A thought by Lee Strobel (2015-02-24) from his
book, The Case for Grace: A JournalistExplores the Evidence of Transformed Lives (Case for ... Series) (p. 53).
Zondervan. Kindle Edition. (Click
on the title to go to Amazon.com to buy the book.)
It
is so easy for us to get in the performance rat race of living for Christ.
There
is a story behind this thought. Lee who
was a staff minister at the time said, “One night I got a call from the church’s
senior pastor, Bill Hybels. ‘I heard a nasty rumor about you,’ he said. I was
taken aback. ‘Like what?’ ‘That you’re working at the church sixty or seventy
hours a week. That you’re there late into the night and all day Sunday.’ To be
honest, I swelled with pride. That’s right, I wanted to say. I’m the hardest
working member of the staff. Finally, it’s time for some recognition and thanks
— if not directly from God, then from my pastor. I said with some modesty: ‘Well,
I am working hard, if that’s what you mean.’ Now his voice had an edge. ‘If you
continue down that path, you’re fired.’ ‘What?’
‘Something unhealthy is driving you. There’s nothing you can do that
will cause God to love you any more than he already does. You need to relax in
that fact. Otherwise, I’m not going to be a party to your self-destruction.’”
From that confrontation by his boss years before Lee
said “I came to realize that God didn’t love me because I made myself valuable
through service; on the contrary, I was valuable because I was loved by God. I
could stop working like a slave to justify myself; I just needed to recognize —
and celebrate — my adoption as God’s child. My desire to love and serve God in
a healthy way would flow from that.”
He quotes Jud Wilhite a pastor in Las Vegas who
was sharing his problems with this and Jud said, “How I feel about God isn’t as
important as how God feels about me. It doesn’t matter how good I try to be;
what’s important is how good God is. He never demanded that I become a super
Christian in the first place; all he asked was that I love him in return. That
was transformative for me. It all comes back to grace.’”
Then Lee said, “All we needed when we first came
to Jesus was his grace, and grace is all we need to grow in Christ. Grace
liberates us. Our tendency toward performance imprisons us.”
Do you need to be liberated today from spiritual
workaholism?
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