DAILY BYTE
If I had to try to sum up what Jesus is meaning through these words, as set up against his teaching in the preceding chapters (the Sermon on the Mount), it would be in the following way:
Don’t centre your spirituality on achievement rather than relationship, or on performance rather than grace, because if you do that, you will be missing the point of everything that is important to God.
But of course it’s about grace, you may be thinking, we hear that message again and again. However, there is a very big difference between knowing something in your head and knowing it in your heart, and I can’t tell you how often my own spirituality warps into performance fixation – desperately trying to prove my worth to God and others by what I can do.
There is no doubt that we live in a performance-orientated culture. We define people’s worth around their achievements, and we look to achieve our own purpose and meaning through our own accomplishments.
Gordon MacDonald talks about attending a granddaughter’s soccer match, where after the match the children spilled off the field in a mad rush to find their parents. He remembers one little boy sprinting up to his day to excitedly exclaim: ‘Hey Dad, I scored a goal today.’
To which his father replied: ‘Yeah, but you missed two others’.
It seems we imbibe with our mother’s milk the lesson that our culture’s priority is achievements and accomplishments, and that these things will bring us approval and meaning and purpose.
And then we bring that achievement mindset to our spirituality, as seen in these words: “Lord, but in your name we accomplished great things like prophesying and throwing out demons and performing miracles!”
But Jesus is saying that if one day we stand before God and try to define ourselves by our spiritual achievements, then God will say, ‘So what ... you are missing the point. All I have really cared about is getting to know you, but you have not let me do that because you don’t even know yourself. You have worked so hard on your public world accomplishments but it’s your inner world that counts with me, and that’s what should have been your priority.’
So do you centre your spirituality on achievements and not relationship? On performance rather than grace?
One way you can answer that is to assess how much time over the last week you spent working on your outer world accomplishments and achievements as compared to your inner world relationship with God.
What do you learn about yourself from such an excercise?
PRAY AS YOU GO
Loving Lord, we ask that you would help us to see what is truly important to you and to shape our lives around that. Amen.
FOCUS VERSE
Matthew 7. 22 NRSV
On that day many will say to me, ‘ Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name and do many deeds of power in your name?’
