On Being a Performer: Jazz Hands & Pharisees

I am a performer. I love the energy and attention. I love the arch of a great production. I love the bonds that form in casts of quirky, "artsy" folk. I love having the chance to move an audience. And the applause certainly doesn’t hurt either.

I am a performer.

But I’m not just talking about the kind of performance that requires jazz hands and copious amounts of eye makeup. Or the kind that earns Meryl Streep an Oscar nomination every year. I’m talking about the kind that God hates. The kind that makes me believe I can make myself righteous by my own strength, striving and deadly doing. The kind that makes me simultaneously arrogant and insecure, that exhausts me, that entitles me.

The kind that gives me a hard heart towards God.

Performance has reared its ugly head in the most unexpected ways in my walk with Jesus. Most recently, my proclivity to perform has surfaced in this lie:

A sign of spiritual maturity is relentless positivity, unshakeable confidence, and a can-do attitude.

The enemy whispers: “Alright, Noelle, if you really trust the Lord, if you really love Him, then no amount of pain or confusion or disappointment should really shake you. If you are really rooted in Christ’s love for you, then you shouldn’t feel hurt when you’re mocked or rejected. If you are really pursuing God, then you should be impervious to loneliness, depression, or anxiety.”

These lies are problematic in three ways:

The Inaccessible God

When I believe those statements, I get to be my own God. Suddenly God’s strength and work become secondary to my own.  If I think these lies are true, what do I believe about God’s heart towards me? He isn’t a loving Father eagerly hoping that His daughter will plop down on his lap, empty-handed, needing refuge, attention, assurance. No, He is instead an abstract entity. A doctrine of beliefs. An unfeeling dictator who doles out orders without offering aid or direction to complete them. 

But that’s just not the character of God we see in Scripture. The Emmanuel, God-with-us God promises us over and over, “I will never leave you nor forsake you” (Deuteronomy 31:6) or in John 14: “I will not leave you as orphans, I will come to you… and make my home in you.” (See also Galatians 4:6-7, 1 Corinthians 1:21-22)

Because of Christ’s work on the cross, we can now come to God with our mess and instead of seeing sin, God sees Christ (Colossians 3:3). We can come before a Father who loves us so much that He will stop at nothing to call us into Himself – even sending His Son to die for us – so that “with confidence [we] draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Hebrews 4:16). The Gospel changes everything.

A Man of Sorrows

The picture of God that we see in the life of Christ turns those lies completely on their head. In Jesus, we see a God who subjects Himself to tremendous vulnerability and pain to rescue the ones He loves. Far from a life of naive and impenetrable optimism, Christ was the laughing stock of His community, His friends deserted Him, and He died with nothing. Isaiah 53 describes Him this way:

“He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces, he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he has borne our grief and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.”'

If Christ himself suffered rejection, loss, pain, betrayal, how can I expect to come out of this life unscathed?  By demanding that I walk through life with a resolute grin plastered across my face, I will not only terrify small children at Trader Joe’s (if you’re out there and reading this, I’m so sorry! I’ll pay for counseling…), but I am also behaving in my typical Pharisee fashion: "In this life, I will be good; I will make myself righteous; I will make a name for myself; I will prove my worth."

Nope. That just won’t do. God hates that, because He already knew we could never do those things - so He sent His Son to live the way we can't; to conquer death by becoming a sacrifice.  Because of Christ's work on the cross, we can come to the Father honestly. Now, He just wants my heart. He wants me – cheerful or not. Full of angst or full of laughter.  Spinning with praises or spinning with questions.

The Already & Not-Yet Kingdom

If God expects us to lead lives in which we are impervious and steeled to the undeniable pain of a fallen world, then how could we ever realize that we were designed for more? How could we ever experience the reality that we are foreigners and temporary residents (1 Peter 2:11)?

I was blessed to spend a year with a pastor who constantly repeated this idea: This life will never satisfy us because it wasn’t designed to. This life is merely an appetizer, tasty but never enough. We were made for the succulent, delicious, satisfying feast prepared for us in heaven. 

We were designed for full, intimate relationships, not broken and hurtful ones. We were designed for warm and welcoming homes, not tense and distant ones. We were designed for mountains that satisfy our cravings for adventure. We were designed for work that excites us, not work that frustrates and disillusions us. 

We were designed for the whole orchestra, not just the first violins.

In Tim Keller’s sermon “The Wounded Spirit,”he describes the tension of living in a fallen world so poignantly: this life is a “cosmic nostalgia," “a longing for something we remember but never had.”

So where do we go from here? 

In Larry Crabb’s book, Inside Out, Crabb describes our Call perfectly:

"God wants us to be courageous people who are deeply bothered by the horrors of living as part of a fallen race, people who look honestly at every struggle, who feel overwhelmed by what we see, yet emerge prepared to live: scarred, still troubled, but deeply loving. When the fact is faced that life is profoundly disappointing, the only way to make it is to learn to love. And only those who are no longer consumed with finding satisfaction now are able to love. Only when we commit our yearnings for perfect joy to a Father we have learned to deeply trust are we free to live for others despite the reality of a perpetual ache."

Much like the life of Christ, we can expect tremendous pain, suffering, and a perpetual ache for eternity. But upon resurrection, we can also expect glory, joy, and the fullness of the Father’s love beyond our wildest imaginings. In Revelation 21, John relates his vision of eternity to us:  

“And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away… I am making all things new.’”

So for now, we take Him at His Word. 

We hope.