Have you ever started to change lanes only to discover — at the blaring of a horn — that someone was in your blind spot?
Blind spots are scary. While a car has two blind spots, one on each side, fallen people have many more. It is humbling to recognize that we can love the Lord yet fail to see many things about ourselves that are probably clear to others around us.
What is our biggest blind spot? Sins like anger, covetousness, and lust affect us all, but tend to be like semi-trucks driving right beside us that aren’t hard to spot. Jack Miller suggests that our biggest blind spot is something that most of us probably don’t even think about: self-dependence.
Miller writes:
God’s work begins when ours comes to its end. Sometimes His presence is not felt with power through our methods however useful they may be, especially when we are confident we have the right approach and insights. God has a way of wanting to be God and refusing to get too involved where we have our own wisdom and strength. Then when we run out of wisdom and strength, He is suddenly present…
I think He wants our confidence to be exclusively in Him, and when we lose our self-confidence then He moves in to show what He can do. Perhaps self-dependence — and forgetting the strength to be found in Christ-dependence — is always our biggest blind spot.
I know that when I am ministering out of my own strength and wisdom, I am relying on the wrong person to do ministry: myself. I need to turn from self-dependence to Christ-dependence.
Is it possible that some of the frustrating circumstances and trials in our lives are like the horn exposing self-dependence in our blind spot? Or are there places where, despite our confidence that we have everything under control, we need to come to the end of our own work so that God’s work can begin?
Jesus calls us away from self-dependence to live in dependence on him. He promises, “Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.” (John 15:5)
The above quote comes from Heart of a Servant Leader: Letters from Jack Miller, pp. 201-202.