We worship a God who has no need for anything. If there was any necessary to God, that would be the measure of His imperfection and how could we worship an imperfect God? If nothing is necessary to God then it also can be said that nobody is necessary to God and if nobody, that includes us. We seek Him today because we need Him and our life is found in Him.

God is self-sufficient. That is what this is saying. All that He needs and is can be found in Himself. All life is found in God or from God without exception from the lowest organisms to the seraphs. No creature has life in itself. It is a gift from God. The life of God isn't something He received from another or otherwise that other being would be God. A simple overview would be to say that God is the one who contains all, who gives all that is given, but who cannot receive anything that He didn't first give. Have you considered that? Anything that you bring, offer or give to God can only be things that He first gave to you. When you hear people talking about giving something back to God, it's not just a description of doing God a favour in return for the stuff He's done for us but it's an accurate description of what's happening. We're just giving back that which was already His in the first place. A lot of thinkers will get to this and try to think of examples but of any example you imagine, take God out of the picture and question whether or not it would exist.

God has no need because need is a word related to created things and can't be used of the Creator. God has a voluntary relationship with creation but no necessary or needed relationship to any of it. His interest in His creatures comes from His sovereign good pleasure not from any need that those creatures can supply nor from any "completeness" they can bring to Him. God is complete – lacking nothing.

Of all of the created things, none of them can operate independently. All of them have needs from something else. We need air, water, food etc. We all require something from outside ourselves in order to exist. All created things depend another created thing for their life and all created things depend on God to provide their needs as He sustains the universe He created.

The big question is why did God create the universe? Before anyone gets excited, I'm not going to answer that nor do I think there is a correct answer that we can know. What we do know is He didn't create to fulfil an unfulfilled need in His life. It's not like how we might build a house to shelter us from the weather or plant a veggie garden so that we can eat roast vegetable foccacias. The word "necessary" is totally foreign to God.

Since God is the supreme being, He can not be elevated. Nothing is above Him or beyond Him. Any movement in His direction by a created being is elevation and movement away from Him is descent. Just as nobody or no thing can promote or elevate God, no body or no thing can degrade Him. Colossians 1:17 says, "He is before all things, and in him all things hold together." How could He raised or supported by the things that He Himself upholds?

If all the human race were to become blind, the sun would still shine in the day and the stars by night because God's creation owes nothing to the millions who benefit from their light. If all the human race became Atheists, it would not affect who God is in any way. God who is who He is within Himself. To believe in Him adds nothing to His perfections and to reject Him takes nothing away from them. The truth is that God is no greater because of our being just as He would be no less if we did not exist.

One of the aspects of God that our egos find hardest to accept is that God doesn't need our help. We often picture God as this overworked old guy who is frustrated that He hasn't got enough workers to get all the things done. Sometimes I think a lot of people get involved with missions purely motivated to help deliver God from the embarrassing predicament His love has gotten Him into and that His limited abilities aren't enough to get Him out of the mess. God doesn't need our help to accomplish anything but the good news is that He takes pleasure in using and involving us in His work. This shouldn't be an obligation like an employment contract either. The believer who is truly seeking the heart of God will share in the will and desires of God and will naturally respond in a Godly manner to the situations around him.

The Christian religion is about God and man but it's focal point is God – not man! Man's only claim to fame is that he was created in the image of God. Man of himself has absolutely nothing – only that which has been given to him from God. The prophet Isaiah talks about the weakness of mankind as being like grass that withers from just a small breath of God. We're so weak and fall so easily but God stands forever.

Isaiah 40:7-8 (NIV)

Faith and unbelief get a lot of mention in the New Testament. Unbelief is often described as a great sin because it denies the self-sufficiency of God and usually means the person without any warrant has claimed some of God's attributes to himself. Unbelief is just perverted faith. It's a faith in the dying man rather than the living God.

We need to be careful not to think that God's self sufficiency is an excuse for lack of Christian service on our part. If anything it should spur us on to all kinds of spiritual service knowing that the one who is at work in us is fully equipped for every situation. Paul knew what it was about. He gave it all he had knowing that he had a mighty God who works in him.

God needs nobody but where faith is present He can use anybody. The God who is self-sufficient lives in us. There is no need that He cannot satisfy or equip us for. As we said at the start of this study, the man who knows God will be relieved of thousands of temporal problems. How many of our day to day problems would we eliminate if we fully trusted in the truth of God's self-sufficiency?