#527. Thinking God needs you.

Turning in a manuscript to a publisher isn’t at all like I thought it would be. After Mrs. Harris at Doyon Elementary School in Ipswich, Massachusetts “published” my first book of poetry in the third grade, and by published I mean laminated some pieces of paper for me and tied them together with string, I started to dream about writing a book.

In my head, turning in a completed manuscript to a publisher would be a really big deal. A Zondervan representative would land a helicopter on my front lawn, place the printed out manuscript into a briefcase chained to someone’s wrist and then fly away forever changing my life.

But it didn’t happen that way. I just sent my editor an email. No doves materialized from behind my computer when I hit “send” in a moment of heavenly celebration. The ground didn’t shake when I wrote, “the end.” The mailman still refuses to address me as “manuscript finisher Jon Acuff.”

That last one might be a slight exaggeration of what I was expecting but when I was writing the book, I felt a lot of pressure to do something big for God. I wanted to accomplish something massive for His kingdom. And eventually the pressure of that started to weigh heavy on me.

I started to get fearful about posting on the site and writing the book because I didn’t want to mess up whatever it was God needed me to do.

In the midst of that time, God reminded me of a powerful truth, “He doesn’t need me. He loves me.” There’s a big difference between those two things.

Need is a partnership.

Love is a relationship.

He doesn’t call me on this adventure called life so that I can, with my deep pools of awesomeness, release some sort of handcuffs He’s wearing. He calls me on this adventure because He knows I love adventures and He enjoys seeing me do things I love.

The more time I wrestled with that thought, the juxtaposition of need vs. love, the more I began to think that I had this whole thing backwards. Maybe if I listened to God and was honest with Him He’d whisper to me:

“Let me be clear. I am God. I am complete. I do not need your additions. I want your work to be an overflow of love. I want to pour so much love and strength and truth into you that you cannot help but do things. Add to the world. Add to the people around you. Overflow on them what I give to you. Not because I need you to do something but because you can’t help but go out and share the love I am overflowing in you.”

Does God call us into big adventures that take us across the planet and across the break room at work? Without a doubt. Does He have a purpose for us that He loves seeing us fulfill in obedience? Certainly. Does He call us into those adventures because without us He can’t complete the work He intends? I don’t think so, because that would make Him an “almost god.” As in, He was almost able to tell people about His deep, ridiculous love for them online but He needed me to write the Stuff Christians Like blog first. Ha, that’s just silly.

But there’s a danger to writing ideas like this and my fear is that people will read this and think, “Great God, doesn’t need me. I don’t need to obey Him in the things He’s calling me toward.” or “For once in my life I wanted to feel needed, and now it turns out even God doesn’t need me. You suck Jon.”

I worried about that a lot, but I think the greater danger, at least the one I see in my own life and the lives of my friends, is the ungodly amount of pressure Christians put on themselves to perform because God needs us to. We break ourselves in half, and if you read the comments in yesterday’s post sometimes our families too, trying to do something for God’s kingdom because we think He needs us. Ministers and missionaries and people that lead Bible studies after work burn out when we try to fulfill or accomplish what we perceive be “God’s need” in the world. And I don’t think that’s right. I think whether you feel called to start a ministry or be open about your faith with your friends or make disciples of all nations, you are answering God’s act of love, not His act of need.

We don’t serve a needy God.

We serve a complete God.

We harvest a field we have not sown.

We receive gifts we cannot earn.