There is an unquestioning embrace of performanicism in all sectors of life. “Performancism” is the mindset that equates our identity and value directly with our performance and accomplishments. It casts achievements not as something we do or don’t do but as something we are or aren’t. When we attend college, we become the labels our education gives us. We let it define our value as a human being in the eyes of our peers, parents and selves. The money we earn, the car we drive… they’re a reflection of us, period. How we look, how intelligent we are, and what people think of us is more than descriptive, it is synonymous with our worth. In the performancist world, success equals life, and failure is tantamount to death. This is why people would rather end their lives than confess that they’ve lost their job or made a bad investment.

This is not to say that accomplishments are somehow bad, or even that they aren’t incredibly important. It is simply to say that there is a difference between taking pride in what we do and worshipping it. When we worship at the altar of performance—and make no mistake, performancism is a form of worship—we spend our lives frantically propping up our image or reputation, trying to do it all, and do it all well, often at a cost to ourselves and those we love. Life becomes a hamster wheel of endless earning, proving, maintaining, managing, and controlling. Performancism causes us to live in a constant state of anxiety, fear and resentment, until we end up heavily medicated, in the hospital, or just really, really unhappy.
The Christian church is not immune to performancism. It often seems that the good news of God’s grace for those who don’t measure up has been tragically hijacked by an oppressive religious moralism that is all about rules; doing more, trying harder, getting better, and fixing everyone–ourselves, our kids, our spouse, our co-workers, our boss, our friends, our enemies. Christianity is perceived as being a vehicle for good behavior and clean living rather than being the only recourse for those who have failed over and over and over again. Believe it or not, Christianity is not about good people getting better. If anything, it is good news for bad people coping with their failure to be good. Ask any of the “religious nones” who answered differently in past years, and I guarantee you will hear a story about either spiritual burn-out or heavy-handed condemnation from fellow believers, or both. Author Jerry Bridges puts it perfectly when he writes:

“My observation of Christendom is that most of us tend to base our relationship with God on our performance instead of on his grace. If we’ve performed well—whatever ‘well’ is in our opinion—then we expect God to bless us. If we haven’t done so well, our expectations are reduced accordingly. In this sense, we live by works, rather than by grace. We are saved by grace, but we are living by the ‘sweat’ of our own performance. Moreover, we are always challenging ourselves and one another to ‘try harder’. We seem to believe success in the Christian life is basically up to us; our commitment, our discipline, and our zeal, with some help from God along the way. The realization that my daily relationship with God is based on the infinite merit of Christ instead of on my own performance is a very freeing and joyous experience. But it is not meant to be a one-time experience; the truth needs to be reaffirmed daily.”
What Bridges describes is nothing less than the human compulsion for taking the reigns of our lives and our salvation back from God, the only one remotely qualified for the job. “Works righteousness” are the words that the Protestant Reformation used, and it has plagued the church—and the world—since the Garden of Eden. It might not be too much of an overstatement to say that if Jesus came to proclaim good news to the poor, release for the captive, freedom for the oppressed, sight to the blind, then Christianity has come to stand for and perpetuate the exact opposite of what its founder intended (Luke 4:18-19).

I’ve been in the church long enough to listen for certain things when Christians talk about grace. I listen for “buts and brakes.” Christians often speak about grace with a thousand qualifications. Our greatest concern is that people will take advantage of grace and use it as a justification to live licentiously. Sadly, while attacks on morality typically come from outside the church, attacks on grace typically come from inside the church. Somewhere along the way we’ve come to believe that life is about behavioral modification and grace just doesn’t possess the teeth to scare us into changing, so we end up hearing more about what grace isn’t than we do about what grace is. The fact is that “Yes grace, but…” originated with the Devil in the Garden of Eden. Therefore, the biggest lie Satan wants the church to believe is that grace is dangerous and therefore needs to be kept in check. And sadly, the church has believed this lie all too well.

It is a terrible irony that the very pack of people that God unconditionally saved and continues to sustain by his free grace are the very ones who push back most violently against it. Far too many professing Christians sound like ungrateful children who preach against “too much grace.” It amazes me that you will hear great concern from inside the church about too much grace but rarely will you hear great concern from inside the church about “too many rules.” Why? Because we are by nature glory-hoarding, self-centered control freaks.
This kind of moralism is tragic because it creates anxiety, resentment, rebellion and exhaustion. It’s the kind of irony that hemorrhages the precise people that Jesus was most concerned with: sinners.

The church needs to honor its founder by embracing sola gratia anew, to reignite the beacon of hope for the hopeless and point all of us bedraggled performancists back to the freedom and rest of the Cross. To leave our “if’s” “and’s” or “but’s” behind and get back to proclaiming the only message that matters—and the only message we have—the word about God’s one-way love for sinners. It is time for us to abandon once and for all our play-it-safe religion, and, as Robert Capon so memorably put it, to get drunk on grace. Two hundred-proof, unflinching grace. It’s shocking and scary, unnatural and undomesticated… but it is also the only thing that can set us free and light the church, and the world, on fire.

Tullian Tchividjian is a South Florida native, Senior Pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, a visiting professor at Reformed Theological Seminary, and grandson of Billy and Ruth Graham. He is the founder of LIBERATE (liberatenet.org), a bestselling author, a contributing editor to Leadership Journal, and a popular conference speaker. Tullian and his family reside in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Follow Tullian on twitter at: @pastortullian.