For Him, Not for It

“When we commit ourselves to the pursuit of holiness, we need to ensure that our commitment is actually to God, not simply to a holy lifestyle or a set of moral values …”
― Jerry Bridges 

            I would have made an excellent Pharisee. Give me a set of rules and an obsessive attitude towards keeping them, and I’m good to go. I love ending the day looking at a To-Do list that’s completely checked off, and a Don’t-Do list that’s blank. When my works have seemed reasonably righteous, I’m strangely secure.                                                                             

And, to a point, why shouldn’t I be? Nothing wrong with a good work ethic, nor with the joy of knowing you’ve given it your best. But there’s real danger in what Bridges describes above. I can love the pleasure I get – the satisfaction, the pride – from doing good and avoiding wrong, more than I love the One I’m allegedly doing all of this for. That’s when I hear the Holy Spirit remind me, “I didn’t redeem You to create a snobby little choir boy. Give me a red-blooded man who stumbles along but who’s in love with me, not a sanctimonious performer.”

I think I know the difference. As a boy, I remember earning stars in Sunday School for having memorized Bible verses and, with all due modesty, I was the star stud. No one had more of those goldies next to their name than I did. I’d been blessed with an ability to absorb things quickly, so memorization came easily, as did the ability to accurately recite. And how I loved the looks on my teacher’s faces when I rattled off those verses, and the envy I saw in the other kids! Not to mention the fuzzy, undefined glow of patting myself on the back, a luxury I didn’t understand but gorged myself on nonetheless.

My words were all about God, and God had nothing to do with it.

I guess that’s the error of legalism in a nutshell: the insane notion that we can do anything to impress Him, much less earn his acceptance. And while I’ve read Romans and Galatians enough times to understand how utterly incapable we are of securing a good standing with God by racking up gold stars, there’s still this obnoxious, insecure kid in me who wants to revel in his trivial, puny accomplishments (“Look, Ma, no lust!”) while ignoring the tsunami of grace necessary for the tiniest fragment of good to come from this old carcass. It’s entirely possible to love a righteous lifestyle more then, and even apart from, Him. And that’s when the “self” in self-righteousness rears his smelly head.

Somehow this seems especially important to me today. Maybe it’s because of the despair I see so many of my clients go through over their own sins, a despair often born out of over-focus on their struggles and under-focus on their First Love. (He’s the One, after all, who chided Martha for being so consumed with her works while commending Mary for being consumed with Him.) Or maybe it’s because I’m coming up on a thirty year mark. It’s been nearly three decades since the night God drew me back to Himself, beginning a restorative work in me that’s surely still in progress, and granting me the miracle of abstinence from besetting sexual sins. Maybe this particular upcoming anniversary is causing me to consider what really has been accomplished since then, and while I rejoice in some of the results, I lament the glaring lack of love I see in a heart which should be bursting with the stuff. C. S. Lewis must have been feeling something similar when he wrote,

“All this flashy rhetoric about loving You

I’ve never had a selfless thought since I was born.

I am mercenary and self-seeking through and through

I want God, you, all friends, merely to serve my turn.”

Gad, that’s bleak. I hope my own state’s not that bad, though it probably is. And yet, I’m not about to adopt a casual attitude towards sin as a replacement for a self-righteous attitude towards it. Sin matters, a lot, and woe to anyone suggesting God isn’t deeply offended by it, or that it has little bearing on our standing before Him. Still, the first commandment is to love Him entirely, out of which springs true holiness. So I can wrap myself in the robes of a nice lifestyle, one which is absent any juicy sins but full of priggish little self-satisfied maggots thriving within. Or I can apply myself to seeking and knowing Him, and from the love which has to follow a knowledge of Jesus, I can make decisions, resist temptations, and wear the yoke, all as ways of saying “I love You” rather than “I love this.”

There’s a difference, don’t you think? There’s the openly wrong way, the seemingly good way, and the more excellent way. May we never confuse the three, and may we always crave the best.