I learned growing up in a legalistic church that my eternal destiny was determined to a large extent by my performance. I had to be good. I had to do my part. The performance message was reinforced all around me in church and in life. If you eat your vegetables you can have dessert.If you are good you get toys at Christmas.If you get all A’s you will get a monetary reward.If you behave your parents will be proud of you. So I learned to perform to get rewards and affirmation. Performance addiction is easy in legalism because you always have someone willing (and extremely happy) to challenge how well you are doing and where you can improve. So I performed. I tried hard. Then harder. Like most performance addicts I got tired and sad and desperate. I was on the verge of accepting that this journey with Jesus is a lot of begrudging compliance. The supposed joy that I
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If you read more than a snippet of my writings you know that I am a grace guy. But there is a question that confounds me. “If grace based theology as the way to live out the Christian life is true then why is it not more popular in the church?” That is a great question. I have been swept away by grace. Everything in my life has been changed by taking away my performance based faith and believing in Christ’s performance for me. During a preseason football telecast I thought about a parallel between one of my least favorite football strategies and this grace conundrum. Perhaps it was an insight from the Holy Spirit. Perhaps it was simply because my brain is not wired to factory specs. But this idea popped in my mind. A lot of football teams play a defense that is called the prevent defense. That style of defense is designed to allow the opponent short yardage gains as
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