When Believers Stumble: Perfectionism

Perfectionist Recently, I confessed that I was fed-up with sports and was probably going to skip the Olympics this year, even though I love the Winter games. Well, my wife was so enthusiastic about them that I got sucked back in and have watched just about every second of the prime time broadcast. My initial complaint is the same, but one interview has made me rethink my position on sports.

A few nights ago, Apolo Ohno won bronze in a short track speedskating race. Bob Costas spoke to him afterwards and you could feel the tension in the air before the interview because it was a bronze medal around Ohno’s neck, not a gold. But immediately Ohno noted that in his discipline anything can happen on any day; any medal was a great accomplishment, not just gold. And he meant it, too. He was excited to win bronze and you could see it on his face.

You can see that on the faces of a lot of other athletes, too, especially the European skiers. Silver and bronze aren’t considered losses, especially to folks who are out there on the World Cup circuit day in and day out. You’re on fire one day and the next you’re looking to just get down the mountain.

The Wall Street Journal had an intriguing article last week in their sports section (betcha didn’t know they had one), covering the most successful NASCAR racers. Everyone talks about Richard Petty’s greatness, but Petty only won a race every 0.169 starts. Jeff Gordon is the modern leader with a 0.167 winning average. In baseball, a batting average like that would get a you a trip to the minors, but here it’s the epitome of success—one time in six.

We Americans love a winner. Greatness is our national drug. Right now there’s a TV show (that a lot of Christians are commenting on) that takes a couple dozen singers and whittles their numbers down until one is left standing. It’s not called American Idol for no reason, is it? That kind of show epitomizes everything we believe in America. Our attitude is the same as a famous line from the movie The Highlander: There can be only one.

The Bible has this to say:

Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all.
—Ecclesiastes 9:11 ESV

Apolo Ohno may have been the fastest guy on the track, but he didn’t place first that day. Jeff Gordon loses five races for every one he wins.

One of the disturbing trends in Christianity that I don’t remember seeing growing up is this emphasis on “Christian Excellence.” I blogged about this a few months ago, but wanted to return to it because it’s such an insidious problem. Our emphasis on excellence, in many cases, turns out to be a form of veiled perfectionism, a trait I find in more Christians than in non-Christians.

The late Christian musician Keith Green still ministers to me. One of my favorite songs of his is “When I Hear the Praises Start”:

My son, my son, why are you striving?
You can’t add one thing to what’s been done for you;
I did it all while I was dying.
Rest in your faith, my peace will come to you.

The sad truth in the lives of many Christians today is that striving is what we’re all about. We’re expending considerable energy attempting to win every race, no matter how small, even if that race has no spiritual significance. We not only want to have a gold star on our Sunday School attendance chart, but we want the rest of the box the gold star came in, even if that means no one else gets one.

Our obsession with being perfect can be seen in your average Christian bookstore (and I’m cueing up a “More Cowbell Award” for Christian bookstores in the days ahead.) The bestseller list consists of one tome on being successful after another. Your marriage must be perfect. Your finances must be perfect. Your children must be perfect—and they must be homeschooled because only homeschooling is the perfect way to the perfect college and the perfect career. The irony is that the rest of the bestsellers consist of books consoling Christians when everything doesn’t turn out perfect: the perfect church splits, the perfect daughter dies in a car wreck, the perfect husband’s career goes awry, the perfect wife struggles with an imperfect eating disorder while trying to be perfect. It’s either Your Best Life Now or it’s Every Man’s Battle. God help us!

Can’t we see the snare in this? How many Christians have we known who kept up the illusion of perfection, only to crash and burn in a conflagration that torched dozens of lives around them?

…for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God….
—Romans 3:23 ESV

I’m not certain the one at the middle of the flaming wreck believed that verse or what comes after it. The ellipses are a clue that there’s more:

…and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. Then what becomes of our boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? By a law of works? No, but by the law of faith.
—Romans 3:24-27 ESV

Did you catch that little word “grace” in there? Five letters, but it means so much! It not only gives life, but it destroys our boasting in any self-righteous perfection we’ve created around us.

But Dan, you say, doesn’t the Bible include this?

