Simplicity

When Believers Stumble: Perfectionism

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PerfectionistRecently, 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.

You Can’t Take It with You

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I would have fainted unless I had believed to see the goodness of Jehovah in the land of the living.
—Psalms 27:13 LITV

Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride in possessions—is not from the Father but is from the world.
—1 John 2:15-16 ESV

When I was requesting input on issues within the Church for my "21 Steps to a 21st Century Church" series, no one issue was presented by readers more often than materialism. AvariceOthers connected materialism with our penchant toward church hopping, consuming churches like we choose just another product on the shelves.

But is materialism in and of itself a problem, or is it just a symptom of other spiritual issues?

When George H. W. Bush (W's dad) was in office, he invited Boris Yeltsin, then president of Russia, to visit America. Nothing boggled Yeltsin more than the staggering number of choices that Americans have. Yeltsin broke down in the breakfast foods aisle of a grocery store when he saw the sheer variety of cereals. Captain Crunch and Count Chocula made the President of Russia cry.

When we talk about materialism, no fact is bandied about more than the notion that Americans are materialistic. In truth, we Americans—using the UN's Human Development Index (an excellent gauge of total privilege)—rank behind nine other countries not normally mentioned in the same breath with America as being overly privileged:

1. Norway
2. Iceland
3. Australia
4. Luxembourg
5. Canada
6. Sweden
7. Switzerland
8. Republic of Ireland
9. Belgium
10. United States

Ironically, the United States has moved down from 2004's list. Nor do we hear plenty of complaints against the Nordic countries for filling up the top ten list. Draw your own conclusions.

The problem with materialism is not so much the sin of it, but the fact that what we view as materialism is often nothing more than volume of choice. The one thing about each of the top ten nations on the list is that all are either democracies, parliamentary monarchies, or parliamentary socialist countries. Each allows their people to vote freely for elected officials. The fact that choices are given to the people means that the people soon become enamored of making choices.

What made Boris Yeltsin so weepy is the benefit of having choice. The UN's HDI listings of the bottom ten countries is a who's who of dictatorships or governments run by "strongmen." No governmental choice of leaders often translates to no choice between the Captain and the Count when breakfast time rolls around.

Marxists love to blame materialism on democracy—even some non-Marxists would contend they have point. It's hard to disengage choice from freedom. Freedom by its very nature entitles people to seek their own good within a set number of offerings. Few people would argue that this is a bad thing. The problem of materialism then becomes how many offerings are too many.

No moral code exists to say how many choices are too many, though. If we want to legislate against materialism, the universal answer would be to reduce the number of choices allowed. Unfortunately, this automatically limits freedom and will inevitably cause someone to have to forgo their usual selections. If the United States proclaimed tomorrow that no more cars made by Japanese companies would be allowed in this country, people would howl. Would they have a justifiable reason to? What moral code speaks for them or against them in this? None that I can find.

When people ultimately cite countries for being materialistic, more often than not the issue is nothing more than one of choice. Confusing materialism with choice is the mistake that people often make when attempting to show the immorality of any nation seen to be materialistic. This assessment fails to take into consideration that even the lowliest of the nations on the UN's HDI list contains materialistic people. Even with limited freedom, people in the HDI nether regions can be in love with the things of the world. Wealth is no indicator of covetousness.

When it comes to personal giving, Americans outstrip their counterparts in other countries by a wide margin. Non-governmental giving by Americans totaled more than $275 billion in 2004. This translates to almost $1000 per person per year. In stark contrast, studies have shown that the average European gives less than $20 a year of personal income to charitable causes. American taxpayers fund nearly all of the World Bank, too, though we never see any of that money doled out to us. And the thanks we Americans get for paying the majority of rescue operation costs after a series of devastating earthquakes in Iran in 2003 is the knowledge that mullahs in that country can't wait to explode one of their homemade nukes on our soil.

But does generosity offset supposed materialism?

This post is not an American apologetic piece. It's an attempt to see that there is more going on under the surface of materialism than the fact that some countries are more richly blessed than others.

