“Not until you’re humbled down into the dust because He had to die for you (no other way).  And not until you’re affirmed and valued into the sky, because He loves you so much that He was glad to die for you….will you be humbled out of the pride that makes you look down on other people, and will you be affirmed out of the self-hatred that makes you look down on yourself…..at the same time.” – Timothy Keller

I used to think of my life as being some percentage good/righteous and some percentage bad/sinful. Perhaps depending on the day, I was a good guy with sin issues that needed work or I was a sinner with a few good attributes. This thinking led to me working on the bad/sinful areas to try to fix them. This thinking led to self-righteousness. Self-righteousness is thinking that I can do better and work on my sin issues to get rid of them. Self-righteousness is what leads to eternal separation from God. Only by His righteousness am I accepted. There is no point in striving to be righteous. It’s been given as a gift. Not accepting that gift and striving instead is not good. I’ll explain a bit more what I mean…….

So before the Gospel, I needed you in order to know who I am. You had the power to make me feel affirmed and valued, or wretched and worthless.

So I would make sure that you affirmed and valued me. I would be what everyone needed me to be. I was the nice guy that I thought everyone wanted so I’d get your approval.

But what is that? It’s manipulation. It’s using people and positions to gain for myself approval, affirmation, adoration, and acceptance. It had been a complete blind spot my whole life. I didn’t even know I was doing it and as far as I know, neither did most others. I was really good at it.

So you can begin so see why I would do this. I desperately wanted to be accepted. I want to be accepted by my friends, I want to be accepted by my family, my church, and I want to be accepted by God. And deep, deep down I had this feeling that to be accepted, I must be perfect. I must be righteous. So I’d work really hard to maintain that.   My heart was wounded and not fully receiving the Gospel, “The Good News”. That we’ve been made righteous by the blood of Jesus.

I once heard righteousness defined as: “The state of one who is as he ought to be.”   Early in life, a seed was planted. “I must be perfect to be accepted”. Afterall, isn’t that what God requires? So I lived as I thought I “ought” to live in order to be as I “ought” to be. The trouble was that the vision of perfection and what I ought to be didn’t match my reality. I wasn’t perfect. I wasn’t as I ought to be. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get the reality of my life to align with the “ought” of the expectations. This produced shame. Which produced hiding from God and others. Which produced more and more failing to live up to the “ought”. A snowball effect was created.

A couple years ago I was in the midst of this and feeling extremely burdened with life. This was also the point in time where I was seeing for the first time all the manipulating I had been doing my whole life to get my needs met. I was pacing around my apartment and began yelling. I was yelling what I felt as though God was saying to me: “Stop striving! Just stop striving! I already accept you! You’re still trying to gain my acceptance and it’s killing you! Just stop striving!”

“No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.”