Friends, we live in a culture that relentlessly celebrates the self-made person. From every podcast and billboard, the message is the same: “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” “Trust your gut,” and “You are your own hero.” This mindset, which emphasizes personal strength, control, and achievement above all else, feels like the air we breathe. It tells us that success, stability, and even happiness are entirely dependent on our hustle, our cleverness, and our capacity to manage every crisis.
But what if this powerful drive to be our own savior is, in fact, the greatest spiritual trap?
When we turn to the Scriptures, we find a story that sounds a profound and powerful warning against this very mindset—a story about a man who had everything—God’s anointing, charisma, military might—but lost it all because he chose to rely on himself instead of his God. That man was King Saul.
Saul began his reign with incredible potential, humble and strong. Yet, his ending was tragic, marked by paranoia, bitterness, and destruction. And it all began when he decided he knew better than God. His narrative is not just an ancient history lesson; it’s a timeless mirror for our own souls, showing us the dangerous allure and devastating consequence of trying to be our own savior. It’s a message of ultimate importance for anyone seeking true peace and lasting reliance.
The Warning: The Instant Folly of Self-Reliance
Saul’s spiritual downfall wasn’t a sudden, cataclysmic event; it was a slow, subtle surrender to pressure. His first majoract of disobedience, recorded in 1 Samuel 13, perfectly illustrates how self-reliance kicks in at the moment we feel most vulnerable. This story challenges us to recognize the precise moment we attempt to step into God’s role, exchanging faith for frantic action.
The Pressure Point: Fear Over Faith (1 Samuel 13:5-14)
Imagine the scene: Saul and his men are trapped in a geopolitical pressure cooker. The Philistines, a powerful and intimidating enemy, are massed in Michmash, their numbers described as being “like the sand which is on the seashore in multitude.” Saul was commanded by the prophet Samuel to wait seven days for him to arrive and offer a sacrifice to consecrate the army for battle. This was God’s specific, explicit instruction: wait for Me.
But as the days dragged on, the waiting became unbearable. The soldiers, gripped by terror, began to scatter and desert Saul’s camp. Saul looked at his dwindling resources, felt the terrifying weight of imminent collapse, and panicked. He thought, “I have to do something, or I’ll lose everything.”
The action that followed—Saul performing the priestly duty himself—was the birth of his self-reliance. He put his perceived urgent need (preserving his army and his kingdom) above God’s explicit patient command (waiting).
This is the lesson for us: Self-reliance kicks in when we feel we have to control an outcome. It’s the whisper in your mind during a financial crisis that says, “God isn’t moving fast enough; you handle this by cutting corners.” It’s the impulse when a relationship is rocky to manipulate or control the other person because you can’t trust the timing of healing or reconciliation. We exchange the powerful peace of faith for the futility and exhaustion of our own frantic action. We confuse our human deadline with God’s perfect timing. Saul’s error was believing that his immediate action could generate better results than God’s intervention.
The Deeper Cost: Disobedience Masquerading as Piety
When Samuel finally arrived and confronted Saul, Saul’s response wasn’t a humble apology; it was a complex rationalization. He essentially argued that his disobedience was a necessary good.
“I saw that the people were scattered from me, and that you did not come within the days appointed, and that the Philistines gathered themselves together at Michmash, I forced myself therefore, and offered a burnt offering” (1 Samuel 13:11-12, adapted).
Saul dressed up his blatant disobedience as a necessary religious act, trying to “compel myself to offer the burnt offering.” He tried to sanctify his frantic need for control by calling it piety. This is the deeper cost of self-reliance.
When we rely on self, we invariably rationalize our sin. We lie to ourselves: “I have to fudge these numbers to save my business.” “I have to lash out and control my children because they’ll fail otherwise.” “I have to keep overworking because God rewards effort, not rest.” We cloak our arrogance of control in the guise of good intentions, necessity, or even faith. We make excuses, but God sees the deeper issue: a lack of trust in His absolute sovereignty. Saul’s kingship was stripped from him not because he missed a date on the calendar, but because his act revealed a heart that had elevated its own judgment above the living God.
The Revelation: God Values Trust Over Talent
Saul’s second major failure, detailed in 1 Samuel 15, revealed a profound and incredibly inspiring truth about what God desires from us. This truth is deeply liberating because it takes the pressure off our performance, our impressive talents, and our personal accomplishments.
The Idol of Partial Obedience (1 Samuel 15)
In this second scenario, God gave Saul a clear, black-and-white command: wage war against the Amalekites and utterly destroy everything—people, livestock, and goods. This was a judgment rooted in history, and the command was absolute.
Saul went, fought, and won. But instead of executing the command fully, he spared Agag, the Amalekite king, and the best of the sheep and cattle. When confronted by Samuel, Saul offered the same tired defense:
“The troops took sheep and oxen, the best of the things devoted to destruction, to sacrifice to the Lord your God in Gilgal” (1 Samuel 15:21).
