Exhausted and lonely one Monday afternoon, Sarah reached over and switched on the radio. It had been a rough weekend. Every request she made of the kids had turned into a battle, and her husband had remained planted in front of the television. She couldn’t recall if he had said a caring word to her or the kids all weekend.
It was like the old joke, she thought. “Ask me how my day was,” says the comedian.
“All right—how was your day?”
“Don’t ask.”
It was a bitter joke to Sarah. She didn’t even want to think about how depressed she was.
Maybe the radio would help. She flipped through the newspaper for the day’s radio listings. The topic on the Christian station was “Help When You’re Down.” She recognized the speaker’s name; he was a local, well-respected pastor. She tuned in the station.
“… so you’re down, troubled, lonely, you’re under crushing pressure. You wonder sometimes if things will ever change for you.”
Is he reading my mind? thought Sarah. He was describing her very feelings at that moment. He understood.
“My friend, there’s an answer for you from the Word of God.” Biblically based teaching was important to Sarah.
“The answer,” said the pastor, “is to stop thinking about yourself and start thinking of others. Just as our Lord thought not of himself, but emptied himself for others, we will find joy in self-sacrifice and service. Get off the pity pot. Repent of your self-absorption, and find peace in sharing.”
Sarah’s heart dropped. Peace in sharing? I’ve been sharing myself all weekend, and I’m in pieces, not at peace. She had no sooner formed these resentful words in her mind, than she immediately felt guilty. After all, the pastor was quoting the Bible. I guess he’s right, she told herself bleakly. I’m just being selfish.
She reached for the church bulletin to see what additional committee she could volunteer for. Maybe in serving more, she’d find the happiness she longed for. But she was beginning to despair of ever being happy, of ever feeling satisfied about herself and her life.
Every day sincere, well-intentioned Christians listen to messages similar to the one Sarah heard. That message—“Stop thinking of your own needs”—is taught by sincere, well-intentioned Christian teachers who only want to help people obey the Savior.
The problem is that it’s not a biblical message. It sounds true, but it’s not an accurate interpretation of the Scriptures.
Many of us have been taught a self-annihilation doctrine for so long that it makes sense to us. After all, isn’t self-centeredness at the core of our sinfulness? Aren’t we supposed to deny ourselves and give sacrificially to God and others?
Certainly, self-centeredness is at the core of our sinfulness. In Lucifer’s heart it all began, as this once-most magnificent of angels resisted simple obedience, trying instead to put himself above God. Through Adam and Eve, we inherited this tendency to dethrone God and put ourselves in the center of the universe.
This is a serious problem. When we refuse to see God for who he is—and ourselves for who we are—we deny the truth that he is God and we are his creatures. We put ourselves on the throne that only God should occupy. We idolize ourselves. We worship and serve “created things rather than the Creator” (Rom. 1:25).
Not only is it true that self-centeredness is at the core of our sinfulness, but also we are to deny ourselves and sacrificially give to God and others. In fact, Jesus summarized the entire Law and the Prophets under two simple commands: Love the Lord your God, and love your neighbor as yourself (Matt. 22:37–40). Our love for others shows that we belong to God. We are to give from our fullness wholeheartedly as Jesus did. He made himself “nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death—even death on a cross!” (Phil. 2:7–8).
So we hear self-denying passages like this in the Bible. We hear the oft-repeated maxim, “God first, others second, self last.” And we conclude that the Christian life is a life of ignoring and even hating our own needs, focusing instead on the needs of others.
Yet to believe this is to confuse selfishness with stewardship. This crazy-making assumption—“It’s selfish to have my needs met”—fails to distinguish between selfishness and a God-given responsibility to meet one’s own needs. It’s like someone saying, “I saw you last night at the gas station, filling your car’s tank. I had no idea you were so self-centered. You need to pray about spending more time filling others’ tanks with that gas.” Ridiculous, yes—but this is essentially what the radio pastor told Sarah that Monday morning. Yet if we don’t fill our own tank with gas, we won’t get far.
The Bible actually values our needs, which are God-given and intended to propel us to growth and to God. Neglecting them leads to spiritual and emotional problems; having them met, however, frees us to meet the needs of others cheerfully and without resentment.
Let’s take a closer look at the biblical view of needs.
In an old TV commercial for aspirin, a doting mother helps her grown daughter make dinner. Mom’s eager helpfulness gets annoying, and her daughter’s resentment builds. Finally the younger woman blows up. “Mother, please!” she says, “I’d rather do it myself!”
We’re all inclined to do it ourselves. Asking for help and support is inconvenient and uncomfortable. Sometimes it’s unsafe. Yet God built dependency into all of us. We all need God, and we need each other. “No man is an island, entire of itself,” wrote the seventeenth-century English poet John Donne. “Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less.”
