Dear Jaded Religious Workaholics

Dear Jaded Religious Workaholics:

At last, you feel like you finally have the desire to be as obedient to God as you’ve always known you should be. “Heavenly Father,” you may say, “I promise to obey your commandments and live a worthy life so that I may receive your blessings and live with you again.” You know you’ll probably fail along the way – “No problem,” you say. “Heavenly Father, I will just try harder and really prove myself, because nobody is perfect, anyway.”

Thus, surfing a pietistic tidal wave comparable to the final night of church camp, you begin afresh your devotion to God and God’s ways. Perhaps you volunteer to serve in your church by leading a youth group; maybe you start teaching Sunday school or sharing your testimony to encourage churchgoers around you. If you’re really spiritual, you’ll be asked to teach adult Sunday school.

You’ve also certainly doubled your efforts to resist temptation. At the sight of something compromising, you whip your head in the opposite direction, as if by looking, you might share the same tragic fate as Lot’s wife.

The consistency and sacrifice with which you’ve begun tithing is laudable. Your church friends probably only spend money on self-gratifying things. It’s commendable that you’re sacrificing your resources to support the work of God. But you’d never articulate that; it would be spiritually prideful to do so. After all, who are you to judge your selfish churchgoing brothers and sisters? Bless their hearts.

And then, gradually but consistently, you give yourself a little slack in obeying the commandments. You’ve been working hard, this was a tough week, you didn’t sleep well – you spout off all sorts of rationalizations that help you justify why you didn’t read your scriptures this morning, or why you didn’t pray, or why you exaggerated your cold symptoms to get out of a church meeting that night. You deserve a break.

Then, suddenly, you commit an embarrassing sin. You’re wrecked. “What happened to all that obedience and all that moral rectitude?” you wonder. Groveling, you approach God and promise to try harder next time. You have no excuse and you know it. You blew it. But God is nice so he’ll let it slide, as long as you do better from here on out.

Or perhaps you don’t have a moral failure. Maybe the tidal wave of religious enthusiasm you’ve been riding for quite some time simply dissipates on the shore and you're left beached. Reading the scriptures does nothing for you anymore, praying feels like you’re talking to yourself, and church feels like repetitive nonsense. Jury duty seems more exciting, only because at least there you’d meet some new people.

Ultimately, you surmise that you just aren’t trying hard enough or believing enough. You pray, “Heavenly Father, I promise to obey your commandments and live a worthy life...” and by so doing, you effectively pressing the “restart workout” button on the performance treadmill.

Those of you for whom a relationship with God has become an exhausting workout on the performance treadmill need a drink of water. But not the kind of water you sprinkle in your mouth during a road race at those rehydration stations. You need the kind of water into which you cannonball and float downstream with your hands behind your head, as if in the lazy river. Or, as Jesus said, “All who are thirsty should come to me! All who believe in me should drink! As the scriptures said concerning me, 'Rivers of living water will flow out from within him'” (John 7:37-38 CEB). Isn’t it striking that in this passage, Jesus’s “command” is nothing more than to come and drink the resource he provides, the resource needed to sustain life? Infants can drink; you can drink.

The point is this: if you want to have a relationship with God on your own steam, good luck. You won’t be able to adequately amount to the holy expectations of a totally good, wise, and powerful God. God is wholly other and wholly good, and our sinfulness disqualifies us from his benevolent presence. You and I are sinful humans; that’s not mean, that’s reality.

But, if you want to take God up on his offer of a no-string-attached, absolutely free, generous invitation to have a relationship with him based on the sufficient, adequate, holy righteousness of Jesus Christ on your behalf – well, then I think you’ve got it. And taking God up on that offer is called faith. With Easter just behind us this year, realize that Jesus’s obedient life, sacrificial death, and victorious resurrection amounts to all the merit and all the righteousness you need to be in a right relationship with God.

Where you once worked hard to justify your existence by devotion to God but failed, Jesus worked hard in your place to justify you by his devotion to God and succeeded. Where you once sacrificed to prove your worthiness in God’s sight but couldn’t measure up, Jesus obediently sacrificed to count you as one who is already worthy in God’s sight based on his measuring up. Where you once groveled to death over your sins, hoping that God might finally acquit you, Jesus actually died for your sins in order that God may truly acquit you. Where you once gave in to temptation and failed, Jesus resisted temptation and won. And all this righteousness is yours simply by faith.

In Philippians, the apostle Paul spells it out like this: “In Christ I have a righteousness that is not my own and that does not come from the Law but rather from the faithfulness of Christ. It is the righteousness of God that is based on faith” (3:9 CEB). Don’t you see? Anyone can have a right relationship with God because God's made it accessible to all by faith. By trusting that Jesus, dying for you on the cross, raises you up with him at the empty tomb, you can be assured that “those who believed in his name he authorized to become God’s children, born not from blood nor human desire or passion, but born from God” (John 1:12-13 CEB).

Martin Luther, a pastor and theologian in the sixteenth century, said it succinctly: “Christ is full of grace, life, and salvation, while the soul is full of sins, death, and damnation. Now let faith enter the picture, and sins, death, and damnation are Christ’s, while grace, life, and salvation will be the soul’s.” A glorious exchange takes place while Jesus is on the cross, and it is the source and substance of our Christian lives.

Now you no longer run the race to fulfill the debt of your own inadequacy and unholiness because Jesus did that for you and makes you a friend and child of God. In this new reality, you run the race of serving God and neighbor in the freedom of faith, because all that you need before God you have in Jesus.

So drop your shoulders, jaded religious workaholics: “Christ has set us free for freedom. Therefore, stand firm and don’t submit to the bondage of slavery again” (Galatians 5:1 CEB). We are set free from the performance treadmill, free now to “run the race laid out in front of us . . . fixing our eyes on Jesus, faith’s pioneer and perfecter” (Hebrews 12:2 CEB).