HOW DO I OVERCOME SELF-RELIANCE AND THE fear THAT CAUSED IT?

When I was younger, I was seen most times as the “golden child”. I was a great reader. I loved academics. I was competitive (at what I was good at). I loved to sing and was growing in my musical skill. In every room I walked in, folks my age often saw me as the leader, the gifted one, the “ceiling”. For what it was worth, I was the pride of my parents and the apple of every teacher’s eye. At first glance, that sounds celebratory or something worthy of honor. But what I thought was my strength would later become what fed my sin nature... self-reliance.

Into adulthood, I began to look to my gifts, my talents, and my abilities to get me in rooms, keep me in them, and make them better than when I first came. Because I was deathly afraid of the trauma that comes with rejection, my reliance on my capability became one of my many defense mechanisms.

“Ryan, you’re gonna be famous one day. I just know it.” or “Wow! You are an accelerated reader! Surely you’re going to be a preacher!” These affirmations were all exhilerating rushes that went straight to my head. From a very early age, I developed the belief, subconsciously, that everything was all up to me.

And then Jesus came in.

In today’s vlog, we’re gonna talk about the idol of self reliance, how Jesus confronts it, and how he takes our little and does more with it than we could ever do on our own... exclusively by His grace and His power.

What if we stopped living like it was up to us? What if we truly believed that we are physically and spiritually unable to do the will of God without the grace and power of God? What if we knew everything we had was powered in Him.

We’d be UNSTOPPABLE to the kingdom of darkness. Let’s dive into Mark 16.

As we follow Jesus together,