A Loving Relationship, Not a Daunting Checklist

God has been working in my life for the past two years to teach me that I really knew nothing about what it means to be spiritual. It's been a process that began with me meeting people who didn't have my same standards and therefore should have been "worldly" people. Yet I came to realize that my definition of what made a person Godly and spiritual must be skewed. You see, these people I met I now consider to be among the most Godly, spiritual people that I know.

I began to see how my list of standards had become a checklist for spirituality. I could see that I would look down on and judge other people as not being as Godly as myself because they didn't follow my list. I began to see pride, arrogance, hypocrisy, self-righteousness in myself. I felt like I had become a modern-day Pharisee. And Jesus was clear in how He felt about them; He didn't count them as spiritual, but as hindrances to the spiritual walk of others.

That started me on a journey. I began to re-evaluate my life, my standards, my beliefs. I knew how to defend what I had grown up believing and living, but I had come to the point where I needed to decide for myself what I believed. I knew that taking another human's word for it was not going to be enough for me, even if that person was my Pastor or my parents. I knew that I couldn't continue to live it if I didn't concretely believe it for myself. I realized that if it wasn't stated out and out in the Bible as a sin then it was a man-made rule. I began to sort through those man-made rules that I had grown up with to see which ones I could trace back to a Biblical basis, not personal preference.

When I moved back to OKC, Pastor Gaddis was preaching about some of the same things I had been learning. He preached about how judging another person's spiritual life based on human standards was wrong. This was exactly what I had been realizing for the past year. He also talked about how God sets a standard that is black and white; He draws the line clearly on an issue. Then he talked about how the Pharisees added to those laws by creating man-made standards. The intention was to prevent them from even getting close to breaking God's laws. Sounds good, sound zealous, sounds spiritual, sounds like us Independent Baptists, right? The motive may have started out right, but the practice went wrong. They began to treat their added standards as the law themselves. They began to believe that a person could not be spiritual unless he followed all of their man-made additions to the law too.

Throughout this time, there still remained one question in my works-oriented mind... If your personal standards are not the basis for evaluating a person's spirituality, then what does make a personal spiritual? This past Wednesday night Pastor's message finally answered that question. The answer is to remember that the spiritual walk is a relationship, not a checklist. I have heard this before many times, but this time it struck me differently.

I had been reading a book about the 5 "love languages" that people "speak." The book is all about relationships and how different people communicate love differently. It talks about how some people do things for each other to show their love. But for it to be an actual expression of love, the action cannot be demanded. If action is demanded then you are required to do a certain thing. You do what is demanded because you fear losing who you love. The book says that action out of fear doesn't show love; you must go beyond what is expected, out of the realm of fear, in order to express love by your actions.

Maybe those things seem completely unrelated, but in my mind they came together and clicked. That was how I had been viewing my relationship with God. I viewed Him as demanding this list of required actions. (I am not going to make a list, because it is different for every person. You will know what you believe is expected of you.) I believed that I had to do these things in order to not displease Him. I did them out of fear, fear that He would not be satisfied or pleased with me, like I had to earn His pleasure and approval.

When Pastor Gaddis talked about the spiritual life not being a checklist, but a relationship it began to click. He even made a comment similar to the one in the book about how action demanded cannot express love. To express love you must be free to choose not to perform those actions. It must be a free choice. God says over and over that salvation freed us. God doesn't demand that we fulfill His commandments any longer.

It doesn't mean that we are justified in going and living however we please. We are free, freed from sin not freed to sin. Even though God doesn't demand that we live a certain way, His standards of right and wrong are still there. But now we have a choice! We are free from His demands to freely express our love to Him of our own free will by choosing to live according to His standards because we know it will please Him.

The difference is subtle...

Instance 1) God demands that we fulfill His laws. We attempt to out of fear of His displeasure. When we fail, we always feel as though we have failed Him. We take our list and fearfully try to check it off, hoping He won't be displeased. We never make it to victory, but struggle with defeat constantly. We think of God as a harsh task master who is demanding and impossible to please.

Instance 2) We realize that God no longer demands that we fulfill His laws. We understand that right is still right and wrong is still wrong and we know that doing right still pleases God; it brings Him pleasure. So as an expression of our love to Him, we choose to do what will bring Him pleasure. We freely choose to do the things on our list, not out of fear of rejection, but because we know we are loved and accepted by God and we desire to show that we love Him too by doing what makes Him happy. We evaluate our lives and actions by how they will please God, not out of fear, but out of eagerness to please Him.

In the end, I may be doing the exact same things as I was before, but now I can do them wholeheartedly with joy. I can do them because I love Him and am grateful for what He has done for me. I can do them because I know that they will make Him happy, not out of fear of displeasing Him.