David Mamet and Self-Sufficiency

David Mamet, famed playwright, has become a reformed liberal.

He is pushing for more individual responsibility from the world.

He champions self-sufficiency.

At first, I got a little worried.

I have not fit the profile of a young person. It has taken me a little longer to catch up with the power and authority within me.

When he champions self-sufficiency as a prerequisite to married life or any other commitment, I balked.

Self-sufficiency is impossible for a human being.

Our hearts beat without our directive. Our lungs respire without direction. The blood flows and the brain runs without any initial input from us.

Self-sufficient? Hardly!

For us, the real problem is finding the right person or thing to depend on.

Some depend on the state, living from welfare check, refusing to put their God-given skills to use.

Some still live under the sway of parents and family members, trying to gain the approval of blood relatives and authority figures, no long gone or deceases.

Yet there is still a better way:

"And he answered them, saying, Who is my mother, or my brethren?

"And he looked round about on them which sat about him, and said, Behold my mother and my brethren!

"For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother." (Mark 3:33-35)

Depending on the One who made you, the One who has provide us a Way to be one with Him (cf John 17:21)

What is the will of God, though?

"And this is the will of him that sent me, that every one which seeth the Son, and believeth on him, may have everlasting life: and I will raise him up at the last day." (John 6:40)

Everlasting life -- that is Christ in you, the hope of glory (Colossians 1:27).

As Christ lives in us through the Holy Spirit, His Spirit guides us into all knowledge and all truth, and as He wills within us both to do and to will for His good pleasure, we find ourselves by faith doing the very things that He wants us to do.

God does not a relationship with His children in which He gives us orders to follow throughout the day. He is so one with us, that we become the will of God, following the direction of the Holy Spirit in all of our affairs.

That is not self-sufficiency. That is God-sufficiency, and the greatest liberty man can ever know:

"Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." (2 Corinthians 3:17)

Is that not what most conservatives, including reformed liberals like David Mamet, are truly looking for -- liberty?! Once again, liberty is not self0sufficiency, but God-dependence so great that every believer identifies with Him in everything through the indwelling Holy Ghost.