Relax! God Doesn’t Want to Watch You Perform, He Just Wants You Willing

As Christians, we can easily get sucked into the belief that God wants to watch us perform great deeds for him. But maybe we have it all wrong.

When Thousands Watch You Perform (and Fail)

“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, fellow students and professors,” I looked around the audience of over a thousand. Every word of my carefully memorized campaign speech vanished from my mind.

The pause turned pregnant as words and phrases trickled back in disorder. My suddenly cold hands gripped the podium, and I stammered out lame lines about how I would make a great leader of the university’s student association.

As my vision tunneled, I could see a few sympathetic faces in the audience as they watched my pitiful performance. I can’t remember exactly what I said before I stumbled off stage in humiliation. But I knew my cocky decision to leave my notes behind had cost me the election.

All my opponent had to do was smile and say a few lines that didn’t sound garbled, and he would win.

The Path to the True You

This painful experience started me on the road to finding my true self—the self God loves unconditionally. The self that doesn’t need to stand on a stage, look a certain way, say certain things, and rigidly adhere to a particular set of rules to feel beloved of God.

God wants me to have a willing heart—even if I fail. Even if I think the task seems impossible.

So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.

Romans 12:1-2 MSG

God doesn’t want us to perform for him. He wants us willing to do the hard work, the unappreciated tasks, and the behind-the-scenes loving that no one will ever appreciate, acknowledge, or know about.

If we fall into the trap of expecting God to watch us perform, we’ll end up plastic and fake.

The way we treat people, the earth, and animals in private matters more than how we treat an audience at church. Our ordinary lives say more about our relationship with God than any church office we hold.