Entitlement

I have come to think of entitlement as a major problem in my life not in terms of “God owes me a life of glowingly successful service for His kingdom” but in terms of how I was taught to view myself as a child of God at all. As I see it, the entitlement of my upbringing resulted from the gospel being assumed, but not taught. If you were already a Christian, the gospel was passé. “Preaching the gospel” was strictly an evangelistic tool, seeking to make converts and after that one moved on to the business of learning to be good. The gospel got you “saved,” inducted you into the ranks of those who believe, but was more or less unimportant after that. My evangelical community growing up was much less concerned with the gospel than they were with being good. Breaking the code of conduct prescribed by the college for the entire community, which encompassed both larger issues and far too much minutiae, could result in expulsion from the community. A lifetime in this culture engendered in me a confusion of focus and effectively inoculated me against the truth of the gospel for a long time. How evil I actually was, was masked by expert external adaptation to the good conduct that as far as I could tell was the main thing. Exclusion from the community motivated a lot of activity (daily chapel and regular church attendance, for example) and non-activity (a ridiculously long and arbitrary list of abstinence). The gospel was nowhere to be seen, at least it took me a long time to see it. When I finally glimpsed it, it was clothed in very ordinary non-religious digs.

One of the most helpful resources I’ve encountered recently in continuing to understand this dilemma in myself is Tim Keller’s book The Prodigal God. He helped me recognize myself in different phases of my life as both the elder brother, actually thinking God owed me because of my good behaviour, and as the so-called prodigal, dissatisfied with the perceived restrictions of living in the father’s house and only at last seeing the truth “in a far away country.” The gospel is the thing that is helping me realize who God is and what the big deal is for me to be in relationship with Him at all, and I am endlessly learning what it means to stake my entire life on the gospel and not on my performance, including that which I credit to God’s work in my life. With this has come the startling realization that for all my growing up in a conscientious religious environment, I didn’t learn the gospel. Among other things, this has screwed up my church involvement pretty badly, still the most difficult aspect I’m struggling to figure out. I know I need community because I will not thrive alone, and am committed to cultivating that. But I'm dead afraid of more religious paganism. Recovery is proving a long and winding road. At the same time I feel a freedom in my spirit that has come from the gospel that did not exist before. It’s been a gradual dawning, not a big emotional experience, or I’d have rejected it for sure. I consistently meet friends along the way, some in church and some in other places, some with similar stories and some with radically different stories, but who are all seeking non-religious gospel living with more questions than answers. My suspicion is there are a lot of us out there, spanning a wide age bracket.