You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
—Matthew 5:48 ESV

That’s the “life verse” of Christian perfectionists and it’s followed by this one:

Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith.
—2 Corinthians 13:5a ESV

You have to live in a cave to miss that medical authorities are wild about self-examination. For women there are self-performed breast exams and for men testicular. A sensitive kind of test, for sure, and certainly a good idea to do. But the proper context for them is key. You wouldn’t do a self-exam like that in the middle of a crowded shopping mall, right? You’d wind up in jail if you did!

Too many of us have put ourselves in a jail of perfectionism by improper examination. We have the Bible in one hand—and that’s as far as many perfectionists go—but we also need to have God’s grace in the other. Grace is the curtain around us that allows for proper self-examination. It’s also the chemotherapy we need when the Lord illuminates cancer in our souls.

There are two ways that we tend to react to this examination. We can either “let go and let God” deal with it, or we can start a disciplined chipping away at revealed sin. The sanctification process for people tends to be one or the other. Disciplined people like the idea of “working out their salvation” while others go for the more “without Him we can do nothing” approach that throws more weight onto God to do the work.

Perfectionists tend to camp out on the side of rolling up their sleeves and making themselves better. More prayer. More Bible study. More, more, more. And while they may like it that way, too often they’ve assumed the role of God in the sanctification process. Scratch a Christian perfectionist and you tend to find underneath a person who hates himself one second and loves himself for always being “righteous” the next. I understand that’s a gross simplification, but it holds true for many Christians stuck in a pattern of “it’s never enough.”

The perfectionist Christian struggles in a few areas:

Fear of failure. Remember Romans 3:23. Perfectionists are so loathe to fail that they take control of their lives away from God and never learn from their mistakes. So much for grace! And so much for sanctification, because if God disciplines us through our mistakes, then we’ll never learn any deeper lessons if we never wind up in the dirt once in a while.Fear of non-acceptance. That’s a perfectly legitimate fear for Christians in legalistic churches. While the Church is charged with disciplining the unrepentant, repentance is not normally the issue for perfectionists—it’s accepting grace. If you’re a Christian stuck in a church where you think you’ll be savaged if you confess your sins, then you’re in the wrong church.

Fear of losing control. Who’s in control, the perfectionist or God? Who does a better job? Come to the cross; dying to self is a good thing.

“Should-ing” on others. Perfectionists use the word “should” like a battering ram, always telling people what they must do, particularly themselves. Often that thing that “should” be done is not necessarily in keeping with God’s idea of what must be done.

To all of this God speaks grace. Or as Paul writes:

But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.
—2 Corinthians 12:9-10 ESV

To the perfectionist, there is nothing so humiliating as weakness, but weakness is the very thing that is needful! Perfectionists too often create for themselves a Christianity of rules without the relationship with God. The Gospel becomes a duty rather than the core of a relationship.

What’s the fix? Letting God shoulder some of that load. We know the first part of this next verse by heart, but do the perfectionists out there see that word again?

And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. It is right for me to feel this way about you all, because I hold you in my heart, for you are all partakers with me of grace, both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel.
—Philippians 1:6-7 ESV

We are partakers of grace. Christ speaks grace to strivers, saying that He will be faithful to complete His good work in us if we let Him.

If we’re perfectionists, if only the gold medal is good enough, it’s time to lay ourselves down and let God work. Too much of our own work can often counter what God is trying to do. If we’ve got our future sanctification journey planned out on a timeline, today’s entry on that timeline says, “Burn the timeline.” It’s one thing to be disciplined, which I am all for, and another to let that discipline crowd out the Savior.

Don’t think that happens? More often than not the guy or gal in church on Sunday with the perpetual long face is the perfectionist who lost track of the Lord amid the duty. They’ve become a sort of spiritual Martha running around doing Christian works because they are supposed to; that’s just legalism in a holy disguise. Perfectionists need to slow down and sit at the feet of Jesus.

Sometimes “Let go and let God” isn’t a cliché.

The Godblogosphere’s Black Hole

Four days.

