I grew up in a self-sufficient, “pull yourself up by the bootstraps,” Western world. Naturally, when I recognize an area in my life that needs growth, I assume I need to just buckle down, identify the root of the issue, and strong-arm my way to healing. Sometimes, I even rely on “religious tools” like prayer, scripture, worship music, and journaling as I attempt to overcome these problems.
Most of the time, I wind up exhausted, frustrated, and burnt out.
I often struggle with the false belief that God will love or save me based on my works. But love cannot be earned—it must be freely given and received. God didn’t send His Son to save “good” Christians (if they even exist). Jesus came for messy, needy, and vulnerable humans. He yearns for raw, organic relationships.
In Matthew 11:28-30 (MSG), Jesus asks a burnt-out society:
Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me, and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me, and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.
Jesus describes His yoke as comfortable. Comfortable can be translated to kind or compassionate. A yoke is a connecting tool—it’s designed to connect two individuals together so they can walk steadily in sync. If oxen are not equally yoked in strength and size, the weaker cannot keep up and gets dragged behind and crushed.
Too many times do I “yoke” myself to religiosity and perfectionism until I can’t keep up with its pace and get dragged behind.
But Jesus wants to set us free from the yokes that crush us by inviting us to lean on Him, as He is “gentle and humble in heart” (Matthew 11:29). For me, this has meant a perspective shift, as I rely on God to take care of me rather than attempting to have it all together. It involves inviting Him into my confused inner thoughts and choosing to trust in Him rather than myself. He is not only the author but daily sustainer of our faiths (Hebrews 12:2).
Healing Takes Time
In response to my self-reliance, God offered me the analogy of a tree. Pete Hughes preaches that trees don’t grow fruit by thinking, apples, apples. Rather, they sit in the right conditions and soak in the water and naturally produce fruit over time.
Sometimes, I think I can “will” myself to be less anxious or perfectionistic by thinking, be peaceful—don’t stress. Be perfect. Let it go. Ironically, as I try to force myself to change my emotions by sheer willpower, I end up feeling more anxious and stressed.
I felt God calling me to be like a tree planted in Him. He is the water that nourishes the tree and sustains its growth daily. If I just spent time with Him, and maybe even stopped thinking about the problems that needed to be fixed, He would heal me over time.
And He did. As I spent time with God not focusing on my issue but simply seeking to learn more about Him from His word and honest prayer, my heart was healed from perfectionism, my need for others’ approval, and so many other issues. Early on, He told me that He would reveal the roots of these issues and heal me. I thought each of these issues had one root cause, and if I could identify the source, I could heal myself. As it turns out, these issues had tons of causes, many of them being deep-rooted beliefs that I held from my childhood. My perfectionism stemmed from my lack of patience and grace, high expectations, and fear of angry reactions. As I showed up and sat with God daily, He gently revealed the underlying beliefs driving my perfectionism.
Many of our personal issues stem from the unhealthy lies we’ve absorbed over the years, heard or observed from our parents, early authority figures, entertainment, friends, and surrounding cultures. Lies like, you are what you produce. You cannot drop the ball. Everyone’s relying on you. No one has your back. You’re in this alone.
When these messages have been etched into our minds for years, it takes time to heal and rewire our thinking. Our old patterns of living don’t just wash away with one inspiring sermon or Bible verse. Sermons and scripture are powerful tools to help us identify lies and learn truth, but repetition—soaking in God’s truth and spending continuous quality time with Him—is what causes heart change. I felt God challenging me to step out of my old framework of thinking (criticism, guilt, and fear) and move into His home (grace, patience, compassion, and love).
As I spent time with God, He helped me to recognize the unhealthy beliefs which built the metaphorical house I had grown up in all my life, beliefs I’d absorbed from Western culture, media, teachers, and even my parents. He challenged me to pause and consider when I was acting out of my “old house” of unhealthy frameworks rather than His.
God knew how deeply-rooted my issues were before I even recognized my need for healing, and He didn’t walk away then. He refused to leave me. In Romans 5:10-20, Paul essentially writes, if God didn’t walk away from us when we were at our worst, what makes us think He would abandon us now? Or, as John Flavel writes, “As God did not first choose you because you were high, He will not now forsake you because you are low.”1
Unlearning Our “Adultish” Ways
When Jesus’ disciples argued over who would be the greatest in Heaven, Jesus called a little child over and said, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of Heaven” (Matthew 18:1-3).
The process of learning God’s truths and separating them from the lies of our upbringing is much like being re-parented by God. For most of our lives, we were parented by (often) well-meaning but broken humans and a broken society at large. Perhaps, Jesus calls us to be born again because we’re going back in time to be re-parented by God, the gracious, gentle, compassionate, selfless, safe, protecting, providing, present parent we always knew we needed.
In Unfettered, Smith writes on the beautiful process of becoming a child again with God:
Adultishness made me believe that comfort was found in control over others, their admiration of me, my accuracy, my ability to name and manage the world around me, my hyper attention to my responsibility. And every time it all came crashing down, I…found ways to numb the pain of it. I’d imagined being an adult meant understanding, fixing, producing, and these false-self habits had been affirmed by my Western upbringing. But now…I saw how grown-ups can be terribly fragile, perhaps because of our desperate efforts to be strong. To [become a child] I had to set aside my adultish, controlling habits.
Jesus is inviting us to be like children in the garden once more. In Eden, those children of God knew their limitations and were unashamed. They weren’t surprised or anxious that they needed something beyond themselves. Any sign of something lacking in themselves was simply a sign to reach outside themselves. Children are not too proud to ask for help, sustenance, and comfort. A child’s first instinct on being born is to cry out, which is to say, “I don’t have something, and I will communicate that need to someone beyond myself.”
Satan shows the children in the garden both their desired outcome and their inability to achieve it, shaming their inadequacy…we are called to be children unafraid of what is lacking in ourselves, renaming the nakedness as the opportunity to put on God.2
Becoming Children Again
Jesus calls His disciples to give up their independence and adult concerns to become like children. To trust Jesus to do everything for us. Children are innately designed to trust their parents to provide for everything.3 The Hebrew word for trust implies a sense of safety and carelessness. Children can be carefree because someone else cares for them and is much better at it. If children can trust imperfect parents, how much more can we trust our perfect parent? We don’t have a futile, imperfect, or limited parent. He is overflowing with mercy and grace. Bursting with wisdom and good ideas on what we need. He spun up the universe by His great imagination and responsibly sustains it daily.
Perhaps we’re afraid to be carefree with God. Maybe we think He’ll mess it up or doesn’t really care. We might even feel that He’s let us down in the past, and we’re hesitant to trust Him again.
But God knows our skeptical nature and is willing to earn our trust. Rather than condemning ourselves, giving up in despair, or shrugging off the matter, we are invited to come to God and ask Him for help. Jesus’s death on the cross was an offer of rest from our striving to earn favor before God. Through His sacrifice, He essentially said, “I see that you’re tired of striving. I know you’re burnt out and exhausted. Why don’t you let me work for you and do the impossible for you? And you can just rest in me.”
Photo Credit: Nathan Hulsey
- John Flavel, Keeping the Heart: How to Maintain Your Love for God, (Fearn, Scotland: Christian Focus, 2012), 94.
- Smith, Unfettered: Imagining a Childlike Faith beyond the Baggage of Western Culture, 68-9.
- In order to be fed or bathed or taken care of, children must be willing to be taken care of, but they don’t worry about where the provision will come from or how it will be provided. When given food, they eat. When offered a bath, they receive. In a sense, it’s obedience and trust which keep them alive. They receive freely without wondering what strings are attached and aren’t afraid to ask for help.