Quotes about Dependence

That a child obtains what he asks from his father looks so perfectly natural, we almost count it the father's duty to give. But with a friend, it is as if the kindness is more free, dependent not on nature but on sympathy and character....But then we must be living as His friends. I am still a child even when a wanderer, but friendship depends upon the conduct.

The more I realize that Christ must be everything to me and that all in Christ is for me, the more I learn to live the real life of faith—dying to self, and living wholly in Christ.

The end and design of all that is written in Scripture is to call us back from the spirit of Satan, the flesh, and the world, to full dependence on and obedience to the Spirit of God.

What a difference between the carnal and the spiritual Christian (I Cor. 3.1-3)! With the carnal Christian there may be much religion and much zeal for God, and for the service of God. But it is for the most part in human power. With the spiritual, on the other hand, there is a complete subjection to the leading of the Spirit, a deep sense of weakness and entire dependence on the work of Christ-it is a life of abiding fellowship with Christ, wrought out by the Spirit.

Humility, the place of entire dependence on God, is, from the very nature of things, the first duty and the highest virtue of the creature, and the root of every virtue. And so pride, or the loss of this humility, is the root of every sin and evil.

People think that what God wills must inevitably take place. This is by no means the case. God wills a great deal of blessing for His people that never comes to them. He wills it most earnestly, but they do not will it, and it cannot come to them. This is the great mystery of man's creation with a free will but also of the renewal of his will in redemption, that God has made the execution of His will dependent on the will of man in many things.

However, as God is the ever-living, ever-present, ever-acting One who upholds all things by the word of His power, and in whom all things exist, the relationship of the creature to God could only be one of unceasing, absolute, and universal dependence. As God by His power once created, so by that same power God maintains every moment.

Not on the strong or the fervent feeling with which I pray does the blessing of the closet depend, but upon the love and the power of the Father to whom I there entrust my needs.

Bring back all who are discouraged, because they cannot find aught to bring Thee in prayer. O give them to understand that they have only to come with their emptiness to Him who has all to give, and delights to do it. Not, what they have to bring the Father, but what the Father waits to give them, be their one thought.

Humility, the place of entire dependence on God, is, from the very nature of things, the first duty and the highest virtue of the creature, and the root of every virtue.

Humility is simply the sense of entire nothingness, which comes when we see how truly God is all, and in which we make way for God to be all.

We must learn from Jesus, how He is meek and lowly of heart. He teaches us where true humility takes its proper place and finds its strength. This happens when we take hold of the knowledge that it is God who works all in all, that our responsibility is to yield to Him in perfect surrender and dependence, in full compliance to be and to do nothing of ourselves.