because the people have shifted their reliance and loyalty to an empty source. God’s people “have changed their glory for something that does not profit.” (Jeremiah 2:11) The passage continues:
Be appalled, O heavens, at this,
be shocked, be utterly desolate, says the Lord,
for my people have committed two evils:
they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water,
and dug out cisterns for themselves,
cracked cisterns that can hold no water. (Jeremiah 2:12-13)
God is declared here to be a “fountain of living water.” Living water is fresh; it is moving, ongoing, available, springing up as it does from below. Our efforts of self-sufficiency are identified in the passage with water caught and stored in cisterns—and cracked ones at that. The cisterns, therefore, wind up dry when we are desperate for refreshment. We are helpless in saving ourselves. Trying to bring about our own redemption starts with arrogance and ends in misery.
No wonder the generous One who brings “plentiful land, fruits, and its good things” tells all to be appalled, shocked, and desolate: God’s people have turned away from the reliable to the unreliable. Self-reliance is admirable as far as it rightly takes us, but there are critical things, spiritual things we cannot do for ourselves. Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. (James 1:17) We have it made in the shade only in so far as we act in wisdom, turning from ourselves toward the Fountain of Living Water.