You are more dependent on God than you think …

On April 13, 1970, the crew of Apollo 13 was nearly 200,000 miles from Earth when an oxygen tank exploded aboard their spacecraft. The mission to land on the moon was suddenly abandoned as NASA faced a much more urgent problem: keeping three men alive long enough to bring them home. The astronauts moved into the lunar module and used it as a lifeboat, but before long carbon dioxide began accumulating inside the cramped spacecraft. NASA engineers devised a way to adapt incompatible filters using plastic bags, duct tape, and a spacesuit hose. The improvised system worked, the carbon dioxide level fell, and the astronauts eventually returned safely to Earth.

There is something almost unsettling about that story. Human beings had acquired enough knowledge to launch three men from Earth, send them hurtling through space, navigate around the moon, and bring them home. Yet those same men remained utterly dependent upon something as ordinary as breathable air. Intelligence could not change that. Technology could not change it. Courage could not change it. They could use their intelligence to preserve the conditions necessary for life, but they could never become independent of those conditions. Remove what sustained them, and everything they were capable of doing would end.

Most of us rarely feel that dependent. Life ordinarily gives us the opposite impression. We wake up, get out of bed, make decisions, go to work, solve problems, earn money, raise families, pursue goals, and plan for tomorrow. We experience ourselves as people who do things, and because we are doing them, it is remarkably easy to assume that we possess within ourselves the power by which we do them. Dependence tends to become visible only when something interrupts what we have quietly assumed would always be there.

That makes one sentence in Acts extraordinarily difficult to read casually. Paul says, “For in him we live and move and exist. As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring,'” Acts 17:28. Christians are accustomed to saying that we need God. We need His wisdom when we do not know what to do. We need His strength when we are weak. We need His comfort when we suffer and His forgiveness when we sin. All of that is true, but Paul reaches beneath every one of those needs. Before we can need God’s help with our lives, there must first be a life that can need His help. Paul says that even that life exists “in him.”

Three ordinary words carry an extraordinary claim: live, move, exist.

In Him we live
The Greek word translated “live” is zaō. Its basic meaning is exactly what it sounds like: to live, to be alive, to possess life. Paul begins, therefore, at the most fundamental level imaginable. Our dependence upon God does not begin when life becomes difficult, it begins with life itself.

That distinction is enormous. We naturally think of our life as something we possess. We speak of “my life” in much the same way we speak of my house, my career, my body, or my plans. Yet there is a profound difference. A person can own a house because that person is already alive. A person can build a career because that person is already alive. Every possession we acquire, every relationship we enjoy, every ambition we pursue, and every decision we make rests upon something more basic that we did not create for ourselves: we are alive.

We participate in maintaining life. We eat, drink, sleep, exercise, seek medical treatment, and protect ourselves from danger. None of those activities explains why there is a living human being there to maintain in the first place. No one decided to begin his or her own life. None of us stood outside existence and chose to enter it. Life was already underway before we possessed enough awareness even to recognize that we had received it.

Paul pushes the thought farther still. He does not merely say that God once gave us life, as though God started the machinery and then handed it over to us. He says, “For in him we live…” The dependence is present tense. God is not simply located at the beginning of our story. The life being lived at this moment remains dependent upon Him.

That changes the meaning of an ordinary day. The morning in which nothing remarkable happens can easily appear spiritually insignificant. Yet before you accomplish the first thing on your schedule, something astonishing has already happened: you are alive. You opened your eyes because there was still a living person capable of opening them. The most ordinary Monday morning is filled with a gift so constant that its constancy can hide its magnitude.

In Him we move
Paul then uses the Greek word kineō, “move.” The word refers to movement, to being set in motion, and therefore to activity. The English word kinetic comes from the same Greek family. Paul has moved from possessing life to exercising the capacities of that life.

Think about how much is contained in the simple fact that you can move. You reach for a cup of coffee. You turn your head when someone calls your name. You walk across a room. Your fingers type a sentence. You embrace someone you love. Human movement is so familiar that we normally notice it only when illness, injury, paralysis, or age interferes with it. Yet every action we perform assumes an astonishing prior reality: we have been given the capacity to act at all.

This reaches well beyond bodily motion. To “move” is an appropriate picture of the active human life. We work, build, speak, travel, create, serve, choose, respond, and accomplish. Those activities can create a powerful sense of independence precisely because they genuinely are our activities. You really did get out of bed. You really did make the decision. You really did complete the work. Dependence upon God does not make human action unreal. It tells us something far deeper about the source of the living capacity by which human action is possible.

Imagine a concert pianist performing a difficult piece. Her skill is real. Years of disciplined practice are real. The movements of her hands belong to her, and the artistry expressed through them is genuinely hers. Yet suppose that, while watching her perform, someone concluded that because she was playing the piano herself, she must therefore be independent of everything that made her performance physically possible. The conclusion would be absurd. Her accomplishment and her dependence coexist. The presence of genuine human ability does not establish human self-sufficiency.

This is where Acts 17:28 reaches directly into one of our deepest illusions. The more capable we become, the easier it can be to mistake capability for independence. We can become educated, disciplined, financially secure, physically strong, professionally accomplished, and highly competent. Those achievements can be entirely real while our dependence upon God remains absolute. We have increased what we can do with the life and capacities we possess; we have not become the source of either.

