What Is This Freedom, and Where Do I Get It, and Who Gets the Glory? How Galatians Is Transforming My Idea of "God's Way"

My friend recently wrote a blog post entitled, "Why I Won't Be 'Growing My Kids God's Way.'" I agreed with her post, as I'm not a fan of what I know about the program. What really hit home for me, though, was her follow-up post, written because some readers were wondering why she was so opposed to that particular program. After all, most parently ideologies and programs have strengths and weaknesses; why not take in the good and leave out of the bad? For her, it all came down to the idea of God's grace: the Growing Kids God's Way program has a very strong emphasis on external behavior.

Katie wrote, "It is because I come out of a works-based, earning, “getting it right” culture of Christianity…but am conversely learning the everyday reality and expression of grace…that I am so passionate about exposing programs, habits, and expressions of any works-based version of Christianity." This statement resonated strongly with me, as I only realized relatively recently how ingrained a works-based Christianity was in my soul, and I find myself more and more aware of all the subtleties of works-based "Christianity" that are present in the American church (not to pick on Americans only, but I am not very familiar with other countries' church cultures).

A culture of works-based Christianity is a lot like slavery. You can't imagine the pride and arrogance that fill your heart (which you try not to express, because that would expose you) when you are keeping the rules. You can't imagine the devastation and alienation from God you feel when you mess up. You can't imagine the incongruity between an outer world where people talk about how good you are, a shining light and example, and your inner world full of doubts, struggles, bitterness, anger, and pride (that you can't ever get help with, because then everyone would know you weren't as good as you seemed).

Growing up in the church, I was very much aware of the enslavements of sin. I wasn't aware of the enslavement of religion. I knew what things I should and shouldn't do. My personality naturally wants to please people, and the esteem of authority figures feeds my pride, so being good was easy for me. I LIKED following rules, because following rules was a sure way to earn the approval of parents, teachers, and other adults in my life. I was able to figure out the "rules" of getting along in the kid world and obtain the approval of kids around me.

I didn't realize until I was older that I applied the same logic to my relationship with God. It was easy: I would and wouldn't do certain things to keep God happy. Principles about loving God and people were difficult to manage, because they were not measurable; rules and measureables I liked, because I could check them off my list.

But things started to change as I got older. I doubted my salvation, because I kept finding sin in myself. I knew that God loved me because He loves everybody - that's just what He does - but I had trouble believing He loved me individually. I kept hearing people talk about grace and Jesus's love and freedom, and I became more and more frustrated because I didn't know what those things felt like. I knew what I should believe and what I should do, but I wasn't sure I had this relationship that everyone kept talking about. I would read books about grace and passages throughout the New Testament, but I could never really believe that grace was for me.

Deep down inside, I truly believed what an LDS friend of mine once expressed: you have to work hard and earn God's love and approval, and Jesus takes care of the rest. That is, it's mostly up to you to try to be good, and the Cross is for the leftovers. I would never say it when talking about my beliefs or theology, but my heart and behavior revealed my true belief: Jesus would only do His part if I was working hard to do mine. And I was afraid of Him, because I knew that I was not working as hard as I could. And if I were to work as hard as I could... I would probably die, or at the very least, hate God.

I knew this was wrong, but couldn't get it into my heart. Speaking to others about this, I even felt a little mystified by my mom's definition: "Here's how I feel His grace: Imagine lying on your back, floating in a pool. Every part of your body is relaxed, the water holds you up, the sun is warm on your face.... Ah, ...grace. God does all the work." It was a foreign concept.

Since I knew that Galatians talked a lot about grace, I decided to read Galatians. Over and over. Until what Paul said about Jesus and grace became second nature to me, rather than glimpses of hope in my rule-bound world.

That was when I learned something interesting about my rule-keeping.

Even though I knew I was in a spiritual prison of sorts, I had never realized that my rule-keeping was evil. I always assumed there were a few levels of evil, of worldliness. The lowest, of course, was enslavement to worldliness, to obvious sins like adultery, murder, greed, etc. Wanting to follow rules and earn salvation, though not the way to salvation, of course, was at least better, because you were wanting to please God. Surely that desire counted for something. I did not see a difference between obeying God so that He would love me and obeying God because He loved me.

