Many Christians experience spiritual burnout, but few are willing to admit it. It’s the perfect way to describe how I felt that at the age of thirty. I was mentally tired. I was emotionally tired. I was physically tired. Most of all, I was tired of Christianity.
But here’s what I didn’t see coming. My burnout eventually led me to a startling discovery. All my efforts to gain self-worth and self-acceptance by living like a super-Christian were not from God. They were Satan’s perversion of Christianity, which I like to call “Checklist Christianity.” I had been deceived by it!
Checklist Christianity is the false belief that God wants us to focus on doing what is right and avoiding what is wrong. As a result, we believe he has a long checklist of all the right things he expects us to complete each day. It’s easy to fall into this trap. Since we want God to bless us, we take a daily inventory of our mental list and check off what we’ve done. If we have done most of the items, then it is a good day, and we believe our efforts will result in blessings from God. But if we haven’t done enough on the checklist, we will have a bad day, and God will be disappointed. We fear a lack of blessings or that punishment awaits us.
When you consider this ridiculous system, no wonder many Christians burn out. Who can keep up such a crazy checklist that consistently? If you are motivated in your relationship with God by obligation, fear, and guilt, you will eventually hit a wall.
The good news is God was there when I hit the wall. Sometimes I wish I had known the truth of the New Covenant then so I wouldn’t have had to go through what I did. But if I hadn’t, I probably wouldn’t have such compassion for those who experience it in their own lives. I also wouldn’t have had the passion to share God’s best-kept secret with thousands of Christians.
Are you living by Checklist Christianity? If so, there’s an answer. It’s living in the power of God’s grace through your union with Christ instead!
(C) “God’s Best-Kept Secret: Christianity Is Easier than You Think”, Mark Maulding (God’s Best-Kept Secret is now available on Audible.)
