WINSDAY WISDOM 224
Are you ever frustrated and worried that your performance must reach some perfect standard to feel good about yourself or to receive the approval of others? I recently experienced the frustrations of walking a dog in a direction where she did not want to go. It was a struggle pulling on the leash with a constant stream of commands to “Stop! Come back! Don’t do that!”
Do you live your life like someone tied to the leash of someone’s expectations? Maybe your spiritual performance suffers from a leash of commands to “do this” and “don’t do that.” That only sets you up for numerous and epic performance treadmill falls.
God walks with us with love, not a leash. Your spiritual life is about a relationship, not performance. It is about direction, not perfection.
God says, I have loved you with an everlasting love (Jeremiah 31:3).
Jerry Bridges wrote in his book, Transforming Grace, “My observation of Christendom is that most of us tend to base our personal relationship with God on our performance instead of on His grace. If we’ve performed well—whatever “well” is in our opinion—then we expect God to bless us. If we haven’t done so well, our expectations are reduced accordingly. In this sense, we live by works rather than grace. We are saved by grace, but we are living by the “sweat” of our own performance.“
Are you still “sweating it out” on the performance treadmill? I urge you to take a moment and consider a question worthy of your contemplation.
Who can separate you from the everlasting love of God? Let’s think about that.
For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons,neither the present nor the future, nor any powers,neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 8:38-39).
There is no better description of this beautiful breathtaking horizon than the all-encompassing, biggest, most powerful, and most feared “performance separators” in this list, all eclipsed and conquered by God’s love for you.
- Death. This is the big one. Death is final. It cuts you off from this earthly journey. However, the same ship responsible for the departure from all you have known carries you to the arrival dock where all your hopes are reality. Death can never separate you from God’s love.
- Life. There are many separators in life. Gender, race, religion, nationality, age. Health and wealth or the lack thereof are bitter dividers. Critics and complainers can feel like monster scissors cutting you into tiny pieces. War tears nations and families apart. But God never takes a break from your life’s journey. He never glances away or forgets a need. There is nothing in life which can separate you from God’s love.
- Angels and demons. These are the most powerful “unseen” things operating in both the physical and spiritual realms. They are more powerful than you but not more powerful than God’s love from which they can never separate you.
- Time. Things present or future might fill your mind with fear, worry, and anxiety. Time will eventually unveil “seen” troubles and “unforeseen” problems. God’s love for you is everlasting. It has no time constraints. Nothing from eternity past to eternity future can ever separate you from God’s timeless love.
- Spiritual powers. The enemy uses supernatural powers to execute his well-designed and proven effective plans to chain many to a lifelong journey on the performance treadmill. These powers breed doubts and raise questions, but they are powerless against the almighty truths of God’s Word. All the enemy can really do is to use those supernatural powers to get you to embrace the lie that “God is not good enough to you.”
That was the lie presented to Adam and Eve. That was the issue in Job’s story. That was Naomi’s bitterness and Ruth’s dilemma. That was Jeremiah’s lament. But God is good enough. Infinitely, incomparably, incredibly, inconceivably good enough! Oh, what a God! God accepts you unconditionally and loves you endlessly. God wants you to know and live your life based on the truth that nothing, not even something supernatural can ever separate you from His steadfast love.
- Space. Height and depth are effective separators. Some things can be placed too high out of your reach or buried so low you cannot dig them up, but they are not too high or too deep for God. God’s love swallows up space faster than the speed of light. The highest heaven, the widest distance, and the lowest depth are not beyond the circumference of God’s love. God’s love for you is higher, wider, deeper, and bigger than anyplace you will be in life and eternity. There is no space empty of God’s love for you.
- Anything else in all of creation. Just in case someone thinks God might have forgotten something or somewhere or sometime, God throws this into the mix. God is not ignorant or unacquainted with anything that exists. He created it all. If the astronomers discover another galaxy or gravitational waves rippling through the fabric of space-time or even another universe somewhere, God created it. God told us He created all of it for our good, so none of it will ever separate us from the goodness of God’s love.
Oh yeah, what about yourself? What if you decide you want a separation? The last time I checked, you and I still fall under the category of created things and no created thing will ever separate us from the love of Christ. That includes all the bad people and bad things. It encompasses all your decisions, both right and wrong.
Sometimes you might struggle with doubts. Doubting is not a sin; it’s a place on the road of faith where you are faced with a decision whether to believe this world’s lie about your circumstances and how you are not good enough or you embrace the truth of God’s Word regarding God’s unconditional love and acceptance that is always more than good enough.
It is essential that we learn to think right. The only way to think right is to saturate our minds with Scriptural truths. If we peel away the layers of the onion, at the root of insecurity and feelings of worthlessness we would find Satan attempting to convince us that we are unworthy with thoughts that our sins are too great, and others appear more righteous. And then the struggle begins. We spiral down mentally and emotionally. To salvage ourselves “we begin to do better.” We return to the performance treadmill. It’s time to get off.
You are greatly and marvelously loved. Why? Because God’s love is good enough.
God’s love for you is unconditional, unchanging, unfailing, and unlimited. God’s love does not change according to your proximity to perfection. If you do well, God does not love you more and if you do poorly, God never loves you less.
God loves you based on who He is. Have you been controlled all your life by what other people think about you or what they expect from you or how they respond to you? There is a solution to that. You can be controlled by the love of Someone who loves you unconditionally, with an unchanging, unlimited, longsuffering, long-lasting love regardless of your performance. God promised to love you forever even when He already knew the worst about you. Each of us needs to learn that. Preach to yourself. Sing it to your soul.
Nothing can separate you from that love. Nothing. That’s it. That is all that needs to be said, all that needs to be known. This truth changes how you live and how you love. It changes how you look at other people and how you treat them.
You are unconditionally accepted. No one has God’s right to judge you, and nothing has the power to make God stop loving you. No one. Nothing. Not even you with all your self-doubts and low esteem. Place your hope in God, not in “doing your best” or “trying harder.”
God has rescued many persons exhausted from the never-ending exercise of trying to be good enough to please everyone. Cut the puppet strings. Trash the comparison checklists. Shake off the self-doubts. Get off the performance treadmill.
Do not marginalize the perfection and sufficiency of God’s love for you. You are fully and unconditionally loved and accepted because of one magnificent reason. GOD’S LOVE IS MORE THAN GOOD ENOUGH. I pray this glorious truth will rise up from the deepest part of your heart to fill your life with hope. When you are not good enough, God’s love for you is still more than good enough.
Put away the measuring tape for you and your children. Performance competition breeds envy, disappointment, and discontentment. Comparison shopping will rob you of joy. If necessary, stay away from social media and its “thoughtless, insensitive comments.”
The things that worry and discourage you today will not matter in twenty years. Most will not matter tomorrow.
God alone determines your identity and value. Do not be enslaved to the whims of others’ opinions. Your importance does not depend upon how many “Likes” your Facebook picture attracts or how many follow or unfollow your Tweets. Do not diminish the significance of God’s love by climbing back on your performance treadmill or crawling back into your suffocating hole of solitary silence.
There is no greater love! God loves you to the max; He will never love you less!
Enjoy being loved by a great love that cannot be separated by life, death, time, space, unseen things, spiritual powers, or any other created thing.
When it comes to any performance test, God is more than good enough!
I hear you. You are welcome. Let’s go love someone first and most!
LOVE FIRST...LOVE MOST 