God Needs Absolutely Nothing — And That Changes Everything

To exist, we need oxygen, food, water, and shelter. God needs none of it. In this episode of Clearview Today, we continue our Getting to Know God series with one of the attributes that’s hardest for us to grasp because it’s so unlike us: the self-sufficiency of God.

We talk about why this truth is so difficult for dependent beings like us to accept — how a power outage, a plane ride, or an unexpected health scare quietly reminds us how little we actually control. From there we get honest about prayer: how a false sense of self-sufficiency shows up in how little time we spend with God, why treating prayer like a coin in a slot machine misses the point entirely, and why “get to the point” praying is closer to the real thing than the template prayers we recite without meaning. Dr. Abidan Shah shares a recent night of being wide awake at three in the morning and how the Holy Spirit turned those restless hours into some of the most meaningful prayer he’s had.

We also draw the crucial distinction between God’s communicable attributes, the ones He shares with us like holiness and love, and His incommunicable ones like self-sufficiency, which we can never possess. And we land somewhere deeply reassuring: being dependent on God does not make you meaningless. You are fearfully and wonderfully made, and He delights in you.