HOW DID WE LOSE OUR DEPENDENCE ON GOD'S LOVE?
By Ernest O'Neill
How Did We Lose Our Dependence on God's Love?
By Rev. Ernest O'Neill
Now, what happened was, we men and women decided this world seems to have all we need. It has trees that we can cut down and make into furniture. We can create houses for ourselves. It has crops that we can grow and get food from. It seems to have some rapids in the rivers that we can ride and get some thrills from. It looks to me as if we can get everything from this world that we need without trusting our God -- without depending upon Him. That's really what we did.
We determined that we could be like God without God's love and life and spirit coming through us. We could be like God in that we could rule over the world and do what we wanted with it. So instead of living off the love of God, we began to try to live off the love of the world. We began to operate in exactly the opposite way to what God had intended. We needed security and we decided if we had land, then we'd have security -- so let's get as much land as we can. Later on, it was stocks and shares. After that it was gold.
It was worse with our sense of self-worth. We all began to feel very much abandoned. Why? Because we did not know the one significant other in the whole universe. We didn't know him and we weren't sure that he knew us. We had a fair idea that what we were was one little cipher in the midst of five billion other little ciphers. Yet we felt we were important. Do you see the parity of it --the irony of it?
You are unique! There is nobody like you in the whole world. There isn't. But nobody else seems to know it. That's the killer -- nobody else seems to treat you as unique, do they? Why? Because they're sitting next to you and they think, "Well, I'm unique too!" We all think we're unique. We're all so busy trying to prove to everybody else that we're unique that we haven't time to show anybody else that they're unique.
Actually we are unique -- but the only one who will give us a real sense of our uniqueness is our Father. He is the only one that really knows how unique we are. But once we lost contact with him, we began to sense a need for importance and significance and so we began to look to people. You know the way it goes. We just make monkeys of ourselves. We'll do anything to get somebody else to laugh at our jokes, we will.
We'll do anything to get them to praise our housekeeping. We'll do anything to get other people to make us think we're the "fellow in the big picture" -- we're THE person, the leading actor, the important one. And so we're all the time trying to suck from each other a sense of importance and significance.
It works tragedy in the home. It just is torture. The husband is trying to get it from the wife, the wife is trying to get it from the husband, the children are trying to get it from both of them and we're all trying to get it from each other. We're sucking, sucking, sucking from each other and nobody is giving, giving, giving because the depths of our needs for significance are infinite.
No human being can give you the sense of significance that you want. Because finally, who talks about John Wayne? Maybe when you see one of the old movies, but after that - nobody. Who even mentions Bing Crosby? It suddenly comes home to your heart, "If these guys are forgotten, what about me who haven't a fraction of their fame?"
You see, inside every one of us, there's an appetite for significance and self-worth that the world cannot fill.