"That had been my same reaction to the Ten Commandments. I don’t believe in cheating, lying, or killing, and moreover, I don’t do those things. Then about two years ago it occurred to me that one of the reasons God gave us the Ten Commandments was that we have in us the impulse to cheat, lie, and kill. When I dared peek at my impulses, there they were. And I shrunk from that glimpse.
It is the same with Paul’s rejection of self-justification. He must have known that our fallen nature strives intensely to justify itself by any means it can other than by grace. Most of what I have done with my life springs from this nearly irresistible passion.
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And we have an image to maintain. Churches have an image to maintain, and Christian colleges do as well. We want to show that being a Christian makes a difference and that Christ transforms our lives. True as these are, they push us to cover up our problems, to pretend that everything is okay, and ultimately to justify ourselves because of how we live.
The strength of the impulse to self-justification can be illustrated by the difficulty we have in receiving gifts. We want to give something back in order to even the score or to demonstrate that we are as good as the giver. The same is true of accepting God’s grace. We sometimes find ourselves wanting to give something back to God, not so much as a response of gratitude, but as a way of showing that we are worthy of his grace. We want to even the score so that we can demonstrate that we are not helpless as the gift of grace implies. “To know that God loves us not because we are good but ‘just because’ is sometimes unbearable.” We want to convince God that we are pretty decent people whom he should admire.
But, of course, with God there is no way we can even things up, there is no way we can show that we deserve his gift, and he isn't impressed very much with our schemes and pretensions to convince him that we are decent and admirable.
How do we pretend? When we are bright and cheerful, others think that we are victorious Christians and that nothing is wrong with us—and we know that they think this of us. When we pray before meals or in prayer meetings or carry our Bibles, we are conscious of others observing us. We refrain from confessing our struggles so we will not appear to be weak. At the same time, when we do confess our difficulties, we sense that we are admired for our honesty. (We give up one game to play another.) We keep unacceptable emotions locked up but appropriately display other emotions. We act in ways we know our Christian group will approve of, use the right words to describe our faith, and avoid behavior we know will bring disapproval.
In a way, then, we need to pretend because we need to feel good and important. Yet we despise pretending because we want to be real and genuine. So we are caught in a dilemma: We can scarcely help pretending, yet we hate it.
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The truth is that we pretenders are hurt. We sometimes doubt our faith, and this is unsettling because we want the security of knowing the truth. We are lonely, wondering whether anyone likes us. We fight off the gnawing pangs of conscience, as the thought of a past indiscretion springs into our minds. We wrestle with self-rejection and feelings of inadequacy. Some of us are depressed and can scarcely survive each day. Some of us have been betrayed by our parents—hit or criticized or handled sexually or neglected—and are wounded deeply by the memory. Many of us are restless, searching for something more, sometimes with quiet desperation, wanting intensely to tell someone yet even more fearful of doing so.
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Is there any other way to dissolve pretending than by means of God’s grace? Can anything else heal our wounds and salve our hurts? Can anything else satisfy our ceaseless strivings and restless hearts?"
--shortened from "Pretending, Self-Justification, and Grace" by Clifford Williams
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