Jesus expressed this dependence through the image of a grapevine: “Yes, I am the vine; you are the branches. Those who remain in me, and I in them, will produce much fruit. For apart from me you can do nothing,” John 15:5. A branch can bear fruit, but it cannot manufacture the life from which fruit comes. Its fruitfulness depends upon remaining connected to its source of life. Jesus’ words expose the strange contradiction of trying to live successfully while treating the One upon whom our life depends as though He were optional.

Acts takes that dependence even deeper.

In Him we exist
The final word is the most startling. The New Living Translation says “exist.” The underlying Greek verb is eimi, the ordinary verb “to be.” In this verse it appears as “esmen”: “we are.” Paul has moved beneath what we do and even beneath the life by which we do it. He has reached our very being.

We exist.

That sentence looks almost too obvious to deserve attention. Yet stay with it long enough and it becomes staggering. Before you can be successful or unsuccessful, healthy or sick, joyful or grieving, faithful or unfaithful, you first have to be. Before anything can happen to you, there must be a you to whom it happens. Before you can think about God, believe in God, reject God, obey God, ignore God, love God, or run from God, you must exist.

And Paul says that this existence itself is “in him.”

That carries dependence to its furthest possible point. God is not simply someone we need in order to have a better existence. We are dependent upon Him for existence. The human being who says, “I can handle my life without God,” can say those words only because God has given that human being the existence required to speak them. A person can use the life God sustains to deny the God upon whom that very life depends.

There is an almost breathtaking irony in that possibility. Human beings can become so accustomed to receiving existence that we experience existence as self-generated. The gift never stops arriving, so eventually it stops looking like a gift.

Perhaps an image can help us grasp the difference. A novelist can create a fictional character who lives entirely within the world of the story, but our relationship to God is vastly greater than the relationship between an author and a character because we are real persons rather than imaginary ones. Still, the analogy exposes something important. A character cannot climb out of the novel, confront the author, and announce that he has become self-existent. Every page upon which he appears testifies to his dependence upon a reality beyond himself. Paul is telling us that human existence carries an even more profound dependence. We did not summon ourselves into being, and having received existence, we have not somehow become self-existent.

This is why Acts 17:28 can radically alter the way a Christian understands an ordinary moment. God does not merely occupy the explicitly religious portions of life. He is not waiting at church until Sunday, waiting in the Bible until we open it, or waiting in a crisis until we pray. Every ordinary moment is already taking place within a dependence upon Him so complete that Paul describes our living, our activity, and our existence as occurring “in him.”

The person rushing through a crowded airport is dependent upon God. The surgeon holding a scalpel is dependent upon God. The executive negotiating a contract is dependent upon God. The mother carrying a sleeping child to bed is dependent upon God. The athlete crossing a finish line is dependent upon God. So is the atheist arguing that God does not exist. Their circumstances, beliefs, abilities, and activities differ enormously, but none possesses independent existence.

Once that penetrates beyond familiar Christian language, gratitude begins to acquire an entirely different depth. We normally become grateful when we recognize particular gifts: a prayer answered, a relationship restored, a financial need met, an illness survived, an opportunity received. Those are legitimate reasons for gratitude. Acts 17:28 reaches underneath every particular gift and confronts us with the gift that makes receiving any other gift possible.

You are here.

You are alive enough to read these words. Your eyes are moving across the page or screen. Your mind is receiving language and forming thoughts from it. Perhaps your heart has beaten several times while you have read this paragraph without your asking it to do so. Beneath whatever concerns are occupying you today lies a reality so fundamental that it is almost invisible through familiarity: God has granted you existence, and your life is taking place within His sustaining provision.

Apollo 13 became dramatic because ordinary necessities suddenly became visible. Oxygen had always been essential; the explosion merely made its necessity impossible to ignore. Carbon dioxide removal had always been essential; rising carbon dioxide made that dependence urgent. Crisis did not create the astronauts’ dependence. Crisis revealed a dependence that had been present all along.

Perhaps that is one reason human beings so often become conscious of God in weakness. The hospital room, the diagnosis, the accident, the loss, and the moment when our own resources fail can expose how little of our existence was ever under our control. Yet we do not become more dependent upon God when life falls apart. We simply become more aware of the dependence that was already there.

The Christian who understands Acts 17:28 can begin learning that truth before a crisis teaches it. Tomorrow morning, before the demands of the day begin pressing for attention, there is a reality worth noticing. You did not cause yourself to exist through the night. You will not generate the life with which you enter the day. Whatever strength, intelligence, talent, influence, or resources you possess will be exercised by a person whose very ability to live and act remains dependent upon God.

That recognition does something profound to prayer. Prayer no longer belongs only to those moments when we have reached the limits of our abilities. Dependence upon God did not begin when our abilities ran out, it was present while those abilities were working perfectly. We can therefore approach God without pretending that we are otherwise self-sufficient people who occasionally require divine assistance. We come as creatures whose next thought, next movement, next accomplishment, and next moment of life are possible only because we continue to exist.

There may be no more humbling realization, but there may also be no more liberating one. You were never asked to be the source of your own existence. You were never capable of carrying that burden. The God upon whom you depend is already present beneath every ordinary second of your life. Before you accomplish anything today, before you solve anything, earn anything, prove anything, or become anything, the deepest truth about you is already there.

“For in him we live and move and exist. As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring,'” Acts 17:28.

Perhaps the next breath you take is worth noticing.

Scotty