Excerpt One from The Captivity of Activity (Book in Progress)
The Lure
One Sunday afternoon after our family attended church together, I saw my three-year-old granddaughter imitating my husband who is a pastor. She was making several statements about Jesus that let me know she had really listened to his sermon. I decided to see just how much she understood and so I asked, "Mattie, who is Jesus?"
She rolled her big brown eyes for a second and replied, "Well, I don't know, but Papa helps Him."
At the moment, I thought that statement was really cute, but in the days that followed I realized how profound that statement was. We really have come to believe that we "help" Jesus, as if He needs our help. We have thought it and lived it for so long that even little children pick up on our incorrect doctrine. Who are we to think that God requires our assistance or that He could not get anything done without having us around to take on the responsibility of working for Him?
There is a common misunderstanding that is popular in the church of today. Most of us would readily agree that our salvation was totally an act of God's grace. We commonly agree that we did nothing to earn it or deserve it. It was a gift. However, we then believe that God's work is finished in our lives and that after salvation it's time for us to go to work "for" God. We believe that the "best" Christians, the ones that please God most, are those that we see out front working their fingers to the bone for the cause of Christ. But God warned us about the futility of that sort of thinking in Acts 17:25 where we are told that He cannot be served with human hands, as though He needed anything, since He is the One that created and breathed life into everything.
Let me share with you my own testimony that has brought me to the realization that the notion that we must "work hard" for God is simply not based on truth. In 1985 I made a promise to God. I told Him that for the rest of my life I would do anything I ever had an opportunity to do for Him. And for the next ten years, I honestly and diligently did that. I did everything I felt that God had called me to do and many things that I felt He had called others to do, but they had declined on doing. My head only shook in one direction. It would only go up and down, never from side to side. I reasoned that the more I did "for" God, the closer I would be "to" God. I believed the Bible verse that taught me I could do nothing without Him, but I reasoned that with His help, "I" could do anything. I had a lot of lessons to learned and I am apparently not a fast learner.
I willingly and stubbornly stayed in that lifestyle of hard work and constant "trying" for a long time. After ten years of trying to live up to my promise I had become completely disillusioned by ministry. Nothing had gone like I had planned. I had not grown any closer to God in that ten-year span of service, despite my dedicated efforts and difficult labor in the church. I hadn't grown spiritually. I had only grown tired. I became so frustrated with my efforts to serve God, my family, my church, my employer, and my own needs that I finally reached a point where I couldn't handle it anymore. So one day I told God, "I quit."
That was exactly what He had been waiting to hear. With that declaration, God knew that He had me right where He wanted me - at the absolute end of my self-reliance and feeble attempts to serve Him in my own strength.
Shortly after my stated resignation from ministry, I attended a conference and heard a speaker make a statement that God used to completely and irrevocably revolutionize my life. The speaker, Esther Burroughs, said, "God is not nearly so interested in what you are doing as He is in what you are becoming."
She continued to explain that my service for Him was not nearly as important to God as my relationship with Him. WOW! That concept hit me like a brick. The last ten years of my life had been consumed with service to the point of neglecting any time of fellowship with Him. There was simply no time for that with all that I was doing "for" God. Something had to be omitted from my daily life if I was going to be able to do everything I had been called upon to do and that something always seemed to be time spent just being with Him and enjoying the privilege of intimacy with Him.
Suddenly, like a lightening flash, the Holy Spirit exposed the scheme of the enemy to me. Satan is so cunning. His methods are precisely calculated and customized for each of us. He knew that there was no way he could tempt me to quit serving God. So he changed his tactics with me and attempted to "wear me out" so that I would crash, thereby putting me out of commission. That's exactly what happened, but like everything Satan intends for harm, God took what seemed like my defeat and used it for His glory and to my best.
You may have heard that old saying, "you can be so heavenly minded that you are of no earthly good." Well, I believe that saying is false. In fact, I believe that the truth lies in the polar opposite of that statement. You can be so busy trying to be of earthly good that you lose sight of anything that is heavenly minded. That is what happened to me.
In his book, "Grace Land", Dr.Steve McVey relates his similar journey from trying to do everything for God. He states that he had always said, "I'd rather burn out than rust out." Then one day God showed him that either way, he was out!
Do you remember the character Otis Campbell from the old Andy Griffith television shows? He reminds me of a lot of Christians I know. He was never forced into the jail cell. But week after week, viewers watched and laughed as he walked himself into the jail, took the keys off the wall, opened the cell door, walked in voluntarily, shut the door, and reached out between the bars to hang the keys back on the wall. He chose to make a captive of himself.
Here's how that reminds me of many Christians. Our enemy wants to take us captive by any means that will work. For many of us, activity is another form of captivity that serves his purposes well. The grace of God has set me free from bondage to anything. Satan can't do anything to force me back into captivity. But he can set it up and deceive me in such a way that I impose a sentence of captivity on myself. I choose to go into self-inflicted captivity. You'll never see this title in any theology book, but I call it "Otis Campbell Christianity!"
Paul had something to say about such a life. Galatians 5:1 says, "It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery." Christ died to set us free from bondage. He wants us to stay free, not to be set free from one form of captivity just to chain ourselves to another. Understand this, you can never be forced back into any form of captivity. But the wording of Paul?s admonition teaches us that we can "let" it happen if we are not wise to the enemy's schemes.
There is an interesting statement made in Exodus 13:17-18. This text takes place just after the account of God's miraculous intervention forcing the Pharaoh to release the Hebrew children who had been held as slaves in Egypt. We are told that God did not lead the Hebrews through the area where they would face war, even though that was a shorter route to their destination. And we are even given the precise reason why God chose an alternate route. God said that if they faced war, they might turn around and go right back into captivity. So instead He led them toward the Red Sea where He could show them His mighty power.
Couldn't He have shown them His power in war too? Of course, He could have. But He knew He would never get that chance because the people would choose captivity over war. God had set them free. There is no way that He would have allowed them to be forced right back into captivity, but He certainly didn't want them to go back of their own free will. So He sovereignly engineered another way to show them His faithfulness by getting them to a spot where there was no alternative but to trust Him.
Our enemy cannot force us into any form of captivity. But when we choose to depend on our own strength and we attempt to do great things "for" God in our own might, we become victims of our enemy's crafty lure into bondage of another kind. Our intentions may be sincere in that we just want to serve God, but such intentions are proven to be harmful and we find ourselves locked, sometimes for years, in the captivity of activity.
During the entire ten-year span of my captivity in the land of activity, God showed me the truth in numerous ways. I just refused to see it till I finally got to my own Red Sea and I knew that I couldn't go any further unless God worked a miracle. He did.
When I reached the end of my own abilities, I gave in to the overwhelming fatigue and frustration that flooded over me. I knew that there had to be something more to life in Christ and I wanted it. In fact, I didn't want to go on anymore without whatever it was that I was missing. What I was missing was "truth." And the truth has truly set me FREE!