Yesterday, I joked about jumping back into the charismatic/cessationist debate that fueled the Godblogosphere discussion during the last quarter of 2005. Now Phil Johnson over at Pyromaniacs, mere hours after I posted my comments on Acts 2, is going to prove ONCE AND FOR ALL that the gifts have ceased. Four days into the new year and here we go again.

All I want to say in response is that my white flag is up—I quit.

No, Cerulean Sanctum isn’t going away. But to be honest here, I really feel like we’re wasting our time blogging if this is the best we can do with this fantastic medium for bringing together great Christian minds. If the sum total of Godblogging is to see who’s right and who’s wrong then we might as well pack it in.

This is not to say that on any given Christian doctrinal topic that some post on some blog somewhere at some time won’t cause someone to change his/her mind. But more often than not, the camps just circle their wagons and pump a figurative QWERTY volley into the other camp. The end product is that everyone gets off a few stingers at someone else’s expense, and like Civil War re-enactors, after a day we pick up our weapons and trudge off the battlefield to go back to being mechanics, photographers, real estate agents, middle managers, and hairdressers.

And what gets accomplished? A whole lot o’ nothin’.

The Godblogosphere trend in 2005 that I most hated to see—and did not witness in previous years—was the increased cutting down of other Christian bloggers, denominations, movements, and so on. How this advances the cause of Christ is beyond me, though. It doesn’t feed the poor, clothe the naked, or visit the prisoner. I’m almost positive it doesn’t do all that well in making disciples, either. In short, all it creates is a black hole of wasted talents, wisdom, and time.

Some get it, though. The genius behind eBay, for instance, is that it brings together little bands of people in search of what other little bands of people have to sell. Hummel figurines from 1948? Got that. The cigarette lighter from a Mercedes Gullwing? Check. Every day, eBay leverages the power of individuals to make dreams happen for other individuals. It’s the epitome of what the Internet can do.

So is blogging, my friends. When properly leveraged, blogging can bring together small bands of Christians to make amazing things happen. It can truly be an answer to prayer. Think of what a dozen likeminded bloggers can accomplish! It staggers the imagination.

What staggers me right now is how we’re squandering this opportunity on squabbling.

A few days ago, I wrote about Bruce Wilkinson’s implosion in Swaziland. I came right out and asked Wilkinson’s critics what any of them had done to meet the oppressive need of the AIDS orphans in that blighted nation. I had to ask myself that question, too. Such a great need and yet here we are at each other’s throats. My how that must honor the Lord!

Blogging represents a remarkable opportunity to be Jesus to people. Why are we dragging it into a black hole and tossing in all that Christ has blessed us with?

My call to Phil and anyone else out there who blogs or reads blogs is this: Let’s stop one-upping each other so we can prove who’s right and who’s wrong. Instead, why not make 2006 the year that we Godbloggers united in the name of Jesus to make a difference in our neighborhoods, cities, states, countries and eventually the world?

Surely there are people all around us who have deep needs that we can fill if we can mobilize each other and our readers to reach out with an open hand in the name of Jesus. Isn’t that a more God-honoring use of what Christ purchased for us than to ball that hand in a fist and shake it at each other?

Folks, is there anything we can do as a group to annihilate the Godblogosphere’s black hole? I mentioned the failure of Wilkinson’s Dream for Africa project. What can we bloggers and readers do to pick up that slack? Can we pool our collective minds and prayers to help all those kids in Africa? Or is it going to be the same old “I’m right and you’re wrong” crap today, tomorrow, and the tomorrow after that until the Lord returns in wonder at how wasteful we all were with what He gave us.

I’m not arguing doctrine anymore. I’m out. Instead, I’m looking for others who want to make a difference for Christ in the lives of the hurting and the lost.

Good grief! We are so blowing golden opportunities! We can make a difference in the lives of real people beyond filling their heads with more knowledge they won’t use. (I know my own head is full, but I’m not so sure about my heart.) We can meet the needs of brothers and sisters in Christ who are struggling with practical burdens in their lives. We can introduce the lost to Christ (I doubt they’re reading our blogs) by working together to use our connectedness to connect them to Jesus.

