Rest assured: Before God, the righteousness of Christ is all we need; before God, the righteousness of Christ is all we have.
Performancism is the mindset that equates our identity and value directly with our performance and accomplishments.
Don't get me wrong - what we do is important. But it is infinitely less important than what Jesus has done for us.
I got my first tennis racket on my seventh birthday. And because we had a tennis court in our backyard, I played every day. By ten I was playing competitively.
Your identity is firmly anchored in Christ's accomplishment, not yours; his strength, not yours; his performance, not yours; his victory, not yours.
When we imply that our works are for God and not our neighbor, we perpetuate the idea that God's love for us is dependent on what we do instead of on what Christ has done.
Whether this was explicitly taught or implicitly caught, I grew up with the impression that when it comes to the Christian life, justification was step one and sanctification was step two and that once we get to step two there's no reason to revisit step one.
I ended up dropping out of high school at 16 and getting kicked out of my home. My parents told me, sadly, that because I was so disruptive to the rest of the household, that I could no longer live under their roof.
I never had an intellectual struggle with the Bible, with the gospel, with the claims of Christ.
When God saved me, He gave me a thirst to learn and to read and to study. I thrived in college. I got a bachelor's degree in philosophy and then went to Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando.
I was afraid that if I surrendered my life over to God, God would tell me not to do those things that I desperately wanted to do.
In the Old Testament, we are continually told that our good works are not enough, that God has made a provision. This provision is pointed to at every place in the Old Testament.
When it comes to engaging and influencing culture, too many Christians think too highly of political activism.
Even political insiders recognize that years of political effort on behalf of Evangelical Christians have generated little cultural gain.
The world tells us in a thousand different ways that the bigger we become, the freer we will be. The richer, the more beautiful, and the more powerful we grow, the more security, liberty, and happiness we will experience. And yet, the gospel tells us just the opposite, that the smaller we become, the freer we will be.
There's nothing like suffering to remind us how not in control we actually are, how little power we ultimately have, and how much we ultimately need God.
The gospel is for the defeated, not the dominant.
Jesus is not the man at the top of the stairs; He is the man at the bottom, the friend of sinners, the savior of those in need of one. Which is all of us, all of the time.
The Why's of suffering keep us shrouded in a seemingly bottomless void of abstraction where God is reduced to a finite ethical agent, a limited psychological personality, whose purposes measure on the same scale as ours.
Indeed, there is nothing like suffering to remind us how much we need God. What good news that His purpose and plan for our lives moves in a different direction from ours!
