Why Am I So Tired in My Faith?
Why do many Christians today feel exhausted from trying to be good enough?
It is true that our American culture is obsessed with performance, production, and perceived value but how does this translate to church culture? Why do we find ourselves working so hard for intimacy with God only to end up feeling like He is even further away? What would happen if we could truly do as the Bible commands us in Psalm 46:10 and “cease striving and know that I am God?”
Our lives would look endlessly different from the worldly culture around us. We would find our value and identity shaped by who God is rather than by what we are doing or experiencing. Unfortunately, the problem with finding true rest in the Lord often begins with what our churches are teaching us (either explicitly or implicitly) about what is truly important. Modern evangelicalism often measures faith by the intensity of our personal devotion and ever- increasing spiritual maturity. Because of this, rest often feels wrong or unearned because we can always do better. However, true Christian rest is found not in pietistic striving, but in a confessional, church-shaped life that anchors weary believers in Christ’s finished work.
I was recently gifted a book called “Rest: A Consideration of Faith vs. Faithfulness” by Jon Moffitt, Justin Perdue, and Jimmy Buehler. It is a short but impactful read in which the authors make the claim that the focus of the modern evangelical church is often on us-centered things rather than on Christ. When I received the book, I was entering a season of stepping back from a lot of the ministry-related tasks and duties to which I was previously committed. As someone who has often struggled with finding my identity in how I am serving in my church and whether or not I add value to the congregation, the Lord, in His providence, saw fit to challenge me to confront unbiblical beliefs and lean into the true rest that is promised in Scripture. Reading this book was a breath of fresh air at a time when I really needed this reminder and has been a continued encouragement to me that there is another, better, way.
Justin Perdue, one of the book’s authors, begins by making the claim that modern evangelicalism is a pietistic movement. Pietism is the idea that individual performance and emotional experience are the most important spiritual indicators in the life of a believer. In other words, pietism focuses on the subjective inner life and personal religious experience as the main measure of spiritual health. He states,
“Pietism begins with the questions: What must we do? This is the baseline consideration. As a result, duty (what we do) comes before identity (who we are) in a pietistic world. Even worse, in this schema, our identity is seemingly derived from what we do- or don’t do- and assurance is tethered to how well we’re performing our duty. If we aren’t performing well, we should be worried” (Rest 13-14).
This type of pietistic language shows up everywhere in modern church life. Think about how often we use phrases like, “I need to be more faithful with having a quiet time”, “Are you really on fire for Jesus?”, or even “Prayerlessness is practical atheism.” This gradually erodes the foundation on which our faith is set. It shifts from a faith built on Christ’s finished work on the cross, and in its place rises up a focus that unintentionally trains believers to find assurance in personal efforts. We begin to think less about Christ and more about each Christian. We become obsessed with personal victories over struggles and temptations, with church attendance and service, and with moral living. While those are all good things, they should not be the focus of our Christian walk. The focus should always be, first and foremost, on Christ, who is the author and perfecter of our faith (Hebrews 12:2).
What happens when the Church becomes a spiritual treadmill focused on personal results? Church becomes a place where we measure ourselves against pietistic standards and walk away
believing that because we are “doing good,” we are growing. Or the inverse, if we aren’t doing well, we are falling backwards into dangerous territory. But, ultimately, we end up doing the same things over and over with little spiritual growth and more and more exhaustion. In our modern evangelical culture, we often mistake busyness for devotion. If I can just serve enough, worship better, have longer quiet times every day, etc then I will finally be able to rest in the Lord. But I have to earn my chance to rest. This mentality inevitably leads to burnout, and we are no closer to the Lord than when we started. Why? Because we’ve made our spiritual lives all about us rather than being focused on the Lord. But what if we discovered that rest isn’t something to achieve, but rather, something that is already finished?
So, what is the antidote to a spiritual life marked by busyness, insecurity, and burnout? Confessionalism. Confessionalism is an adherence to historical church confessions that shapes the way the body of believers views the Gospel, themselves, and the great commission. The focus is on the objective truths of the Gospel which are shared and confessed by the Church and on the ordinary means of grace by which Christ gives rest to His people. While spiritual disciplines such as personal time in the Word, fasting, tithing, etc are encouraged, they are viewed as supplemental or secondary to participation in the body and the means of grace. Critics of confessionalism may view it to be too exacting and too specific but perfect confessionalism is not the goal here. The goal is for the Church to be centered on objective realities from which our theology flows and, in so doing, find true and lasting rest in Christ regardless of how we feel from moment to moment. In the book, Justin Perdue states,
“Confessionalism emphasizes Jesus and what He has accomplished on our behalf. The emphasis is on what has been done. The concern, in a confessional context, is that we take hold of- and rest in- our standing before God in Christ, regardless of how we might be feeling or performing at any given moment. If the Christian is at the center of pietism, Christ is at the center of confessionalism. Jesus and his work are in the foreground; the Christian life is in the background and is only rightly understood in light of Jesus and His accomplishments. Confessionalism begins with the question: Who are we? This is the baseline consideration. As a result, identity precedes duty in a confessional world. What we do is derived from who we are, not the other way around” (Rest 17-18).
So, what does it mean to rest in the finished work of Christ? It means that we are secure in the knowledge that Christ has already done everything necessary for our salvation and that the Bible is true when it says, “He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion” (Philippians 1:6). As believers, we are being sanctified daily, not by any works we can do or personal victories we can achieve, but by the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. How then shall we live and find true rest? By committing to a church-shaped life: the comfort of a shared confession, the ordinary means of grace, the weekly rhythm of hearing the true Gospel preached, and the reminder to ourselves and one another that our chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. Confessionalism gives believers a stable doctrinal anchor. It is based on Scripture and not in our ever-fluctuating spiritual experiences. It gives us a community that comes together each week to declare the truth of the Gospel rather than to put pious pressure on one another to perform better. Finally, it gives us a rhythm of hearing “Christ for you” not “do more for God.”
True confessional rest reshapes the Church’s focus. The focus becomes worship over self- assessment, honesty over hype, and dependence over striving. We choose to evaluate spiritual health less by “How did my week feel?” and more by “What has Christ promised and finished for me?”. Imagine with me what it would be like as weary sojourners in this land if we came to gather as the Church each week to acknowledge that we are indeed sinners in need of grace, to affirm that grace cannot be obtained through righteous works of our own, and to celebrate
what Christ has done for us so that we can rest in His perfect peace instead. We could finally get off of the spiritual treadmill that equates performance with pleasing God and identity with what we bring to the table in our congregations. Moreover, our mission and our sense of justice would be rooted not in ourselves and our guilt that we need to “do more”, but in grace and worship for our Savior who has done it all already. True confessional theology doesn’t make faith less personal; it makes it more sustainable by shifting the focus from ourselves back to Christ.
When you doubt your salvation, where do you instinctively look? To your performance? Or to Christ’s promises? Is your church asking you to feel more, do more, be more, or is the encouragement to rest more deeply in what Christ has already done? As believers living within a culture that puts maximum emphasis on how much we are accomplishing, our churches must encourage us to root our identity in what Christ has already done for us. Rather than deciding if we are good enough or doing enough to earn our place in our congregations and in the Lord’s kingdom, we must rest in the security that Christ has already done everything necessary to accomplish for us true and lasting rest in Him. Indeed, maybe the most radical thing a believer can do today is to stop trying to prove his or her faith, and instead receive the rest Christ has already purchased.
