The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And He is not served by human hands, as if He needed anything. Rather, He himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. From one man He made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and He marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek Him and perhaps reach out for Him and find Him, though He is not far from any one of us. ‘For in Him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are His offspring.’ Acts 14:24-28
“Like all of creation, human beings are made to desire God, on whom we depend for life, meaning, and direction. If we are oriented primarily toward the glory of God, then we, like a mirror, bear the image of God. We may certainly love, appreciate, and even desire and depend on other creatures, but we do so because we recognize that they belong to God. Because our desire is directed primarily toward God, our religious affections have a kind of coherence and wholeness. All of our other desires are organized around our central desire for God. All of our other relative dependencies point to our ultimate dependence on God.
Properly ordered desire for and sense of dependence on God organize the affections, thereby giving us a stable center of personality that can hold in harmony all of our other relationships. Well-ordered affections allow us to maintain the boundaries that preserve the integrity of our identities, even as we enter into relationships with others. Depending on God allows us to rely on others without being subordinated to them. Desiring God allows us to long for others without losing ourselves in them. Longing for and relying on God, in fact, always move us into appropriate relationships with other creatures.”
Kendra G. Hotz and Matthew T. Mathews in Shaping the Christian Life: Worship and the Religious Affections (Louisville: WJKP, 2006) 35.
What does dependence on God have to do with generosity? And how do well-ordered affections shape how we live our lives? God made each and every one of us to depend on Him and have relationships with other people that reflect His image and glory. The operating system for those relationships positions God as Provider and people as faithful stewards. When we choose instead to depend on ourselves, by default we make the the decision to rely on the leading competitor to God in our lives, which is money. Consequently, we switch to loving money and using people to accomplish our purposes.
To hold onto money for ourselves when God’s design is for us to serve as conduits of blessing reflects disordered affections and adversely impacts our capacity to love God, to have coherent relationships, and to interface with anything in the created order. Why think about this today? In plain terms, today is a holiday in the USA that originally celebrated independence or freedom from oppression. For many, God has been supplanted as the source of our dependence. Many in the USA have become slaves to money, which has caused faith, relationships and much of life in society to unravel.
What can we do about it? Rather than focus on the macro issues, we must live life faithfully on the grass roots level. We must make God our central desire, faithfully steward all God provides in love and service others, and experience the joy of generous living following God’s design. And we must order our affections in the way regardless of what everyone else is doing! In short, let’s live in such a way that our lives declare our ultimate dependence upon God.