What now should be done?
For quite a good while my Christian journey centered on “shoulds”.
I had believed on Christ in my youth. I knew he had pardoned my sins through his sacrifice on a cross. When I turned to him, confessing my wrongs and trusting in him, I knew deep down that I was now his. The Bible speaks of being born anew from above. That was me.
I also knew in those earliest years of grace that my life in Jesus was not meant to plateau. It was meant to keep changing. I was not meant to live my life any longer on my own. His salvation was to go deeper than just getting me into heaven after this life.
But there was a problem. I lacked some critical knowledge about how that might work.
Over time I came to think and live as though “pleasing God” was the central purpose of my being his child. Some poor thinking took form, ironically, through things I often heard in church. My understanding of the gospel – God’s good news for all people – had gradually changed to something called “performance-living”.
I was no longer fully living my faith from the inside out. Rather, becoming Jesus-like seemed to call for taking on the next God-pleasing task assigned me. Such tasks, I was reminded, were what I “should do” if I were indeed a true Christian.
It’s worth noting that none of the Christian performances I undertook were bad. Not at all. They were good, sometimes noble, acts of service.
Like many Christians, as I later realized, many of my “wants” were in the right place. Discovering this brought a measure of comfort. After all, I hungered to please God and longed to be a truly “good Christian”. One thing that seemed lacking now was joy, the happy measure of joy I had tasted in those earlier God-companioned days.
And too, the sweet empowering love of earlier days began to wane. My good Savior’s springs of abundant living were being traded for an overburdening list of shoulds.
Only later would I recover the way of living Jesus had in mind for his disciples all along. More of a fruit-bearing kind of living. While not all things going forward would prove fun or easy, my way would become characterized more as a joyous, teamed-up partnership with him.
In the company of fellow disciples-in-training, I could move ahead under his accepting, empowering Spirit. The season was to become a very special period of training for me – especially in discovering how eager Jesus was about all this. His label for it, “life in abundance. . . in the easy yoke”.
(c)2022 Jerry Lout