Do we consider the United States blessed? David said that he would have despaired had he not seen the goodness of the Lord this side of heaven. While life is not always measured in what one owns, the Old Testament repeatedly offers a view of God's blessings that shows the Lord abundantly giving good things to the faithful. Many of the great people of God in the Old Testament were wealthy and God Himself made them that way. It's had to argue against God's favor. God's only warning is that those He so blessed not love the gifts more than the Giver.

The New Testament goes almost 180 degrees in the opposite direction by showing the household of God filled with the destitute. While wealthy patricians did populate the Church, so did prostitutes, widows, and orphans—the poorest of the poor. Jesus Himself was not wealthy, but He was buried in a rich man's tomb. Most of the apostles ultimately surrendered whatever earthly wealth they did have, forsaking it for the Gospel.

Making a theology of wealth or poverty from the Bible is more difficult than some imagine. Those that favor poverty and simplicity refer to the New Testament. Those that believe that God richly rewards the faithful materially love to quote from the Old Testament. Personally, I believe that the model is that we hold all that God gives us loosely. It's all His and it's always in play; He just needs to speak the word. We need to hear it when it's spoken.

The battle rages on.

I am not rich by any means—at least according to the standards of the United States. Our household income is pretty close to the median for this country. By the world's standards, though, I am most definitely rich, if per capita income is the only measure. Still, that's hard to judge in a vacuum. Outsourcing of American jobs shows the great equalization here. A worker in India with skills similar to mine can live on a third my income and have the Indian equivalent of my exact lifestyle. I may pay $4 for a whole chicken, while he pays only $0.40. If anything, he may be better off even though he makes only a third what I do because his cost of living is profoundly lower. Who then becomes the real materialist?

And what does that mean for our consumerist thinking about picking a church to attend?

We say that church shopping is bad and yet the number of Christian denominations in this country numbers in the thousands. America's melting pot gave us a stew of Christian sects brought here by each little immigrant group that settled this country. Their homeland may have had only a dozen flavors of Christianity, but multiply that by every country represented in America and you've got instant choice. Mix in the America ideal of being your own man and you have church splits ad infinitum. Just between the Methodist Church and the Presbyterian Church there are probably close to a hundred splinter groups that consider themselves Methodists or Presbyterians of some stripe. We say that we shouldn't treat the Church as a consumer activity, yet we are the ones that created all these factions and fractions of the original Church with a big "C." Now how many of you dozens of Presbyterian types are going to give up your little piece of the pie and join up with my independent Pentecostal church? No hands? Hmm.

Ultimately, we are only as materialistic as we love created things over the Creator. God apportions gifts as he sees fit, and if He wishes to take it all away from the United States, He can do so tomorrow. On the other hand, we should not despise God's graciousness to this country and its people. Sin is only found when we love the gift more than the Giver. When we lose that perspective, we are no longer receiving from God, but from the world, the very sin John warns us of. We become idolaters.

Are we idolaters? Some of us are. Each man needs to examine himself before God to see whether the charge sticks.

Tags: Materialism, Greed, Church, Faith, Christianity, Jesus, God

Out in the Country

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Meadowlark

Whenever I need to leave it all behind
Or feel the need to get away
I find a quiet place, far from the human race
Out in the country

CHORUS
Before the breathin’ air is gone
Before the sun is just a bright spot in the night-time
Out where the rivers like to run
I stand alone and take back somethin’ worth rememberin’

Whenever I feel them closing in on me
Or need a bit of room to move
When life becomes too fast, I find relief at last
Out in the country
—”Out in the Country” by Three Dog Night (lyrics by Paul Williams)

Rev-Ed over at Attention Span wrote a piece that brought tears to my eyes. That doesn’t happen too often, but as I reflect on what he says in “God Speaks in the Country” all I can say to that post is “Yes and amen!”