God intended us to be incomplete in and of ourselves. Dependency is built by God into the very fabric of the universe. Without the sun’s warming rays, the earth would quickly become a frozen tomb. Without food and shelter from the elements, animals would die. Deprived of light, soil, and water, plants would shrivel.
Even God reaches out for relationships, though it is difficult to imagine an all-powerful God with needs. In his very essence, however, God is a relational being. He is love (1 John 4:16), and love always has an object. A lover does not love in the abstract.
So to whom does God reach out for his relational needs? Certainly not to us. Though God desires closeness with us, he doesn’t need us. This would put the Creator in a creaturely position. He loves and cherishes us, but he doesn’t need us.
God exists in a Trinity—three persons in one: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (Matt. 28:19; 2 Cor. 13:14). His triune nature provides for him constant relationship and connectedness. In a way that we can’t imagine, God is always attached, never in isolation. Yet, being God, he is self-sufficient within the Trinity.
Jesus experienced and expressed relational needs. He needed his Father. He “often withdrew to lonely places and prayed” (Luke 5:16; Mark 1:35). He used the expression “Abba, Father” when addressing his Father in heaven, indicating an especially close, intimate relationship to God.
Jesus needed more than his Father—he needed friends, too. Though the primary purpose of Jesus’ going to the Garden of Gethsemane was to be alone with the Father, his secondary purpose was to have a select few of his disciples share—at some distance—in his agony. With Peter, James, and John he shared his pain: “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death .… Stay here and keep watch” (Mark 14:34). In his own darkest night of the soul, Jesus reached out to his friends to support him (though they failed to give him companionship).
As God’s image bearers, created in his likeness, we also are created to reach outside ourselves to get what we need. But it doesn’t stop here. The Bible not only teaches us about our incompleteness, it instructs us about our need for people—“Jesus with skin on.”
While many Christians understand that they can’t live in a vacuum, they feel uneasy about anyone but God and “spiritual matters” filling that hole up. Yet God wants us to be loved not only by himself, but by each other. These needs are called “incarnational needs” and will be dealt with more fully in chapter 7.
Why incarnational? Because Jesus stands alone in all the religions of the world. He became man—flesh (incarnation), to make an attachment to us just as we are. He showed us that God wants to connect with people, as a person. As John says, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life” (1 John 1:1).
Christianity is unique in that, while other religions involve humankind reaching up to God—in Jesus, God reaches down to our level. In other words, Almighty God reached down and baptized human connection by sending Jesus. Just as he hungered, thirsted, and felt loneliness, so can we.
Our incarnational needs are taught all through the Bible. For example, after he created Adam, God saw that it wasn’t good for him to be alone (Gen. 2:18), so he created Eve. God built human beings to need him and to need each other. “Pity the man who falls,” says the Preacher, “and has no one to help him up!” (Eccl. 4:10) One of the most spiritual activities you can perform is to need other people.
In the daily hospital psychotherapy group that I was conducting, some of the group members were depressed, some had anxiety disorders, some had compulsive and addictive problems. All were Christians, and all spoke about learning to depend on others for their emotional neediness.
The conversation upset Raymond, however, who had been in the hospital for three days. He suffered from severe depression. He resisted coming into the program because he felt like a spiritual failure. In his mind, a depressed Christian was a backslidden Christian.
“This subject of needs just isn’t valid,” Raymond protested. “We are to minister grace to the world and get our minds off that nonsense.”
“So it’s important to minister to the world?” I asked.
“Absolutely. We are to give comfort, encouragement, and hope to those with don’t have it, in the name of Jesus.”
“I certainly have no problem with that,” I said. “But do you also get comfort, encouragement, and hope?”
“That’s selfish,” he replied. “God doesn’t want me concentrating on myself.”
“Then God’s using you to hurt people.”
“What?”
“If your need for comfort, encouragement, and hope is selfish, then others’ need for that is selfish, too. If it ain’t okay for you to have it, it ain’t okay for you to give it.”
Gradually Raymond’s theology changed—and so did his relationships with his wife and kids. He learned to accept his own neediness and to reach out and ask for help when he needed it.
The assumption “It’s selfish to have my needs met” makes people crazy not only because it hurts people, but because it isn’t true. It isn’t logical, and it doesn’t make sense. To give a cup of cold water to those who need it, we need to have drunk from it ourselves. If we are to forgive, we need to have been forgiven. Paul says it best:
Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. (2 Cor. 1:3–4)
Scientists have tried for years to invent a perpetual motion machine, one that can operate indefinitely without fuel or maintenance—but with no success. It would be nice if we could all be perpetual motion machines, with no need to ask for help, no need to call a friend when we’re depressed or panicked, no need to ask advice when our finances go awry, no need to talk to someone when our eating is out of control or our marriage is shaky.
Our neediness forces us to realize that we are creatures, that we must look up at God in humility and ask him for what we need. Our humble position is designed to drive us closer to God, to others, and ultimately to maturity, “attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ” (Eph. 4:13).
