Good News for Weary Women (part 2)featured

This is Part 2 in a series of highlights from Elyse Fitzpatrick’s Good News for Weary Women. You can read Part 1 here.

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Elyse Fitzpatrick’s book, Good News for Weary Women is a call to women to lay aside our burdens and remember the Gospel.

One such burden is our tendency to strive to justify ourselves with our rule-keeping. We want to be okay before God, so we add extra rules and try-harder-do-better until we end up prideful at our “successes” or despairing at our inevitable failures.

Searching for identity
But Elyse Fitzpatrick makes another important point: if we’re honest with ourselves, we don’t always try to keep the rules because we’re asking, “How can I be right with God?” but, “How can I be right in my own eyes?” (120). “The bottom line is that we don’t believe Jesus’ perfection is enough for us. We accept that He loves us, but we want to be loved by ourselves even more. We don’t believe that His love is enough to satisfy our hearts. We want something concrete, something tangible” (127, emphasis mine). EF writes:

“As Christians, we’ve been wrongly taught that having God in our lives automatically makes us better people. But at the same time we’re taught that a victorious life is within our grasp, if only we follow the “secret steps.” Then when we struggle with failure, we assume that there must be something wrong with us–something that isn’t wrong with everyone else.” (121)

So we become obsessed with becoming the elusive “Better.” We try to follow the rules or complete the steps–not only because we think that will make us right with God, but because we want to achieve some state of happiness, strength, or sufficiency within ourselves and before others.

This is ultimately about identity. When we strive to be okay in our own eyes, we begin to define ourselves by the rules we keep and look down on others who do not meet our standards of righteousness. We see this in Luke 18 in Jesus’s description of a Pharisee who was an example of “some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt” (vs. 9):

Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: “God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.” (vs. 11-12)

The Pharisees thought that they were righteous based on all the rules they kept. But more than seeking the approval of God, they “loved the glory that comes from man” (John 12:43) and they viewed their status as reason to look down upon those they deemed less righteous.

We are all guilty of this. When we build our identity around something, we become condemning and critical of those who don’t live up to our standards. If I have built my life around having perfectly obedient children (ha!), I will be judgmental when my friends’ children misbehave and they do not respond how I think they should. Or, if (when) my children misbehave, I will respond to them harshly out of embarrassment, since they are messing with my identity before others. EF describes this as the idolatry of self, and it wreaks havoc in and around us:

When we are driven by self-forgiveness, self-approval, and self-perfection, our faith will inevitably be poisoned by misery and guilt. We make lousy gods, and our quest to find okay-ness in our own eyes will always lead to difficulties in our relationships and unrest in our souls. We will never know peace or joy. We will find it impossible to love. (121)

When we look at God’s law as something we can achieve and begin to define ourselves by those achievements (or condemn ourselves for the inevitable lack thereof), we have again misunderstood its purpose. I wrote earlier about the purpose of the law, to expose our inability to obey, to provoke us to gratitude for Christ’s perfect obedience in our place, and to show us how grateful obedience is lived out (68).

While we try to find our identities in our rule-keeping, the law exposes our inability to obey. We are tempted to boast in our successes, but we find ourselves humbled by our weaknesses. Once again, we must remember the Gospel. Then we will find ourselves praying like the tax collector, whom Jesus commends:

But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted. (Luke 18:13-14)

Identity in Christ
Instead of giving us reason for boasting in our accomplishments, the Gospel humbles us with reality. Christ died for us while we were yet sinners (Romans 5:8). We were saved “not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy” (Titus 3:5). God loves us apart from our works, not “some better, future, more obedient version of us” (50).

Who can stand up tall before the cross? Remembering the Gospel humbles us and causes us to find our identity not in the rules we keep but in the Savior who kept the rules for us. Christ obeyed the law perfectly in our place and now his record of obedience is ours as we are united to Him. That is good news! In light of this news, we are free to stop clinging to our accomplishments to give us reason for boasting. Instead, we find ourselves boasting with Paul in our weaknesses, because we realize, “When I am weak, then I am strong.” (2 Cor. 12:10).

The Lord’s word to you and to me is simply this: don’t boast in anything you do or anything you have. Boast only in the truth that you are loved by the Lord, who poured out His just wrath on your Savior and clothed you in His righteousness. Don’t seek to commend yourself, because ‘it is not the one who commends himself who is approved, but the one whom the Lord commends’ (2 Cor. 10:18). (90)

When we remember the Gospel, we are free to obey God’s law out of love for him and not to gain an identity for ourselves. As we do, we realize that Jesus came into the world to save sinners like us (see 1 Timothy 1:15-17). As we fail to live up to God’s standards and our own, we can be reminded of the depth of our need and the depths of His provision for us in Christ. And, in his mercy, “God loves to use sinners to accomplish His glorious goals…[so that] no one [will] be confused about who gets the glory” (103).

In Christ we are given an identity that does not rest on our supposed achievements but on the God who chose us to be His. We need to remember the Gospel, that we can live as He has already declared us to be: “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy” (2 Peter 2:9-10).