Giving up on your life is freedom
It’s very clear to me that I can’t have anything to do with my salvation. The chasm between me and God is far too wide, and I will never become perfect. This is something that I’ve realized before, but not to the extent I have realized it now. I’ve given up on myself before, but not to this extent, not yet. I was holding a couple things very tightly in my hand and it was getting painful to hold onto them, so painful that I had to let go.
Today, I went to a group Bible study, which really just turned into a private Q&A session for me because I had too many questions. I should feel bad for the other people that had to sit through that, but I don’t. Fuck them. Maybe not really in a fuck them way, but before I got there today, I was spiraling hard, thinking about ways to ruin my life.
During the Bible study, I was able to get a lot of clarity on some questions on how I was to live my life. First off, here’s the roadmap of my current spiritual journey in chronological order. Steps 1-2 are what I’ve experienced thus far, and everything after it is what I see to be my next steps.
In a state of existential despair, looking for a clear cut path to salvation because I believed in God and hell, and would do anything to escape it. Fear dominated here, and I would guilt trip myself over the smallest things, because I was trying to achieve my way to salvation through perfection. I’m always going insane in my head.
I give up on myself entirely, realizing that I cannot do anything to achieve my salvation, and if God wants me in hell, I cannot do anything about it. So be it. Fear passes away here into a serenity bordering on lifelessness. I’m still spiraling, not in a way driven by fear, but characterized with a fatalistic carelessness.
My next stage is approaching this Christian thing entirely differently. No more chasing after perfection. God is the only one that can give me any kind of understanding of truth, change my heart or life in any meaningful way. It can ONLY come from Him. With that presupposition in mind, I’m going to approach this Christianity from a relationship with God angle instead.
Our pastor said, the reason the Good News is called “Good News” is because when you’ve tried to save yourself and failed at it, and realized that you have no potential — zero potential at all to reach across the chasm between you and God, the fact that Jesus came and died on the cross for us is Good News. He claimed that he’d been a Christian for 44 years, decided he was going to become a pastor early on in his life, but he thinks he just understood the Gospel/Good News a week ago, despite the fact that he’d been preached it hundreds of times. I think what he meant there is that there are different levels to understanding this. I believe I am only at the beginning of coming to understand this, and nobody will ever reach completion in their journey. So there will be many more aha moments incoming.
Duty can very quickly become a bad thing in your relationship with God. I’ve had some problems with this, so I’m really not going to try that hard anymore. Our pastor said that a sign of legalism creeping into your life is if you start feeling guilty when you don’t do the “Christian thing”. If I don’t feel very moved by God to do something, I’m not going to do it anymore. I can’t live my life like this anymore. I need to move on, or I’m going to get cardiac arrest.
Our pastor also said something about fighting the law, and fighting against your sin. If you draw a line in the sand for yourself, you’re sure to cross it. However, if you love God, and have abounding joy in Him, you won’t be too tempted by stuff anymore, because you’re already fulfilled. So that’s why I’m going to stop trying to torture myself to perfection in all areas of my life, whether it be being a better programmer, better Christian, etc.. I’m going to approach it via my relationship with God, and let Him work.
I need to keep my hands off the steering wheel, and hand it to God. But even for that, that’s what God is going to do. I need to stop expecting “basic competency” or good things from myself. That’s simply not a possibility. There’s no point expecting a 3-year old to write mathematical proofs. But that’s a very freeing sensation.
tldr; stop focusing on perfection, focus on the relationship