Jesus’ story of the Pharisee and the tax collector makes this point:
Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, “God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.” But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted. (Luke 18:10–14 NRSV)
The Pharisee was “standing by himself,” boasting of his good works. But the tax collector would not even look up to heaven. He recognized his sins and inadequacies, and they drove him to God.
If you don’t recognize your needs, you stagnate. You have little reason to seek God. Those with no symptoms don’t seek a doctor. It’s easier to deny your mortality when you don’t suffer from high blood pressure, weight problems, or shortness of breath. Start putting on weight, though, or experience dizzy spells, or have to gasp for breath—then you call the doctor. Similarly, when you feel lonely and depressed, then you draw closer to others and to God. There will always be more demand for curative than preventive medicine.
Our needs place us, then, in the position of having to ask for help. Just as thirst leads us to drink and hunger forces us to find food, our spiritual and emotional neediness compels us to reach for someone else. The tax collector asked for mercy, and he “went down to his home justified” (Luke 18:14).
As long as we think we’re better than most, we will rarely admit our needs and ask for help. We distance ourselves from other people, like Edom. The Edomites sought security in being distant and uninvolved, but their pride proved deceptive (Obad. 1:3). As the Bible points out, “A man’s pride brings him low” (Prov. 29:23).
Jim and Brenda came to me for marital help. It was soon clear to me that Jim was emotionally self-sufficient to a fault. When Brenda took the kids on an out-of-state trip to see her mom, Jim would call every day to see how they were doing, but he’d never admit that he was lonely and that he missed them.
When Brenda asked how he was doing, Jim would say, “You know me—I’m fine. Couldn’t be better. You guys have a great time.”
Brenda knew her husband, but only after a fashion. She knew that nothing threw Jim. She knew that he weathered job losses, physical ailments, and friendship conflicts with nary a frown. She knew that he didn’t need help from anyone.
Finally, Brenda had had enough. She dragged him to couples therapy. “I don’t know why Jim married me,” she complained. “I don’t feel like I matter to him. Sometimes I wish he’d have some huge tragedy just so he’d ask me for help.”
Jim seemed arrogant to his wife because he’d been trained that way. Jim’s father had been absent when he was young, and his mother was dependent and immature. He learned early not to depend on anyone else. For him to cry and be lonely or sad was too much for his weak mother, who’d spiral into depression. So Jim suppressed his negative feelings as well as the experience (but not the need) of needing others. He also became resourceful and responsible.
Ironically, his resourcefulness and sense of responsibility was tough on his marriage. Brenda had no neurotic “need to be needed.” She simply wanted to know her man. But his resistance to being vulnerable made him appear to be arrogant and self-satisfied, further isolating her from him.
It wasn’t until Jim began seeing his self-sufficiency as pride instead of responsibility that he began changing his behavior and rebuilding his marriage.
We are responsible for ourselves. We all carry our own load of cares, obligations, and problems. The apostle Paul tells us: “Each one should carry his own load” (Gal. 6:5). This is functional independence, in which state you carry out your normal responsibilities. You don’t ask others to work for your living, or to pay your bills for you.
At the same time, however, we are relationally dependent. We all need to be loved. It’s the fuel of life. Being connected to God and others keeps us going. We need empathy, comfort, understanding, and reassurance from others. Jim had learned to be both functionally independent (this was healthy) and relationally independent (this was unhealthy). He needed to cultivate a relational dependence; he needed to need others. That is humility. “A man’s pride brings him low, but a man of lowly spirit gains honor” (Prov. 29:23).
Humble people know they can’t do it all themselves, for humility teaches them to ask for help. They know they must reach out to survive. That’s why the Bible tells us that God “mocks proud mockers but gives grace to the humble” (Prov. 3:34).
Answering an attack from the Pharisees, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (Matt. 9:12–13).
God doesn’t rescue perfect people. He wants people with problems. People with nothing to fix have nothing to say to God. Those who are poor in spirit, those who are in mourning, those who are meek—those are blessed (Matt. 5:3–5) because they can be filled, can be comforted, can be helped. He never said, “Blessed are those who have their act together.” If nothing is broken, nothing can be fixed.
We are drawn to this gospel message because we have problems. And after joining a church, we spend our next forty years trying to hide our problems. Having no problems is a problem.
The self-righteous attitude of thinking we have no problems is what birthed Alcoholics Anonymous in the 1940s. People found that in A.A. meetings they could still have struggles; they could still be needy. In fact, they had to confess their shortcomings at every meeting. The church today is making great strides in embracing this biblical attitude. The church should be a place where it’s safe to be unfinished, incomplete, and needy.
If God built us with needs, then it stands to reason that letting our needs go unmet can cause major problems. Just as neglecting regular oil changes will destroy your car’s engine, neglecting our God-given, legitimate needs will cripple us.
