Where's Your Heart? - True Worship
Slow
Self-reliance toward God is a dependence on our own power, not the power of the Holy Spirit. Self-reliance is to the second bookend what self-righteousness is to the first. Self-righteousness is the opposite of dependence on Christ’s righteousness for justification. Self-reliance is the opposite of dependence on the Holy Spirit’s power for sanctification. Just as by nature we assume we earn our salvation by our good works, so by nature we assume we grow spiritually by our own effort and willpower.
What’s wrong with this kind of self-reliance? Everything.
Let us introduce you to our friend Brian. In his fifties, he remains very athletic. He has everything Nike: shoes, wristbands, even a golf bag. His motto is Just try harder. It seemed to work well for him; he succeeded in college, career, and sports. His Christian journey began as a teenager. In high school he excelled in the spiritual disciplines, especially Scripture memorization. As he left home for college, his faith was vibrant and growing. Yet when we met him thirty years later, he was spiritually bankrupt and completely devastated. What happened?
In college, Brian’s motivation for applying himself to the spiritual disciplines gradually shifted from grateful delight in God to a subtle sense that God would reward him for performing these duties. Brian’s other motto was No pain, no gain. He fully expected to gain as a result of enduring the pain of getting up early and exercising his mind over Scripture and prayer. Legalism always begins like that—with a trace of belief that we earn God’s approval and blessings by our performance. As the seeds of self-reliance developed into a full-blown belief system, Brian’s unwritten list of dos and don’ts began to loom larger. And when legalism blooms, its fruit is a prevailing and accelerating pressure to perform.
As long as Brian dug deeper, he continued to succeed. He worked harder and harder to keep up with Bible study, prayer lists, and Scripture memorization. He also labored over his grades. When he struggled against sin, he turned to his mottos, his white-knuckled willpower, and his above-average intestinal fortitude. But the pressure was beginning to show through the cracks. One day his campus ministry leader shared this passage on self-sufficiency:
Not that we are sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, but our sufficiency is from God, who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit. For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. (2 Corinthians 3:5–6)
The words stuck in Brian’s throat—he recognized the stark contradiction between this and his own approach to spirituality. But unfortunately, the leader failed to help him recognize and apply the truth about the righteousness of Christ (the first bookend) and the Spirit who gives life (the second bookend). Within a few weeks, Brian reverted to self-reliant legalism. Inwardly Brian pointed to his many successes as evidence that God was blessing him because he was measuring up. But before long, instead of the atta-boys he was accustomed to, his feedback from others included words like arrogance and conceited.
The best way to disengage an impure desire is to engage a pure one; the best way to expel the love of what is evil is to embrace the love of what is good instead. To be specific, we must replace the object of our sinful affection with an infinitely more worthy one—God himself. In this way we do not move from a full heart into a vacuum. Instead we move from a full heart to a heart bursting with fullness. And the expulsive power of our new affection weakens and even destroys the power of sin in our hearts.