And then, as I was reading through Galatians the second or third or fourth time, I'm not sure when, I was hit by something as a lightening bolt. Galatians 2:20 said, "I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose."

Hmmm. I think that's when it began to sink in.

I would never, ever say to Jesus, "Sorry, Your grace means nothing." Nor would I say, "Your death on the cross was pretty much insufficient. You can't save me. Only I can save me." Yet that was what I was doing every time I felt like my good deeds were giving God a helping hand. Trying to be good to earn my salvation wasn't okay because "at least I was trying." I was convicted of my own arrogance. As Martin Luther said in his commentary on Galatians, "What awful presumption to imagine that there is any work good enough to pacify God, when to pacify God required the invaluable price of the death and blood of His own and only Son?... To keep the Law in order to be justified means to reject grace, to deny Christ, to despise His sacrifice, and to be lost."

Then, I read another verse. Galatians 4:3 said, "So also we, while we were children, were held in bondage under the elemental things of the world." Growing up in a particular denomination of the church, I had always read this verse as being about bondage to the sins that related to "being bad," not "being good." Drinking, premarital sex, murder, hatred... those were the worldly things that enslaved people. But as I studied Galatians, I realized that the "elemental things of the world" were actually the religious systems apart from Christ's death and resurrection. Trying to earn heaven by following rules, as good as I had thought it, was actually a form of worldliness, an effort that Paul described as "weak and worthless elemental things." (Gal. 4:9) In thinking that I would earn God's love by avoiding worldliness and darkness, I was living under a different kind of worldliness and darkness.

As Martin Luther expressed it, "[The Law] may restrain evil, but it does not deliver from sin." I had assumed that restraining my sin would deliver me from evil. Yet my inner life proved otherwise, and my awareness of the inner life (and its overflow into my outer life) led me to despair and be angry with God. Why would He ask me to be good and make it so hard? Why would He give me a desire to please Him along with an inability to do so? And as it began to really sink in that I could not save myself, that the attempt to do so would just add to my pride and list of sins, it was then that I began to trust in Christ's effort alone to save me. In all my straining to obey the American Church version of the Law and my studying of the Gospel over and over, they worked together as God intended. When I finally reached the hopelessness that anyone who pursues the Law eventually finds, I arrived at the hope revealed in the Gospel. Once again, Luther expressed perfectly what was in my heart:

    "Men fast, pray, watch, suffer. They intend to appease the wrath of God and to deserve     God's grace by their exertions. But there is no glory in it for God, because by their exertions these workers pronounce God an unmerciful slave driver, an unfaithful and angry Judge. They despise God, make a liar out of Him, snub Christ and all His benefits; in short they pull God from His throne and perch themselves on it. 

    "Faith truly honors God. And because faith honors God, God counts faith for righteousness.

    "Christian righteousness is the confidence of the heart in God through Christ Jesus."

My attempts at self-salvation are worthless and worldly. So what do I do? How do I respond? I am learning to be wary of any response that involves ME trying or my effort. All I can do is ask Jesus to change me from the inside out, to give me faith because I can't muster it up or fake it, and choose to believe that He will deliver me. And here, in this spot, I am finally loving God not only because I know He is just and powerful and terrifyingly worthy of awe, but also because He is showing me how loving and gracious He is. "Do not fear, do not worry about your salvation," He says, "because I was willing to give up My own Son for your righteousness, and I am saving you."

Anyway... that's the long version. All this to say, I know where my friend is coming from in her visceral reactions against any parenting program that encourages our human tendency to rely on behavior as a measure of righteousness while downplaying the heart. Once you are rescued from that place, you never want to go back, and you certainly don't want people you love to end up there. 

"If you have died with Christ to the elementary principles of the world, why, as if you were living in the world, do you submit to [external] decrees.... These matters which have, to be sure, the appearance of wisdom in self-made religion and self-abasement and severe treatment of the body, but are of no value against fleshly indulgence." -Colossians 2:20, 23

You cannot promote man's efforts to be good as "God's way."