Confessions of a Recovering Self-Righteous, Legalistic, Judgmental Hypocrite (part 1)

Geesh, do I gotta? After reading that title back, I’m not really sure I want to write this post after all…

…

Oh…all right. 🙂

One thing I’ve grappled with for most of my life, and especially as a youngster, is an overactive sense of conscience. I’m a lot better than I used to be, but there was a time when I couldn’t do anything without second-guessing my own motives and assuming the worst of myself. The only explanation I can come up with as to why I was this way is that as a kid growing up in a broken home, I developed a warped sense of responsibility and became an overachiever. At any rate–I had high standards for myself, and I beat myself up with guilt when I failed to meet those standards. I had a deep desire to be “good” (which isn’t a bad thing), but I tormented myself when I wasn’t.

How this played out in my discipleship as a kid was that I expressed an interest in spiritual matters beyond my years, and this got me a lot of attention from the grown-ups in church, which I liked a lot, but which also sort of loaded me up with a sense of expectation. I developed this identity as a super-zealous spiritual teenager with a great calling on his life, and between that and the blossoming of my musical talents at an early age, I gained a sort of celebrity status in church circles. I became popular among many of my peers, who saw me as a leader and would sometimes even come to me with their problems.

A lot to live up to. 🙂

The problem was…I had problems of my own. I wasn’t that guy, not really. I was no super-Christian. I struggled with compulsive and sinful behaviors in secret, partly as a release valve to all the pressure I lived under. And the simplistic message of grace I’d learned (just confess and be forgiven) did nothing to teach me about the root issues of why I was compulsive in the first place. You can imagine the sense of guilt and shame this created in me. You know that argument Paul has with himself in Romans 7–that part about wanting to do good, but then doing the very thing we hate? I lived in that place constantly. And the only way I knew to try to cure myself was to beat myself up with guilt, steel myself, and try to beat my issues by sheer strength of will.

As you can imagine…this cesspool created a lot of legalism in my life. It generated a lot of simmering anger underneath the surface. And even while I dealt with these issues secretly, somehow I believed the persona that had been created for me…and this combination made me self-righteous and judgmental. And all this stuff sort of came out all over the people around me. I was all about being “on fire for Jesus”, and I’d chide my peers when they didn’t share my zeal. As a teenager, when I got an opportunity to preach to my peers, I’d let ’em have it, both barrels.

Looking back…it’s a wonder to me that I had any friends at all. But I did. And I think they genuinely loved me, but they, too, believed this super-Christian persona I had, and that often made them feel like they couldn’t measure up in my presence.

If they had only known I wasn’t measuring up, either.

I couldn’t see it then, but now it’s crystal clear to me that the anger and “fire” I used to preach with was really anger I felt for myself. It was like there was this standard that none of us could reach, and I somehow thought if we could whip ourselves and each other into shape, we could attain that standard. Whew. What a way to live.

I share this part of my experience because it has taught me two things about legalism which help me understand when I see someone walking in that kind of judgmentalism and legalism:

• Quite often (but not always), legalistic people are themselves tormented because they do not measure up to their own standards–and that’s why they come across as they do.
• Quite often (but not always), the people who come down on sin the hardest are doing so because they are struggling with it themselves and do not know how to conquer it.

More about my journey soon…