It will be five years this July for us in our country home. We’ve adapted to a slower pace (though it’s not that significantly slower anymore), grown our own food, put in an orchard, and dreamed big dreams about growing herbs and wine grapes using permaculture methods. Call me converted, but I agree with the new agrarians who believe that our divorce from the land has led to spiritual impoverishment. Or as Neil Peart of Rush once penned:

Sprawling on the fringes of the city
In geometric order
An insulated border
In between the bright lights
And the far unlit unknown

Growing up it all seems so one-sided
Opinions all provided
The future pre-decided
Detached and subdivided
In the mass production zone

Nowhere is the dreamer
Or the misfit so alone
—”Subdivisions” by Rush

Sadly, the country is evaporating, the sprawling “mass production zone” creeping in on us faster than we would have hoped. Field after field within ten miles of our home sports a “For Sale” sign. Last week we found out they’ll be putting in a hospital about three miles west of us. Just more lights to obliterate our starry sky. The previous hospital we used is only twenty minutes away, twelve if you speed to it, but someone decided we needed something even closer despite the fact that ten miles east of our home another medical facility is going in. The handwriting’s on the wall. Somewhere a strip mall is being blueprinted by people who never saw a Painted Lady alight on the pale blue chicory.

I look up in the night sky and every year it’s a shade lighter. The rim of the western sky glows continually now, drowning out the light of the celestial spheres, the stars obscured by wasted parking lot light tossed carelessly upward. I look at the Orion telescope catalogs we get and I wonder if I’ll ever have enough money to buy that telescope before the creeping suburbs make it out our way and render our sky the same blank slate I see in the city.

What annihilates the meadows that once teemed with butterflies and wildflowers? The aforementioned strip mall—upscale, of course, because we all know that country people like to shop at Saks. But then we realize it’s not really for the country people, it’s for those fleeing the rotting cities relegated to urban blight and violence, another gunned-down black youth a signpost leading out of town for whites looking to put some distance between themselves and the senseless hate. Meanwhile, the bright suburb of 1970 has passed into its decrepitude and its residents are no longer “our kind of people.” So some flee to the next plot of ex-farmland and create another suburban hell that thirty years from now will be in its own doddering years.

We bought an existing house, so we didn’t add to the problem. Our deed said that our property was first surveyed in 1763. Pioneering men stood at the tops of the rolling hills and scried out a plot of land that would one day hold our 13.2 acres. Almost 250 years later and the feeling in the heart of those men is the same one that captured us. To get back to the soil and coax from it the fruits of the earth. The joy of the harvest. The rich bounty of God’s provision. The connection to the life He breathed into Creation.

We’ve lost our sense of wonder in the Church. We’ve packed the Lord and His glorious Creation away in one of Bloomingdale’s Little Brown Bags and let our imaginations be filled with the perishing for no other reason than because we can. Isn’t it easier that way?

As for me and my house, we want to serve the Lord by never forgetting that the trees speak, the stars proclaim, and the rocks, rivers, and rills shout. I hear their music and never want to endure the day where my ears strain to hear their song because they are long gone. Yet too many Christians believe that their chorus has nothing to teach them. And that is one reason why we are so far from where we should be.

O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens. Out of the mouth of babes and infants, you have established strength because of your foes, to still the enemy and the avenger. When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas. O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!
—Psalms 8:1-9 ESV

Dominion does not equal license, no matter what we think. If we pave paradise and put up a parking lot, what sense will our own hymnody make to a future generation?

This is my Father’s world, and to my listening ears
All nature sings, and round me rings the music of the spheres.
This is my Father’s world: I rest me in the thought
Of rocks and trees, of skies and seas;
His hand the wonders wrought.

This is my Father’s world, the birds their carols raise,
The morning light, the lily white, declare their Maker’s praise.
This is my Father’s world: He shines in all that’s fair;
In the rustling grass I hear Him pass;
He speaks to me everywhere.
—”This Is My Father’s World” by Maltbie Babcock

Or, as Rev-Ed points out, how will “How Great Thou Art” survive should most people never wander a forest glade?

When we lose the country, we lose so very much. It’s where I want to be because I feel like I’m closer to God out in the forest, out in the meadow, than in any church building.

Some Christians look at me and laugh because they know it will all burn some day. But when I stand in Glory, I’ll have the confidence to say to the Lord, “Jesus, I heard the trees sing your name and I joined in their song.”