Sonship Week Vignette 1--On Time Righteousness

This year at Sonship Week we tried a few new things.  One of them was an attempt to have a better integration between worship and the teaching that we were providing.  Like every collaborative effort, working with a lot of moving parts takes a fair bit of co-ordination.  In this case, this meant that we were asking our speakers to finish their talks promptly, so that there would be enough space and time for our worship and times of response.

As the leader of the week, the responsibility for keeping us on schedule largely fell to me, and I must say the teaching team really did a remarkable job of working hard to finish their talks on time.  And of course, in my own desire to lead by example (1%), serve the rest of the team well (1%) and prove just how possible it was to deliver an excellent talk and finish right on time since I'm such and "old pro" at it (98%), I again saw just how much I need the gospel.

On Thursday AM, I gave a talk about how we need to have daily intimacy with our Father for the gospel to grow in our lives.  To be honest, even though I had thoroughly timed out the talk, and written my stop time (9:10) on the top of all my notes, I was totally lost in the moment.  I felt free!  I felt alive!  I felt like I was really connecting with the audience!!  And when I sat down, I finally remembered to look at my watch.  And...  it said 9:10 on the dot!!!

Are you ready for the fall?  My immediate response was, "Yeah!  All right!  I did it just right.  I said what I wanted, the way I wanted and I finished right on time.  I'm worthy of the team's respect."  And then, what do you think I noticed?  I noticed that on the timed schedule for the day, that my finish time was actually 9:05 and not 9:10.  My immediate response was, "Oh crap!  I really blew it.  I didn't perform the way I needed to, and no matter what I said or how well I said it, this talk is failure.  I'm a failure."

You can see the problem here can't you?  My righteousness and reputation before God does not improve even if I do everything right, or even if I do everything wrong.  Both of those swings of emotion revealed to me that even in the midst of hearing the gospel at Sonship Week, I'm still always striving to establish my own righteousness--a self-righteousness that is based on my merit and performance (even when that merit is trivial!!).

Of course the story gets worse.  After sitting there in despair for a few minutes and pondering the unbelief that each of the reactions evidenced, I then remembered that we had started the session 5 minutes late... So I was on time after all!  And right in that moment, even after having just seen how greedy my heart was for my own reputation and repenting of it, I again ran right back to my  "on time righteousness" as my defining identity.  

Sheesh... I thought Sonship Week was going to fix all of that!