When Strivings Cease: Replacing the Gospel of Self-Improvement with the Gospel of Life-Transforming Grace

by Ruth Chou Simons

That’s why the gospel isn’t a recipe for self-improvement. It’s not a mix of working with what you’ve got, sprinkling in a little religious effort, adding in discipline, strategy, and a healthy dash of likability. But this formula (as we’ve seen in previous chapters) isn’t entirely a recipe for disaster—if it were, we’d all have jumped ship like it was a bad fad diet we realized we’d taken up in a moment of weakness watching late-night television. No, unfortunately, this recipe sometimes yields results. It sometimes rewards those who keep on pushing, keep on hustling, keep on perfecting, keep on striving. But the fruit isn’t lasting because the control center that’s keeping us keeping on in this way was broken to begin with. It’ll only run for so long in its terminal condition.

“Without a heart transformed by the grace of Christ, we just continue to manage external and internal darkness.”2

So here’s the gut-punching truth: if you are constantly trying to control outcomes, circumstances, and others’ perception of you, you may be forfeiting the life-transforming power of redeeming grace.

The gospel of life-transforming grace isn’t the opposite of exhibiting good fruit; it’s the fuel that allows us to do so.

spent too many years thinking God saved me so that I could get my act together and be a better version of myself; I didn’t fully understand the gospel. That’s not the grace of God. I wasted so much time hoping more consistency, better choices, swearing off persistent sin, or hiding from God would help me feel more worthy. But no more. We can declare no more to the almost-gospel-but-not-quite versions

“the law was our tutor to bring us to Christ”

easy to fall back into a pattern of striving for grace rather than striving in grace.

Grace is not the reward in itself; knowing Christ is. Grace simply makes it possible for you to stop striving for yourself and strive out of love for God instead. Grace isn’t an excuse to be lazy or apathetic about the marks of a Christian life. Rather, it is the catalyst by which we can partake in it. Friend, we’ve not been saved by grace and spared the ceaselessness of striving so that we can stay the same. When we are informed by grace and not conformed to the law, we can strive the way we ought.

you don’t need to figure out how to be a model Christian, how to be more “on fire” for God, or even how to please God—if you’re in Christ, you are already pleasing to him because of Jesus. Your number-one job as a believer is to return again and again to the good news of the gospel—the foundational truth of redeeming grace—and let it draw you near to him once again.

grace is infinitely greater than our sin and shame. Surrendering to Christ did not erase his past; it rewrote his future. Friend, we cannot pay back an infinitely more capable, more generous God. Anything we’d even attempt to offer back to him was given to us in the first place.

“What shall I render to the Lord for all his benefits to me? I will lift up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord” (vv. 12–13).

He offered back to God the very thing God desires—our desire for him and for his glory to be made known in and through us. The only hope we have for feeling the freedom of a debt

What is the chief end of man? A: To glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever.

Fear is a ruthless beast we won’t just overcome with peppy affirmations and grit; we overcome fear with something more powerful, more capable of filling the void, more sustaining than any outrunning of it could produce. Fear is overcome with freedom—the freedom purchased for us in love through Christ’s grace.

In times of adversity Satan will seek to plant the thought in our minds that God is angry with us and is disciplining us out of wrath. Here is another instance when we need to preach the gospel to ourselves. It is the gospel that will reassure that the penalty for our sins has been paid, that God’s justice has been fully satisfied. It is the gospel that supplies a good part of the armor of God with which we are to stand against the accusing attacks of the Devil (see Ephesians 6:13–17).

Satan’s very favorite tactic, from the beginning, has been to mess with our minds and to plant seeds of doubt in God’s faithfulness, God’s forgiveness, and God’s favor. This is the trifecta of freedom in a believer’s life. His faithfulness eclipses our clawing for control; his forgiveness erases debilitating guilt and shame; and his favor eradicates our need to look anywhere else for love than God himself.

