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Why "Accountability Groups" Make Us Liars

The tragic irony in all of this is that when we focus so strongly on our need to get better, we actually get worse.

We become even more neurotic and self-absorbed. Preoccupation with our guilt (instead of God’s grace) makes us increasingly self-centered and morbidly introspective. And what is Original Sin if not a preoccupation with ourselves?

Make no mistake, we need loving friends to point out ways in which we’re settling for less—we need the help of our community to help us see our idols and the various ways we are trusting in something or someone smaller than Jesus to satisfy our deepest longings and needs. But what needs to be ultimately rooted out and attacked is the sin underneath my sins, which is not immoral behavior but immoral belief—faith in my own moral and spiritual “progress,” rather than in the One who died to atone for my lack of progress.

Listen carefully: Christianity is not first and foremost about our behavior, our obedience, our response and our daily victory over sin—as important as all these are. It is not first and foremost about us at all—it is first and foremost about Jesus! It is about His person; His substitutionary work; His incarnation, life, death, resurrection, ascension and promised return.

We are justified—and sanctified—by grace alone through faith alone in the finished work of Christ alone. Even now, the banner under which Christians live reads, “It is finished.” Everything we need, and everything we look for in things smaller than Jesus, is already ours in Christ.

So I’m all for accountability—but a certain kind.

The accountability we really need is the kind that corrects our natural tendency to dwell on me—my obedience (or lack thereof ), my performance (good or bad), my holiness—instead of on Christ and His obedience, His performance and His holiness for me. It sometimes seems we can’t help ourselves from turning the good news of God’s grace into a narcissistic program of self-improvement. We try to turn grace into law, in other words. We need to be held accountable for that!

The gravitational pull of conditionality is so strong, our hard-wiring for law so ingrained, we need real friends to remind us of the good news every day. In fact, our lives depend on it! So instead of trying to fix one another, perhaps we might try “stirring one another up to love and good deeds” by daily reminding one another, in humble love, of the riches we already possess in Christ.

©2012 Glorious Ruin: How Suffering Sets You Free; Tullian Tchividjian published by David C Cook. Publisher permission required to reproduce. All rights reserved.