Do you want to read over my shoulder gain in a recent email exchange?
I was introduced to Christianity in the Foursquare denomination about 16 yrs ago when I was 19. I had the deep fellowship with Christ, the love, the fruit, the peace and led many “naturally” to faith in Him. Came from a rebel background and really hung my hat on Jesus. Served Him and tried to please Him IN EVERY WAY. To make a long story short I had a sudden screeching halt to my faith about 2 years later when I sort of came upon a dry spell in my Christian faith and began asking God to “deepen my relationship” again with Him. I started asking Him the usual:”free me from anything not of you, and “show me any area in my life that’s not in line with you” prayers. Now usually this worked and I’d obey and be done with it. However this time it didn’t—and that began a long, long painful spiral down in my faith that took me years to finally recover from. I did the medication, the sweats, and the torturous thoughts…. and so on…. all because I began to feel that day God was asking to sort of DO what I could not DO. The level of obedience, and the bar of response to His holiness were going further and further up. In this case too high! I felt this uneasiness and distance began to settle in between Him and me. I started to hide from Him. I started to not want to talk with Him…for fear of being condemned [which was a first for me because I never knew Him to be anything but noncondmning]…so I became blocked FROM THE VERY ONE I NEEDED TO RUN TO THE MOST. It was if I was unable top appease the Lord and the pain that I felt I couldn’t reveal to Him because he was staring at me saying, “Obey!!” Somehow my mind eventually became an open target for fear and anxiety and my life went down the %^$%$#@#@ real fast. The funny thing about it was that as this happened sin sprang up in me more…and then I wanted to do stuff I never dreamed of doing (before)…so that made the condemnation even worse!
Can you shed some light on some of the dynamics that happened to me here at all????
My response: Your story unfortunately is not a rare one. Transformation by human effort always leads to increased performance anxiety, which leads failure, which leads to increased guilt, which leads to increased sin and the cycle continues. That’s what so insidious about the system of religious obligation. It takes our most noble intentions and hurls us down a path of guaranteed failure. It tunes our spiritual ears to the condemning, performance-based voices of our flesh, thinking they are his voice. That spirals us into the very kind of circumstances you describe.
Isn’t it great to learn, however, that that path leads not to life but to death? That’s why Paul said the mind set on the flesh is death. That is not only the mind that indulges the flesh, but also the mind that seeks to abstain from it, or the one that seeks to make the flesh please God. It can’t happen. Read Romans 8 again after what you’ve been through. I think you’ll see some wonderful things there.
I suspect God allowed you this season to break the power of religious obligation in your life, and allow you to go on in him in the spirit of Galatians 3, simply believing what you hear, and that not being demands for obedience, but his gentle winning of your heart and life in him. It’s the words of affection and security Father wants us to know so that you can live in a way that please him not out of obedience in your own effort, but out of affection that transforms us deep from within.
I’m sorry you’ve been through this, but the lesson is so valuable. Righteousness cannot come through the most well intentioned discipline, but through a growing relationship with the loving Father through the Son, our older-brother Jesus!
