God Is Not Mad at You: You Can Experience Real Love, Acceptance & Guilt-free Living (6 page)

When people try very hard and still experience failure, a cloud of doom often hangs over them and they can easily believe there is no hope, but in Christ there is always hope. The prophet Zechariah suggested that people be “prisoners of hope” and receive a double blessing for what they had lost (Zechariah 9:12). To be a prisoner means that we are locked up and unable to get away from a certain place or thing. Live your life locked up with hope and unable to get away from it and you will see amazing things happen. No matter what you have gone through or might be going through right now, you can hope (have faith) that God is working on your behalf right now and that you will see the results of His work in your life. You don’t have to be a prisoner of your circumstances, but instead you can be a prisoner of hope.

There is freedom from an oversensitive conscience available, and it is found in studying God’s Word. The more we study and get to know God personally, the more we know the truth, and it sets us free little by little. If you suffer with chronic guilt, please don’t despair, but just keep studying the Word as God’s personal message to you. It will drive the darkness out of your soul and you will have a healthy conscience that can receive conviction from the Holy Spirit, but not condemnation from the devil.

The perfectionist can easily turn everything into a law or a rule that must be kept. When we make laws and try to keep them, we will always feel guilty when we don’t. During what I call “my miserable years,” I made a law of many things; one example was cleaning house. It had to be cleaned every day, and I mean
everything dusted, mirrors shined, floors mopped and vacuumed, et cetera. I would not allow myself to go out with friends and have any enjoyment or relaxation until the house was cleaned. If I tried to enjoy myself, I felt guilty, not because I had really done anything wrong, but because I was living under laws I had made for myself. When the children came home after school and began messing the house up, I went into my fits, as I lovingly call them now. I nagged them all the time to pick things up. It was so bad that they really could not relax in my presence much of the time. Fortunately God changed me before much damage was done and I am happy to say that we all have great relationships now.

I felt better about myself when all of my surroundings were neat and tidy, but how we feel about ourselves should come from inside, not from outside. What kind of laws have you made for your own life? Anything that is a law becomes something that you are obligated to do, not something you enjoy doing. If prayer and Bible study is a law for you, then you probably dread it and find it hard to get to, but if you realize it is a privilege and not a law, you can enjoy it.

God does want us to discipline ourselves and to have good habits, but He doesn’t want us to make laws for ourselves and other people. The law takes the life out of anything that we do. The law kills, but the Spirit makes alive (2 Corinthians 3:6). The only way a thing can be filled with life and joy is if we are led by the Holy Spirit to do it and if our motive for doing it is love for God and wanting to glorify Him.

You have made a law of a thing when you feel guilty if you miss doing it one time, even for a good reason. I exercise very regularly and to be honest, I hate to miss doing it, but I don’t feel guilty if I do. I love to spend time with God, but I don’t watch the clock while I do it so I can clock a certain prescribed time that I think I
need to put in. I still like a clean house, but I no longer feel guilty if all my work is not finished at the end of the day because doing it is not a law to me. I will do it, but I will enjoy my life in the process. That is God’s will for us!! He doesn’t want us living stiff, wooden, rule-oriented lives that have no joy in them.

Here is an example that may help you understand further. Dave and I believe strongly that God wants us to help the poor, and we frequently help people who are begging on street corners, but we don’t help everyone. It is not a law for us, but something that we are led by the Holy Spirit to do or not to do. I can remember feeling guilty if I didn’t give something to each beggar that I saw, but in my heart I sensed that some of them were not poor, and that they were simply playing on people’s emotions as a way to make money. When I gave to someone out of legalism, I didn’t enjoy doing it, I merely felt obligated, but now that I have taken a step of faith and decided to trust myself enough to be led by the Holy Spirit in these areas and others, I no longer feel guilty if I don’t give and I feel joy when I do. In the past week we have passed by three people begging on the side of the road, but we stopped and gave twenty dollars to only one. Why? We simply didn’t have peace about the first two, but when we saw the third man, Dave and I both felt led to help him. These types of decisions are not made with the mind alone, but they are discerned in the spirit.

The apostle Paul gives us great insight in Romans chapter 7 about not making laws out of things, but instead learning to be led by the Holy Spirit.

I think that we often make laws out of things because we are afraid to trust ourselves to be led by God’s Spirit. I urge you to refuse to live a life legalistic and to trust God that He will teach you how to clearly be guided by Him in all things.

Perfectionists are very sensitive to what others think of them and they often try so hard to please so many people that they lose themselves. What I mean is that in an effort to please others, they rarely follow their own heart and do what is pleasing to them or to God.

Some people are addicted to approval. They cannot feel peaceful unless they believe that everyone is pleased with them, and that is something that is next to impossible to accomplish. We just can’t please all the people all the time. The only way to avoid criticism is to do nothing, say nothing and be nothing, and that doesn’t sound very inviting to me. The need to be popular can make you neurotic and steal your destiny. The apostle Paul said that if he had been trying to be popular with people, he would never have become an apostle of Jesus Christ (Galatians 1:10). Any time a person is a leader of other people, others will criticize
him or her. As a leader, it is impossible for me to make one decision that will perfectly suit everyone, so I have to make my decisions based on what I believe God wants me to do, and not what people want me to do.

If Paul had an unbalanced need for approval, he could not have fulfilled his destiny. The Bible states that Jesus made Himself of no reputation (Philippians 2:7). He, too, knew the importance of not being overly concerned about other people’s opinions.

