You’re Doing It Wrong!
And God Has Got Your Number
Running In Circles
If you listen to enough evangelical sermons you can start to see some patterns emerging. One is the perennial you’re not doing enough message. This one can range from a confessional about how we aren’t doing enough, to a scathing rebuke about whether you really love god because you aren’t doing enough.
Depending on the characterization of what is not enough in the sermon, you may leave church that Sunday with a firm resolve to stop skipping your personal Bible reading and prayer time. You may decide to volunteer for the church programs and missions that “nobody can be bothered to support.” Or you may recalculate that tithe you were about to pledge.
But whether you actually do any of this or not, you can count on it being wrong. Just give it a few months and another perennial sermon will come around. This one will be about how our focus on doing and working for god is blinding us to what is most important in our discipleship. Because we are likely doing all this stuff for a multitude of wrong reasons.
- Did you volunteer to teach Sunday School as a way to win god’s favor?
- Are you tithing to buy your way into god’s good graces?
- Do you think that having shared the gospel with someone earns you a pass to neglect other areas of your discipleship?
- Are you in the Easter pageant to further Jesus’ message or to win applause and admiration?
- Are you going on that mission to win souls for Christ or to boost your career in ministry?
Then you will hear dire warnings about how we can get so caught up in doing for god that we have forgotten our first love. We are just going through the motions. We think our good works are proving our love for Jesus but we have it all backwards. First you must love god, then the works will arise out of that. Works done out of a desire to win points in heaven or praise from others are empty clattering noise to god’s ears.
And god is neither fooled nor pleased.
These flip-side sermons are rarely preached in close proximity to each other. Otherwise we may catch on to the real message — that we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t. Even if this doesn’t mean we will actually be sent to hell, our motives are in question and we are displeasing god.
There is no exit from this maze.
I Saw The Light!
This tale is found in devotions and testimonies as well as in sermons. The teller relates how they had a pitfall in their discipleship, but then saw a Bible verse that really hit them. They had been so caught up in one aspect of discipleship that they totally forgot about another one. They had been approaching the situation through their secular, worldly lens instead of through the promises of the gospel.
The story goes something like this:
- They were so caught up in finding god’s will for their life that they forgot to just be still and trust him, or
- They were so focused on honoring god that they neglected to listen to him, or
- They were so busy spreading the gospel that they lost sight of how to live it, or
- They were so absorbed in running a mission or a church program that they didn’t make time for their personal relationship with the lord.
The list is endless. Because the demands of evangelical discipleship are so numerous and tangled that meeting any one of them necessarily means neglecting or violating others. A survey of evangelical sermons will reveal how many are about how to detangle these complex instructions and actually make it work.
It just doesn’t work. None of it works.
The teller will then declare victory over their problem because they stumbled upon a magic verse. It may be about trusting god, or remembering that he loves them, or about his promises to the faithful. In any case, it was brought to their attention by god and it just knocked them sideways. They can now see that glaring blind spot and how they had been pushing so hard in the wrong direction. They may then combine the magic verse with several others, making it into a literal road map out of their problem — and a lesson to all of us too.
Maybe you have even been this teller. Performing these stories is a mainstay of white evangelical culture. In any case, this brief flash of insight never seems to actually lead out of the maze. Just give it a few days, and they (or you) will be right back in it somewhere, stuck in a corner, trying to detangle it all. Whatever was the problem in the first place never really went away.
The magic verses don’t seem to work for long. But that part is not talked about. Nobody follows up with the teller about that time that a scripture just knocked them out onto the true path and they learned that amazing lesson. Or about why the problem wasn’t resolved and they still struggle to apply that lesson to it.
Down for the Count
Still, you persist. Every day you take up your cross and beat yourself up with it. It’s all because you’re looking at things wrong. You’re looking at everything through your worldly, secular lens. You need enough faith and understanding to see things through the lens of a true disciple. If you just learn enough, trust enough, pray enough, and try enough you will find the magic glasses that will reveal the path through the maze.
Then one day you wake up on Sunday morning with a sore throat. A cold is coming on. It’s not a good idea to go to church. And you realize that this makes you happy. You get a day off. You can sleep in. There’s no rush, no dressing up in finery, no traffic, no parking, and no sermon about one more way you’re missing the point and doing it all wrong.
If you’re really astute, you may examine why you prefer the misery of a cold over going to church. Are you an even worse Christian than you thought you were? Why can’t you do this?
Younger evangelicals may sincerely fret about this. Their elders may seem resigned to failure and less bothered by it. But nobody ever says they’ve got it. Where are those who truly do have that faith of a mustard seed, whose prayers of faith are routinely answered, who don’t worry about anything because they have the peace that surpasses all understanding, and who correctly navigate through the tangle of instructions and demands of discipleship? Few pastors would even claim such success and those who do tend to end up in court and public scandals.
In fact, you can’t think of anybody who has gotten even halfway to these spiritual goals. Why is nobody actually getting anywhere? It’s like climbing an ice mountain barefoot. Magical verses give you the illusion of a leg up, but in the end everybody seems to slip right back down to the bottom.
And your feet are frozen numb.
Dangerous Thoughts
Eventually you may realize that you have been trying to put a twin-sized fitted sheet onto a queen-sized mattress. It just doesn’t work. None of it works, not even the magic incantations.
Basically, you’ve been had.
Is it your fault, the pastor’s fault, the church’s fault, or god’s fault? Does it even matter? My answer was to stop fighting it and just leave it alone. The only way I could navigate the maze was to stay out of it in the first place.
Instead of spending my life thrashing around in this morass, why not just be kind? Be generous. Try to do the right thing. Resist evil. Admit that I don’t know all the answers. Try to make life a little better for my fellow souls.
None of this requires faith, magic words, or thousands of years of theological study and debate. It can be done without constant instruction, correction, and rebuke. Neither does it require fighting our natural instincts to accomplish it. Kindness, it turns out, is present in our inherent nature.
Evangelicals like to claim that non-believers are purely selfish people, living for themselves instead of for god. But I find the opposite to be true. What is more self-serving than spending all your energy trying to fortify your personal relationship with a deity? Who, besides yourself, stands to benefit from this?
No, I don’t love god. I think other souls, including my own, are way more in need of love than he is.
So that’s my number and I don’t care who has it.
