The Pitfalls and Joys of "Trying Harder"

I recently wrote a brief defense of the importance of personal effort (or “trying harder”) in God’s gracious design to transform His saints. My central claim was that we put ourselves at odds with the NT if we understand or teach the dynamic of sanctification in a way that devalues or strongly cautions against hard work.

But that doesn’t mean emphasizing hard work has no attendant hazards.

Bob Hayton wrote of one of these pitfalls in a post last summer: Particular Pitfalls of Independent Baptists: Performance-Based Sanctification.

Work hard, feel good; blow it and feel terrible. Where is the

confidence in God’s grace in this model? The secret to living victoriously for Christ is gritting your teeth, doing more, and not doing the things you shouldn’t do. Try, try, try. Harder, harder, harder! Don’t quit. Keep going. We say that salvation is by grace, but growing in Christ is about the will power, the commitment and the determination.

This can lead to despair or a terrible form of pride.

The solution Bob advocates (citing Terry Rayburn and Tim Kellar, in part) is to reject trying harder, and focus exclusively on faith. Several Reformed leaders have emphasized a similar perspective in recent years (with a burst of back and forth on the Web beginning in the summer of 2011, see the table posting tomorrow), Tullian Tchividjian and Sean Lucas among them.

My purpose here is to explore the problem Bob and others have described. Perhaps we can come to more fully understand it.

The “just preach the gospel to yourself” view of sanctification has a legitimate complaint when it describes the despair-pride yo-yo experience many believers go through. I’ve not only met Christians like this but have done my share of bouncing up down as well. Whatever might be lacking in the “just preach to yourself” or “gospel centered” model, it’s advocates are right that a state of alternating inner turmoil and arrogance cannot be what Christ and the apostles had in mind in the New Testament.   Continue at Aaron Blumer

Good and Angry: Four Anger Myths

They may not be many in number, but they do exist: Christians who are thoroughly confused about anger. During counseling, reading, and sermon-listening, four myths have come to my attention repeatedly. Here’s a brief, non-expert—but hopefully thought-provoking—response.

Myth 1: If you don’t let it out, anger will drive you crazy.

This popular notion probably has its roots in Freudian psychoanalysis. Freud’s million-dollar idea (or at least the pop-psych version of it) was that the human subconscious sort of reroutes “repressed” emotions into psychoses that seem unrelated to their causes. Pent up anger can eventually make you think you’ve been abducted by aliens or that people you know and love are afflicted by a strange disease only you know about and that you have to shoot them to cure them. So, to be healthy, we must express not repress.

 This kind of thinking about anger is common in popular film and television. If only the serial killer had openly expressed his anger, he would never have become such a monster. Cue commercial.

Sometimes Christians view anger this way as well. “I just need to vent,” they say.

But if we remove the Freudian assumptions, the idea that it’s healthy to openly express anger looks highly questionable. Is there really a place anger goes to lurk when we’re not feeling it? Certainly our thoughts and beliefs live in memory, but what if anger—and other emotions—really exist only when we’re feeling them?

In any case, if we take an honest, careful look at our own experiences of anger, we find that letting anger loose physically or verbally usually produces more anger, and then more, until an explosion leaves us physically and emotionally exhausted—and not angry anymore. People who indulge anger in this way often believe they’ve done something healthy when, in reality, if they had confronted the angry thoughts earlier in the process, they would have found that the emotion evaporated without any outward expression at all (easier to say than to do, but true, nonetheless).

Some advocates of “venting” nuance the term a bit and recommend physical exercise, etc., as opposed to expressing angry thoughts verbally. In my experience this works, not because anger goes somewhere to be stored, and exercise vents it, but rather because anger exists only as long as angry thoughts are happening to sustain it. Eventually, doing something unrelated breaks our thinking out of the revving-up cycle and the anger fades. This isn’t venting. It’s distraction, and doing crossword puzzles works about as well as beating fists on a punching bag—probably better.  Continue at Aaron Blumer

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The Idea of a Standard of Ethics