10 Things Jesus Never Said: And Why You Should Stop Believing Them by Will Davis Jr

Author:Will Davis Jr. [Davis Jr., Will]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2011-06-30T17:00:00+00:00

A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing

I hate to confess this, but for many years I was the founder, president, and CEO of the Try Harder Club in my Christian circles. I could blame my flawed thinking on many things, but it wasn’t anyone’s fault but my own. Somewhere along the way I began to believe that it was all up to me to live a God-honoring life. The only way to know for sure that I was pleasing God was to keep score. If I read the Bible, prayed, tithed, witnessed, and did any number of other spiritual works, I would surely make God happy.

To make matters worse, I was a pastor. I actually had a platform from which I could share my try-harder doctrine: God wasn’t about grace, God was about doing. The more you did for God, the better off you were. And if you weren’t doing, you needed to seriously question your Christian commitment.

I spent the better part of a decade calling poor, exhausted sinners to come and work their hearts out for God. I closely resembled the Pharisees Jesus rebuked in Matthew 23:15: “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are.” I wasn’t very good at winning people to Christ, but I was great at winning them to Christianity.

I was far from righteous. The secret sins quickly won the day in my heart. I had a significant amount of pain and dysfunction from my own bad choices growing up, and now I was compounding things by preaching a system that I myself wasn’t even keeping. I was the ultimate hypocrite. I looked really committed, I was quick to condemn those who failed, I told people to keep the rules—and yet I was an absolute mess.

My spiritual house of cards collapsed in a heap in the summer of 1996. The pain and guilt of not practicing what I was preaching, the shame of secret sin, and the spiritual bankruptcy that always comes with the try-harder mind-set all caught up with me. I had a complete spiritual, emotional, and physical breakdown. I walked out of the church I was pastoring, unsure if I would ever return, unsure if I was even a Christian.

If trying hard was enough to make you holy, then I should have been a candidate for sainthood. In reality, I was nothing more than what I’d always been—a desperately needy sinner.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.