Saving the Saved: How Jesus Saves Us from Try-Harder Christianity into Performance-Free Love

By Bryan Loritts

White-knuckling can never get you where you want to go. But grace can.

You already know because you’ve tried: repeated attempts to earn God’s love and approval get you nowhere and leave you exhausted. When performance taints our relationship with him, the Christian life can turn into an unholy hustle. It was never meant to be like this.

In Saving the Saved, Pastor Bryan Loritts reveals the astonishing truth that God doesn’t want your spiritual scorekeeping. He simply wants your surrender. The punchline of the gospel of Matthew is just that—a message of grace and performance-free love to do-good, try-harder Jews who thought they had to earn their way into God’s favor. It’s an ancient message, yet it can be a lifeline to us today as we live in a world of performance metrics. Just as Matthew wrote to the Jews in his gospel, we were never meant to flounder under the pressures and anxieties of show Christianity. Make no mistake: we are called to live in obedience, but Jesus wants us to save us from the illusion that our actions can ever earn God’s acceptance of us.

In Pastor Bryan’s relevant, uncompromising style, Saving the Saved proclaims the good news that once the pressure is off to perform, we are free to abide. Beyond the man-made rules and the red tape, there is a God who knows you by name. Come and meet him as you’ve never known him before.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Zondervan
• Release date: Oct 11, 2016
• ISBN: 9780310344940

Bryan Loritts

Bryan Loritts is the lead pastor of Abundant Life Christian Fellowship in Silicon Valley. A graduate of Cairn University (formerly Philadelphia College of Bible) and Talbot School of Theology, Bryan Loritts was recently voted one of the top thirty emerging Christian leaders. He is the co-founder of Fellowship Memphis—a multi-ethnic church where Bryan served for eleven years, helping it to grow from twenty-six people in a living room to several thousand. Pastor Bryan also served as pastor for preaching and mission at Trinity Grace Church in New York City, and is the author of several books. He is the President of the Kainos Movement, an organization aimed at establishing the multi-ethnic church in America as the new normal, and sits on the Board of Trustees for Biola University and Board of Directors for Pine Cove.  He is the husband of Korie and proud father of three boys: Quentin, Myles, and Jaden. You can follow Pastor Bryan on Twitter @bcloritts.

Book preview

images/img-25-1.jpg PART 1 images/img-25-1.jpg

what goodness isn’t

CHAPTER 1

soul songs

THE LIFE YOU’VE ALWAYS WANTED

Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.

Matthew 4:1

The question of performance-free love transcends ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic status. Am I forever loved for who I am? is the background elevator music to our hearts. And if such a love does exist, how does it manifest itself in my life? The answers to these questions are found in Matthew 3 and 4.

The slaves of the antebellum South ached for something more. In a world where they were treated as less than human, they knew what others said about them, and the way they were treated was at odds with who they were created to be. Listen to the songs they sang in the sweltering heat of Southern plantation cotton fields, and you will get a peek at their unsettledness. Sure, some of their songs were encrypted messages of escape passed through the vocal highway of melody, but their songs carried a richer message. Frederick Douglass, the great nineteenth-century abolitionist orator, reveals why the slaves sang:

I have often been utterly astonished, since I came to the north, to find persons who could speak of the singing, among slaves, as evidence of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears.¹

The slaves sang because something was wrong. Life as they knew it was amiss. Like a CT scan, the songs of the slaves revealed the most intimate sections of their hearts. At their core, the slaves sang because they longed for more. Their songs articulated the deepest aches of their souls.

The biblical equivalent to the old Negro spirituals is a collection of psalms called laments. Journey through these lament songs, and you hear the aches of the Jewish people, who put pen to the disequilibrium in their souls. These laments could easily be mistaken for Negro spirituals, as the Jews wondered if they were loved, if God really cared about them—and if he did, would he protect them from their enemies? Embedded in the Jewish laments and Negro spirituals are universal questions that continue to play on the iTunes playlists of our hearts.

Like the oppressed Jews and African slaves, we all want to know we’re valued and esteemed for who we are and not for what we do. We want a performance-free love infusing us with inherent worth and dignity. We need to know we’re valued and accepted, even when our performance fails. Does such a thing even exist? And if it does, what does it look like?

PERFORMANCE-FREE LOVE

There is a beautiful episode in the life of Jesus where we see him receive performance-free love. In Matthew 3 and 4, Jesus is on the precipice of his public ministry. In just a few moments, he will pick his disciples and ascend a mountain to preach the greatest sermon ever preached—the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7). But when we encounter Jesus in in these early chapters of Matthew, he’s still considered some average Joe whom hardly anyone knows, from some Podunk village called Nazareth. The timing of this scene is critical, because remember, he’s yet to perform. He’s worked no resurrections, extended no forgiveness, stilled no storms. In Matthew 3 and 4, Jesus is just what many mistakenly think him to be—a mere human born under suspicious