We cannot always be God-pleasers and people-pleasers at the same time. If you are overly concerned about what people think of you, then you need to seriously consider what that is going to do to you long-term. People who are addicted to approval frequently get “burned out.” They often attempt to do too much in order to meet all the expectations of the various people in their life. And it wears them out mentally, emotionally and physically. They are not good at saying “no,” and once again the problem of perfectionism (in this case, a desire to please everyone perfectly) creates anxiety and anger. When we say “yes” to everyone, we feel used and pulled in too many directions, and then we get angry. But we are the only ones who can change our situation. We create many of our own problems, and we are the only ones that can solve them. Don’t waste your time asking God to change something that He has already given you the power to change. Don’t complain and live a silently angry life while at the same time continuing to do the very things that make you angry.

Although it is true that people should not pressure us to do everything they want us to do, it is equally true that we are the ones who have the responsibility not to allow ourselves to try to please them to the point that it causes us to feel pressured. Don’t blame someone else for your failure to stand up for yourself.

People who step outside the box of what most people would
consider acceptable behavior are usually branded “rebellious.” Are they really rebellious, or are they attempting to be true to their own selves? Was Peter stepping outside the box of what was normal when he stepped out of the boat and began to walk on water at Jesus’ invitation to do so? The eleven disciples who remained in the boat probably thought Peter was very foolish. We often judge people who do what we would secretly like to do, but won’t do for fear of what people will think.

You can buy friends and acceptance by letting people control you, but you will have to keep them the same way you obtained them. It becomes very draining after a time, and you will end up resenting them for the very thing you allowed them to do. I have come to believe that if I can never say no to a person in order to remain in relationship with him or her, then that is probably a relationship that I don’t need.

Sometimes people we think are angry with us are not angry at all. It is our fears that give us that perception. Just as we can spend our life thinking that God is mad at us and He isn’t, we can also imagine that other people don’t approve of us, when in reality they may not even be thinking about us. Refuse to spend your life in fear of what people think, and begin to confront that fear. Get to the root of all your fears and you will probably find that most of them are unfounded and that they exist only in your imagination.

The pathway to God is not perfect performance. Some people in a crowd asked what they needed to do to please God, and the answer Jesus gave was, “Believe in the One Whom He has sent” (John 6:28–29). That is so simple that we miss it. We need to
believe in Jesus? That’s
it
? Surely God wants more out of us than that! More than anything, God wants us to trust Him and to believe His Word. You can get off the treadmill of trying to be perfect, because you cannot buy or earn God’s love or favor, not even with a perfect performance. It simply is not for sale!

If we can’t earn God’s approval, then how can we get it? Receiving God’s grace that is provided in Jesus is the answer to this problem. We must know that it is not anything we do, but God’s amazing grace that invites us into a loving relationship with Him. Grace is a gift that cannot be purchased with our performance or anything else. It can only be received by faith. Grace is God’s undeserved favor! It is His love, mercy and forgiveness available at no cost to us. Grace is also the power to change us and make us into what He wants us to be. There is no limit to God’s grace and it is available to restore and lift us up any time we fail. You can be free today from the anger and anxiety that is produced by perfectionism by giving up your own works and fully trusting in the work that Jesus has done for us all. Remember, the work that God requires of you is that you believe in the One Whom He has sent (John 6:28–29).

Grace not only forgives us, it enables us to forgive those who have hurt us in life. Repressed anger about the way others have treated us is often the root of perfectionism and the anger and anxiety it causes. Forgiving our abusers or enemies is a major part of our own healing. While we are learning not to be angry with ourselves for our imperfections, let’s also learn to give others the same grace that God gives us.

In his men’s seminar, David Simmons, a former cornerback for the Dallas Cowboys, tells about his childhood home. His father, a military man, was extremely demanding, rarely saying a kind word, always punishing him with harsh criticism and insisting
that he do better. The father had decided that he would never permit his son to feel any satisfaction from his accomplishments, reminding him there were always new goals ahead. When Dave was a little boy, his dad gave him a bicycle, unassembled, with the command that he put it together. After Dave struggled to the point of tears with the difficult instructions and many parts, his father said, “I knew you couldn’t do it.” Then he assembled it for him.

When Dave played football in high school, his father was unrelenting in his criticism. In the backyard after each game, his dad would go over every play and point out Dave’s errors. “Most boys got butterflies in their stomach before the game; I got them afterward. Facing my father was more stressful than facing any opposing team.” By the time he entered college, Dave hated his father and his harsh discipline. He chose to play football at the University of Georgia because its campus was farther from home than any other school that offered him a scholarship. After college, he became the second-round draft pick of the St. Louis Cardinals’ professional football club. Joe Namath (who later signed with the New York Jets) was the club’s first-round pick that year. “Excited, I telephoned my father to tell him the good news. He said, ‘How does it feel to be second?’ ”

Despite the hateful feelings he had for his father, Dave began to build a bridge to his dad. Christ had come into his life during his college years, and it was God’s love that made him turn to his father. During visits home he stimulated conversation with him and listened with interest to what his father had to say. He learned for the first time what his grandfather had been like—a tough lumberjack known for his quick temper. Once he destroyed a pickup truck with a sledgehammer because it wouldn’t start, and he often beat his son. This new awareness affected Dave
dramatically. “Knowing about my father’s upbringing not only made me more sympathetic for him, but it helped me see that, under the circumstances, he might have done much worse. By the time he died, I can honestly say we were friends.”