Selfless v. Needless

Both my hair and my brain are easily tangled. Both types of knots require good conditioner and lots of patience. Sometimes I’ll hear or read something that doesn’t settle well with me, and I have to sit for while, brush in hand, and carefully work through the tangles. This is what discernment looks like for me, and I suspect it takes me longer than the average person. I have a lot of hair, I have a lot of confusing thoughts, and I'm great at ignoring both until they get out of control.

This past year, a particular tone of teaching I’d received over the years began to nag at me. Lots of urging women to deny self: in their marriages, in their motherhood, in their calendars, in their sex lives, in their dress, in their…everything. And of course, denying self is crucial to walking with the Lord! We must be servant-hearted, willing to lay down anything that gets in the way of our affection for and obedience to him! So why was I bothered by the tone of these messages? Was I under conviction and needing to repent, or was something off? Sometimes it’s hard to tell right away.

I sat with my theoretical brush and began to ask the Lord for wisdom, to help me sort through the tangles. Eventually one obvious thing became clear, and one not-so-obvious thing became clear. The obvious thing? I consistently struggle to be selfless, and my selfishness shape-shifts a million times a day. I need to live repentant of this, fight it in all forms, and depend on the Lord for help. The not-so-obvious thing: There’s a difference between being selfless and being needless.

God is the only truly selfless one, and God is the only truly needless one. However, though he’s called me to pursue the former, he has not called me to pursue the latter. In fact, neediness is a gift from him because ultimately it makes me need him—which is the very core of the gospel. “I need thee, oh I need thee! Every hour I need thee.” 

Teaching that implies I ought to be needless saddles me with a burden I cannot bear and undermines my understanding of the gospel. Also, pursuing needlessness ironically sets us up for selfishness. Ask a woman over and over again to deny her God-given needs, and eventually she’ll run out of robot magic. Feeling tricked and worried she’s a failure, she’ll feel extra provoked to reach for selfishness in whatever form she can find it. The world will affirm this: “You deserve it.”

Nothing good happens when we ignore our humanity and expect ourselves to be like God. This is the stuff of Genesis 3. Imagine the boom in God's voice when he declares in Isaiah, "I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god. Who is like me?” and “I am the one who helps you.”

For a Christ follower, it’s difficult to make this distinction between selflessness and needlessness. We know we are called to lay down all things, including our needs. After all, didn’t Jesus do this very thing on the cross? But, Sister, laying down our needs doesn’t mean denying they exist. Laying down our needs means humbly confessing that they exist both to God and others, remembering and praising our ultimate Provider, and vulnerably asking for help from God and our community that God has given us. Actually, neediness is a gift in funny packaging.

Neediness is a gift because it throws us at the feet of our Provider and asks us, in faith, to trust his provision. Consider the newly-freed Hebrews dependent on manna in the wilderness. God knew they needed to eat each day, but he called them to lay down tomorrow’s need and trust his provision by only collecting enough manna for each day. Those who hustled and collected extra for tomorrow found their efforts quite literally crawling with maggots in the morning. They didn't trust the Lord! But on the other hand, don't you bet there was some Hebrew woman who preferred to deny her needs rather than trust God to provide? I can hear me saying it now: "That's okay! I'm not hungry!” That wouldn't be a faith-filled response at all. We shouldn’t out-hustle our neediness or deny our needs, but we should trust God with our needs and allow him to work. Oh, how our faith will grow here! Truly, our neediness is an instrument for God's work in us.

Our neediness is also an instrument for God’s work through us. Our personal neediness can train us to see neediness in others. The surprising result? Selflessness! Selflessness occurs when we pay attention to others’ needs, and we offer ourselves as instruments to meet those needs. Here, our place of pain becomes our place of ministry. How much more effective and enjoyable it is to minister as a needy person than as a needless person!

Neediness is also an advantage because it creates godly codependency. It trains us to realize that we cannot get through life on our own. We need the Lord, and we need other people, just as they need us. This is the beauty of the Church: A group of people in need of one another's gifts, resources, and wisdom, united in praise to the One who provides all things. A needy church is ultimately a selfless one, because it is made of members who vulnerably confess their needs, empathetically meet the needs of others, and credit God with every bit of it. It's the delicious oneness we see in the early church: “All who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need” (Acts 2:44-45). There are likely lots of reasons we don't see this happen much now—but I bet one of the reasons is that we aren’t faithful to confess our needs.

Of course, all of this focus on needs can get quickly skewed. After all, our selfishness shape-shifts quickly and can manifest itself in a million different ways. We can’t be so obsessed with our own needs that we refuse to see the needs of others. We also can’t look at other people as the Need Meeters. No! God is forever and always the one who meets our needs. When we give that job to other people, things get wonky really fast.

And yet, even this mess can be a gospel reminder: We need to Lord to forgive us, over and over again, and to shape us into his image.

Sister, God designed you to have needs so that you would be forced with every growl of your stomach, every yearning of your heart, and every disruption in your relationships to remember your Need Meeter. Don’t carry around the burden of needlessness. Instead, may the cry of your heart be this: “‘I need thee every hour, O precious Lord,’ and I am so glad, because it means we’re always together.”