Performance-Based Spirituality
Got things done this week. Worked hard. In fact, I can’t remember pushing it this hard since I was a first-year associate at a large law firm. Two hours of sleep on Wednesday, and God sustained me all day Thursday and got me through an important meeting.
But it was done imperfectly. The effort was there, but I didn’t finish everything. I applied diligence and all my might even. Good, but not perfect. I used to hate that. It’s still okay. God’s responsible for the result if I do my part.
One of things God delivered me from was perfectionism. Excellence is good. Perfectionism is not.
I don’t have to do anything — nor can I — to earn God’s love or approval. There’s freedom in that.
Here’s a good study related to the subject (perhaps better titled, “Recovery From Religious Abuse”).
And after such a week I totally forgot I was supposed to usher at the Saturday night service.
Amen brother. In this week of easily displaced worship though our scurried affairs (Gal 3:3) let us be still for a moment and lay hold of our salvation and His continuous grace in every moment. For His daily grace truly is sufficient for us (2Cor12:9).
Amen, great topic, and Happy New Year Beloved. Having just survived another “Christmas Holiday”, I spent time reflecting on the lie of the holiday in comparison to truth. Yes indeed the truth shall set us free. Performance based anxiety is drilled in our culture early on.
Santa Claus, the lie of the holiday says, “He knows when you been bad or good so be good for goodness sake.” This message used to indoctrinate and manipulate obedience in chidren (all in so called fun) is no laughing matter when one thinks of the pain that many of us experience through our adult years attempting to perform our way into accpetance.
Now the truth of Christans is just the opposite of the lie that hijacked it.
Man seeks to perform to meet God and measure up but God came down in the person of Christ and met us in our sin. Far from “being good for goodness sake”, or engaging in proper perform to receive the gift, Christ meets us in our mess.
I wonder how many of us are still living the Santa message, driven by fear based perfomance anxiety, to be good, to receive the gift?
The true gift met us in our inability to perform. Christ born of a virgin, to save us.
Now, since the truth sets us free indeed, clearly only the Father of Lies could hijack a message of true grace and pervert it with a message of performance in the guise of fun and play for our children. A message I believe we internalize for life and still have a hard time shaking. By grace we are saved is so often hard to embrace.