What the Gospel Means: Abandoning the Spectrum of Righteous Living

Before I knew Christ, I thought of my relationship with God in terms of how well I was keeping the rules, how I measured up on the Spectrum of Righteous Living. You know that spectrum, the one we use to compare ourselves with others, the one we use either to condemn ourselves for our moral failures or assure ourselves that we are doing all right after all.

We all know those outliers at the high end of the Spectrum: they seemingly never break a sweat and never break a rule. Self-control is as natural as breathing for these high-achievers, and they wonder why the rest of us have so much trouble keeping up.

And we waver back and forth between pity and outrage at the outliers who live at the other end of the Spectrum of Righteousness Living. These are the people who either can’t or won’t give up their many sins. They distinguish themselves by their outstandingly wicked behavior.

Most of us would admit that we’ll probably never get to the high-achieving end of the Spectrum, and we hope we never get to the other end. Most of us muddle somewhere in between and console ourselves by comparing ourselves with people around us.

Striving to improve our standing on the Spectrum of Righteous Living is a lose-lose proposition.

·         If we fail to keep the rules (and we always will), we will grovel in self-loathing and shame and despair.

·         If we “succeed” in keeping the rules, we will nurture a deadly spiritual pride that expresses itself in self-righteousness and spiritual hubris.

There’s no winning that rule-keeping game. There’s only sin there. And death.

That is why Paul called that game “the law of sin and death.”

But that’s not the main problem with that approach. The biggest problem with that Spectrum approach to spirituality is that it is alien to the gospel.

Jesus didn’t come to show me how to live a better life. He didn’t come to inspire me to do better and try harder to move up on the Spectrum of Righteous Living.

That’s not the gospel. If being a Christian means aligning my life patterns with the ethics and example of Jesus, I can never be a Christian. I can’t even live up to the standards of my conscience, must less the example of Christ.

This is why the gospel is such good news: it is entirely separate from the Spectrum of Righteous Living. If I want to know God, I’ve got to repent not only of my sins but also of my righteousness. I’ve got to abandon all hope that my rule-keeping ambitions, my behavior modification program, my sin management schemes will finally make things right with God.

I am made right with God not by doing better and trying harder, not by improving my standing on the Spectrum of Righteous Living, but by throwing myself on the mercy God has shown me in Christ. In other words, if I want to be right with God, I’ve got to abandon the Spectrum altogether.

But abandoning the Spectrum and trusting Christ instead isn’t just about the beginning. The gospel is not just how we come into a right relationship with God, it’s also how we live in Him, how we grow and flourish in Him.

If we forget the gospel, if we go back to live in that pattern of desperate rule-keeping and box-checking, we are living as if we never understood the gospel to begin with, as if Christ hadn’t set us free from the law of sin and death.

Even as Christ-followers, we can find ourselves again aligned with that Spectrum of Righteous Living when we are motivated by vanity or fear of man. And then we’re stuck again with those two bad options: either wallowing in misery and shame because we can’t measure up or strutting in arrogance because we keep the rules better than the rest.

The difference between a healthy attitude about sin and a gospel-forgetting, unhealthy one is subtle because it is a difference of the heart. It is a subtle trajectory of the heart that aims me toward obeying God because I love Him or obeying Him out of fear.

How can I tell what my motive is? What are the indicators that tell me I have slipped back into old habits of a performance-based faith aimed at climbing up the Spectrum?

When my motives are more closely related to fear and further from joy, that’s when I know I’m drifting back to those old habits of measuring myself on the Spectrum.

The gospel – the Good News that Jesus has done for me what I could not do for myself – is a great source of joy for those who have put their faith in him. Let’s live in that joy, avoiding sin and choosing virtue because we love God not because we fear failure.

Let’s leave the Spectrum of Righteous Living behind for good.