Karen, a professionally dressed woman in her thirties, came to see me about her depression. Concentrating on her work and sleeping were equally difficult, she told me. She had withdrawn from family and friends; suicidal thoughts occurred to her more and more frequently. A complete physical had revealed nothing wrong. In severe depression, Karen felt despairing and hopeless. And she hadn’t a clue about its cause.
During our first session, I explored Karen’s past and present relationships. Karen had maintained a high position of leadership in her local church, was active in her community, and was a wonderful wife and mother. Yet nearly every significant person in Karen’s life—her mother and father, her sister, her best friend from high school, her college boyfriend—had either abandoned her or had no emotional attachment to her.
She’d married Peter, a good man who nevertheless was unable to make deep emotional connections (just like Karen). His workaholism kept him away from home a lot; but in some ways, that was a relief to both of them. “Because we rarely see each other,” she said, “we appreciate each other more when we’re together.”
Their kids were being raised by caring parents who didn’t know how to receive what they were giving. And the children were having problems. Their nine-year-old daughter tended to be socially withdrawn, and their teenage son was beginning to run with the wrong crowd.
The more Karen talked, the clearer the picture became. Her personal emotional isolation was repeating itself in her marriage and her church. For decades she had been running on emotional empty, getting along only on her strong will, guilt, and adrenalin. Now she needed to learn the humble task of filling her spiritual tank up—with God and with people.
After I gave Karen my diagnosis, she asked, “Isn’t there a book I could read, or a seminar I could attend?”
“As disconnected as you are now,” I said, “your depression will get worse, no matter how many books you read or seminars you attend.”
Karen took the scary, risky step of learning how to connect, how to ask for help, support, comfort, and understanding. It wasn’t easy, but she worked hard for a long time. As she became more humble, as she recognized her needs and began to ask for help to get them met, her depression gradually lifted.
Karen’s depression signaled to her that she needed something outside of herself—at least a book or a seminar, she thought. She responded to the signal and learned how to be needy and poor in spirit. God provided the symptom and the resources; Karen worked at learning to ask.
Psychological symptoms are God’s way of letting us know that something is wrong. Depression, anxiety, eating disorders, substance abuse, and compulsive behaviors are all symptoms of a deeper problem. These symptoms the Bible calls “fruit”: “Likewise every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit” (Matt. 7:17–18). In other words, bad fruit is not the problem, but only a symptom of the problem. We need to dig until we find the root of the problem, then heal that. We must pay attention to our psychological, spiritual, and relational symptoms, for they let us know if we are getting our needs met.
The false assumption that it is selfish to have our needs met is very seductive to Christians, probably because all of us want to be loving, caring people. Yet our desire to give ourselves to others is what some teachers use to scare us into thinking that taking care of our needs will drown us in a whirlpool of self-contemplation, hedonism, or narcissism.
Nothing, the Bible says, is further from the truth. Having our needs met frees us to meet the needs of others—without resentment. Having a full stomach spiritually and emotionally allows us to give cheerfully (2 Cor. 9:6–7).
The most comforting people in the world are those who have been comforted; the most understanding people are those who have been understood; and the most loving people, those who have been loved. The disciple whom Jesus loved the most (John 21:20) unsurprisingly became known as the apostle of love. What he received, he later gave.
Jesus confronted Simon the Pharisee with this truth when a prostitute, overcome with God’s grace, washed Jesus’ feet with her tears: “Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven—for she loved much. But he who has been forgiven little loves little” (Luke 7:47). Having found forgiveness, the woman was able to love much, whereas Simon the Pharisee was blind to his own neediness and was therefore unable genuinely to love.
Contrary to what the radio preacher had so vigorously taught, Sarah began meeting her own needs first. She resigned from a few committees. People who depended on her did without her while she got help. Most important, when she was in need, instead of calling and offering to help, she called and asked for it.
“It’s really different,” she told me. “I didn’t expect what has happened to my ministry. Hour for hour, I probably do less for others than I used to, but what I do is light years better. For the first time in my Christian life, I actually want to help. I want to serve. I don’t feel resentment or guilt. I think I’m actually learning what being loving feels like.”
One could do worse than sit at the prostitute’s feet and learn from her. The Pharisees in your life may want you to stay away from reminders of your neediness. You do need to adhere to their truly scriptural teachings (Matt. 23:2–3), but as you grow more and more aware of your deep and desperate incompleteness, of your need for love from God and from others, you truly become—as the prostitute did, and as Sarah is doing—more like the Master.
Ask yourself, “Am I asking for what I need?” You may need support in a crisis, or advice about a problem, or comfort in a loss. All these needs the Father of the heavenly lights welcomes. “Every good and perfect gift is from above” (James 1:17), and they often reach us through other people (Acts 9:6–19).