John Walt

I have never been good at doing what I am supposed to do. Because of that, I have caught a lot of flak over the years from the “keepers of order.” It seems that most people want a clear outline of how they are expected to behave, the more detail the better. If you give me a list of things to do I will struggle, but if you give me an objective to achieve, I come alive. In my early 20’s I found myself face-to-face with one of the most confusing concepts surrounding spiritual life.

All my life, I had been told there are a whole bunch of things you shouldn’t do and a few things you should do when it comes to following God. The shouldn’t do list was really long and pretty clear, the should do list was much shorter and honestly confusing. We all know most of the shouldn’t dos, but if you need a refresher, you can start with the 10 commandments and then look at all the amendments we have added since then. But when it comes to what we should do it seems to vary based on who I was talking to. I was told I needed to attend church regularly, tithe monthly, have a quiet time every morning, have a small group, find ways to serve, and the list goes on and on. The reason the shoulds were confusing was because I didn’t see most of them in Jesus’s teachings. Staying away from the shouldn’t dos was straightforward but uninspiring. I was told everyone needs an accountability partner that they talk to regularly. Great, what is the purpose of that? To make sure you don’t do things you aren’t supposed to. Ok, what do accountability partners do if you fail? Nothing, they are just there to hold you accountable, whatever that actually means.

All of this led me to a place where I had to be honest, I was not at all motivated by the behavior modification that most spiritual leaders seemed to be teaching. I was tired of watching people who were living by the shoulds burn out. Sometimes they gave up altogether, and other times they seemed to just shut down inside and become apathetic about their life. Neither of those was ever an option for me. I wanted to live to the fullest, to suck the marrow out of life and to seize the day. I couldn’t square the shoulds with what I read in Jesus' teaching. One day, as I wrestled with this question, a thought popped into my head that I believe was from God. “The gospel is not about restraint, it's about abandon.” Those words created a picture in my mind where instead of working to be who I should be, I could completely and totally surrender to who God created me to be. Instead of restraining myself and trying to fit into a mold others had for me, I could fully dive headlong into the life God had for me. It was freeing because I felt like it gave me one objective to focus on, and I could pour all of myself into that.

So much of modern Christian teaching obsesses over behavior, or as Dallas Willard calls it, “the gospel of sin management.” What Jesus invited us into was completely different than that. The Pharisees were obsessed with behavior management, and Jesus came in and completely flipped the script. Instead of focusing on behavior, he focused on the heart. This is such an important distinction because it's the same struggle we deal with today in navigating our spiritual lives. Are we trying to manage our behavior or give ourselves over completely to a wild ride with God? I chose the wild ride. I haven’t spent too much time over the years worrying about sin because if I am living the path of abandonment to God, then I am constantly being transformed, and the “wrong behavior and wrong thinking” just seems to fall away as my heart is changed and my mind is renewed.

Right order vs. Right behavior

The gospel of sin management is focused on making sure we live out the right behavior. This includes all the should’s and should not’s that we have all been told. Many of these are actually good things, by the way, but they aren’t the point. That is where the concept of right order comes into our spiritual lives. If I put behavior over heart transformation, then I am out of order. If I think avoiding sin is more important than connection to God, then my spiritual life has the wrong order.

But the concept of right order goes much deeper than that. If I am being transformed and living from connection to God, then out of that I naturally create right order in the world around me. When I am spiritually living in the right order, then it drives my behavior. I can’t want to steal, kill, and destroy when my heart has been transformed by God. But behavior change was never the point, it's just a byproduct. The same concept is seen in medicine when we look at treating symptoms vs. treating causes. We can treat symptoms all day long but until we address the root cause, we will never have dealt with the issue. If my heart is not transformed but I manage to behave correctly, then I am just treating the symptom, and at some point, symptoms will manifest in other areas of my life.

We have probably all seen this too many times, where a great Christian who seems to have it all together suddenly seems to run into a brick wall. I personally have watched people “walk away" from God, or drift into universalism, or just start to look for new ways to feel alive. That doesn’t happen when we are living in the right order. This is because the right order is full abandonment to God. If we are fully surrendered, then we have died to the lie that we deserve anything or can achieve anything on our own. It’s much harder to “sin” when our ego and self-interest aren’t running our lives. If you think about it, all the shoulds are driven by a root of self-interest, “I want to know I am right.” So we take control and try to make the spiritual life a simple outline of behaviors and beliefs. When we surrender completely to God and we are transformed, then our behavior is driven by the state of our heart and not something we are trying to control all the time. I believe this is what Jesus was talking about when he said that lusting is the same as adultery and hate is the same as murder. It's all about the heart, and the heart can't be changed through restraining ourselves; it is only changed through complete abandonment to God.

The gospel of sin management is appealing because it gives us some assurance against destructive behavior. We don’t want our kids or friends to make messes of their lives so we make sure they know what is acceptable vs. unacceptable. What if by preaching right behavior, we are actually distracting people from the right order of things they are created to live from? What if teaching restraint is keeping people from seeing the path of abandonment?

When God first gave me the thought about restraint vs. abandon, I didn’t know fully what it meant or where that path would lead. But I did know that it meant I didn’t have to shut myself down to try to fit into a way of living that I felt people were trying to cram me into. So from then on I knew the path God has for me won’t be one where I feel like I'm holding myself back all the time. I had a picture of literally diving into life in God with all my intensity and passion, holding nothing back. It was years later that God led me into the metaphorical desert to die. When I finally saw the things I was holding onto, I didn’t feel ashamed of my self-obsession or try to figure out how to change my behavior. I cried, I saw how wrong I was, and then I abandoned myself deeper to God and surrendered what I had been holding onto. As I have said many times, God continues to show me more places that have to die and more areas where I am self-obsessed. Each time I trust Him more and find myself diving in more wholeheartedly. I can’t surrender everything to God wholeheartedly if I am restraining myself. Most of what we are taught about God is that He wants us to restrain ourselves from our sin nature, but what if what He really wants is for us to wildly surrender it to him?

Right order vs. Right behavior

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