Any single moms and dads out there who need someone to watch your kids so you can have a date or just some time to yourself? Are there any elderly people who have housework they just can’t do because they can’t find anyone with a few hours and a strong back to do it? Anyone with a special needs child who is looking for a friend for that child? Any prisoners who need someone to send you hard-to-get Christian materials? How can we Christian bloggers serve you?

As for us bloggers, we could start by putting together a Google map that places each of us and our respective churches on the map. From there we could start directing people to places they can get the help they need. If someone needs a Christ-honoring church, we could direct them to a blogger. That blogger could then pair up with him/her/them at the blogger’s church and start making a difference to real people. This is just one way that we bloggers could meet a pressing need. Millions more exist. Now, when do we start brainstorming ways in which we can reach out? (Any Google Map guru want to take a shot at this or tell me how it can be done? I’m ready to go!)

To every Christian blogger and to every reader of our blogs, let’s utilize this medium to make a difference for Christ in 2006 rather than dishonoring Him by tossing the opportunities He gave us into the black hole of our own petty bickering. It’s amazing what happens when we put down the big guns and start ministering together. Maybe some of our differences won’t seem all that great in the end.

Now who wants to join me?

To the Pure, All Things Are Pure

To the pure, all things are pure, but to the defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure; but both their minds and their consciences are defiled.
—Titus 1:15

I was reading through Titus last night and this well-known passage struck me in a way I had never considered before. Convicting and challenging, the words of Paul revealed a great truth.

In 43 years on this third rock from the sun, one of the worst personal qualities I’ve developed is cynicism. Pigpen Always considered to be an idealist as a younger man, I was branded a hopeless optimist. I remember working at a Christian summer camp and having one of the girls on staff ask me why I was happy all the time. I was stunned that she even asked such a question. Wasn’t a sunny disposition the fruit of God’s Spirit living within us?

But over the years, disappointments and the profound corruption of mankind set in. You read the newspapers, watch the TV news shows, and the relentless depravity of it all sets you adrift on a lonely raft in a sea of bad news. Time has a way of turning idealists into despairing optimists, then into world-weary pessimists. Sooner or later, everything (and everyone) gets tainted one way or another.

You see the signs soon enough. Your snide remarks interrupt TV shows, movies, ordinary conversations, even church, a litany of snarky asides that would put Mystery Science Theater 3000 to shame. You comment on everything. Maybe you even start blogging.

A child’s birthday party becomes an opportunity to pontificate on the creepiness of clowns or the corporate calculation that gave us Chuck E. Cheese and his rodent ticket redemption center packed with two cent toys manufactured in Togo. Your husband announces he’s going shopping for you and your first thought is, Does he know of any stores besides Home Depot? Or when the football star scores a touchdown, you ponder just how many pounds of steroids he has in his system. You hope one day to see the perfectly coiffed pastor’s wife with her hair looking like a rat’s nest—just once.

The football game, birthday party, shopping trip, even someone we like—doesn’t it feel good on occasion to feel superior? To long for that bit of dirt that taints to our advantage?

I hate being cynical. It may make for clever writing, but cynicism and sarcasm only exist to take what is pure and slop it up. In its worst guise, it skips the cleverness altogether and goes right for crassness and sleaze. Your neighbor who talks family values every chance she gets is probably hiding her affair with the mailman. The nice, helpful single guy at church who just turned thirty is most certainly gay or a pedophile—there’s got to be something wrong with him. Can’t we all think of a million situations?

But to the pure, all things are pure. The birthday party is a wonderful expression of togetherness and love for a child. The football game is a time to enjoy life with friends. The husband’s offer is a response of tenderness. The pastor’s wife with the nice hair is one of God’s favorite people. That second thought never slips through the neurons. The pure enjoy life free of subtitles and running commentary.

New Year’s resolutions fall prey to snark about as well as anything, but for 2006 I know that my resolution is to allow the pure to stay pure, to develop a countercultural mind that steers clear of tainting what is pure. I don’t need to feel superior all the time or to impress my own deviance onto people and situations that never asked for my clever wit.

It’s all too easy to descend, isn’t it?

Before year’s end, I’m going to write about developing the mind of Christ for 2006. Letting the pure be pure is just one step in that direction. Stay tuned.