Saul thought his military success and his “good” idea of a superior sacrifice would compensate for his disobedience. He thought his talent as a general and his generous offering could somehow improve upon God’s will. He substituted God’s command with his own human judgment, relying on his impressive works and resources to cover his lack of simple trust.
The lie here is that partial obedience is just disobedience with a good excuse. By saving the best, Saul was building an idol to his own talent: “I won the war, and now I’ll use my superior wisdom to manage the spoils.” He was attempting to edit the Creator’s script.
The Inspired Priority: “To Obey is Better than Sacrifice”
When Samuel finally confronted Saul, he declared one of the most eternal and powerful truths in Scripture:
“Has the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed is better than the fat of rams. For rebellion is as the sin of divination, and arrogance is as iniquity and idolatry” (1 Samuel 15:22-23).
This passage is a stunning revelation and an incredibly inspiring message for all of us struggling with performance anxiety and self-reliance. It tells us that God doesn’t need our impressive plans, our superior resources, or our self-generated achievements. He doesn’t need your perfect business plan, your massive bank account, or your flawless reputation. He doesn’t need the “best of the sheep” that you stole from His plan.
What God desires is our simple, humble reliance and trust.
It is liberating to know that our greatest gift to God is not a performance we have to strive for, but the simple, beautiful act of obedience—submission to His will. Saul’s talent couldn’t save him from his fate; our quiet, daily obedience can save us from the exhaustion of constantly trying to be better than God. Our performance matters far less than our position of dependence. This shifts the focus from our competence to God’s, and that is where true peace lies.
The Path Forward: Choosing Dependence Over Dominance
The story of Saul doesn’t have to be our story. The opposite of self-reliance isn’t weakness; it’s a powerful, liberating dependence that leads to true, sustainable strength.
The Remedy for Arrogance: Humility
Samuel called Saul’s rebellion a sin like “arrogance like the evil of idolatry” (1 Samuel 15:23). Why is self-reliance likened to idolatry? Because when we rely solely on self, we effectively make ourselves the idol. We transfer the attributes of omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence from God to our own capacity for control. We believe we are the source, the resource, and the ultimate savior of our own lives. This is spiritual narcissism.
The path out of this spiritual dead-end is not a path of greater striving, but a path of radical surrender. It is the simple, honest, and profoundly encouraging acknowledgment that “I can’t. I don’t know. I’m not enough. But God can.” This acknowledgement is not weakness; it is the genesis of all true power. Humility is simply accepting your role as the dependent creature and resting in the knowledge of the all-sufficient Creator. It’s the ultimate step out of exhaustion and into freedom.
Trusting God’s Provision, Not Our Plan
Saul’s mistake was constantly believing his resources—his army, his judgment, his stolen cattle—were his source of power. He was always looking inward or outward to his possessions, never upward to his Provider.
When we feel the pressure to control, to manipulate, or to race ahead of God’s timing, it’s a sign that we’ve forgotten that God is the source of all provision, protection, and wisdom. We don’t have to strive for control over our circumstances; we only have to trust His competence over our own.
This looks like:
- Pausing before Acting: When anxiety demands an immediate, frantic response, pause, pray, and ask, “Is this action based on faith or fear?”
- Laying Down the Crown: Regularly placing the weight of your worries—finances, relationships, health—at the foot of the cross.
- Seeking First: Prioritizing prayer, quiet meditation, and the study of the Scriptures before you prioritize work, endless consumption, or networking.
When we lean into God’s competence, He gives us peace that surpasses understanding and directs our steps toward His perfect, unfailing plan.
A Word from Our Savior
Saul’s tragedy was believing he could manage life better than God. He tried to save his own kingdom through his own efforts, his own disobedience, and his own partial obedience, and he lost it all.
The message for us, the ultimate antidote to the spiritual trap of self-reliance, comes directly from the gentle teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ. Saul’s self-talk was, “I can do it.” Jesus’ invitation to us is a radically different one: “Come to Me.”
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus speaks directly to our worries—the very things that drive our self-reliance: our food, our clothing, our future. He confronts our panicked striving head-on:
“Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’… But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you” (Matthew 6:31, 33).
Jesus invites us to lay down the exhausting, fruitless burden of trying to be our own god, our own provider, and our own savior. He calls us to a radical, liberating dependence. The man who truly “has this” isn’t the one running the fastest or controlling the most variables. The one who “has this” is the one who has fully surrendered the desire to control and has simply handed the reins back to the Creator.
Let’s step out of Saul’s shadow and step into the light of Christ’s promise: True strength, true peace, and true provision are found only when we stop trying to do it ourselves and simply trust Him to do it through us.
Meditations By Lee 