Without the transforming grace of God, we would have no answer for the Accuser but our own feelings, our own track records, or our own confidence. We’d be tossed about in fear and doubt because, quite frankly, we just can’t outsmart him with our own resources. But by grace, through faith, our defense is Jesus Christ—we don’t answer for ourselves. While self-help teaches us to rely on ourselves, Jesus sets the example (even as God’s Son!) for us to anchor our hope and defense in the Word of God.

biblically: keeping score is trying another person in the courtroom of your mind and subjecting them to the law you’ve declared and the standard you’ve created.

That’s because when we reject grace—God’s undeserved favor and forgiveness—and cling to self-hatred instead, we’re pridefully holding on to a stubborn idea of what we think we can or cannot be—which, friends, does not take into account the God that made you purposefully.

Self-belittlement and self-loathing actually flow from a heart that excuses itself on account of worthlessness and rejects the hope that is offered. Neither

In contrast, a grace-informed narrative sounds like: Without Christ, I’d be just as capable of lying, deceit, and manipulation. By God’s grace, I’m not where I hope to be, but I’m sure not where I once was. Before I was saved, I only lived for myself. If it didn’t please me or feel good, it wasn’t worth my time.

I am so prone to self-centeredness. Without realigning my heart and mind to my true identity in Christ, I’d be self-serving too.

Did you notice how the gracelessness of self-loathing and self-diminishing eventually leads to hopelessness toward others, while the confessional honesty and humility of a biblical self-assessment leads ...

What we want in the midst of keeping score and counting up wrongs is to win. But the way of grace is that victory has already been accomplished in all the ways we really need and want. If we no longer have to fight for another’s approval for assurance, no longer need applause for motivation, and no longer need another’s affirmation in order to know our God-given purpose, then we no longer need to go to battle in order to receive it. Any offense toward us doesn’t mar the image of God printed on our souls; our identities are secure in him.

How many times have you withheld favor from your kids, spouse, friends, or family members, believing that to give them grace is to excuse their behavior? Giving grace, when we are not Jesus, is not pardoning sin or acting as savior. It’s simply removing yourself as judge and jury and extending and communicating the very grace of God that has rescued you from being labeled hopeless, disappointing, unforgivable.

I beg you, friend, take your eyes off of everything you think you need to be amazing, and be amazed, instead, at God’s grace. Square your shoulders and fully turn your heart’s longings and desire to know and be known to him. Don’t settle for a peripheral glance now and then. Don’t be content to grow numb to this extravagant gift. Let us not be among those amazed by ourselves

At the end of our days, when we cross over into glory, we’ll have questions that won’t seem to matter anymore, and earthly sorrow will pass away. But we won’t bring along our resumes, and that stunning career accomplishment will look dingy against the white-hot glory of God’s holiness. The number of boxes you checked off next to your Bible reading plan won’t be your badge; the seal of the Holy Spirit on a surrendered heart will tell of your arrival. And in the presence of our Holy God, what will keep us from incinerating on the spot will be our safekeeping in the cleft of the Rock—the covering of grace through the blood of Christ—that shelters us now and holds us fast into eternity.

I know you think you have to hold it all together—your home, your kids, your school schedule, your relationships, your family dynamics, your work performance, your fears, and your pursuit of God.

But the life-transforming gospel of grace declares that it is Christ who is holding all things together. He’s the one who holds you secure in the arms of grace. So, you can rest, friend. You really can. Not a forgetful, complacent rest but a deep and unhindered surrender. It’s a rest that brings to a halt our endless well digging and causes us to lay down our shovels for good...

Strivings cease when . . . . . . we no longer need to prove our worth. . . . we stop chasing approval as our comfort. . . . we glory in our weaknesses. . . . God is greater than our accomplishments. . . . we know peace apart from pleasing others. . . . God is for us and no longer against us. . . . Jesus so captures our gaze we stop chasing everything else.2