The Idol of Grit

Article originally hosted and shared with permission by The Christian Economic Forum, a global network of leaders who join together to collaborate and introduce strategic ideas for the spread of God’s economic principles and the goodness of Jesus Christ. This article was from a collection of White Papers compiled for attendees of the CEF’s 2019 Global Event.

— by Peter Greer & Chris Horst

Our world is short on hope. From racial injustice to poverty to political polarization to the moral failures of prominent leaders—bad news dominates our headlines. We feel hope in ourselves, our societies, and our leaders running thin.

It’s even more painful when we hear stories of scandals and abuse among followers of Jesus—people who use power and position to subjugate instead of serve and people who claim to worship God yet seem to worship themselves. We witness cover-ups and financial mismanagement, hypocrisy, #MeToo and #ChurchToo movements, viciousness from people who pin crosses on their blazers, and unchecked materialism from people who were supposed to “store [their] treasures in heaven.”[1]

When we see these abuses or experience the pain they cause, we can feel justified in asking: Is it time to give up on church? Time to give up on organizations and institutions? Time to give up on the dream of changing the world? Even more severely, we ask if it’s time to give up on God.

When we look for solutions to this ballooning hopelessness from our society, we come away feeling entirely unsatisfied. Leadership gurus promise easy hacks to solve our disappointments and management challenges. Instagram influencers outline diet and exercise plans guaranteeing a healthier life. Technology companies insist their latest app will solve our relationship challenges, improve our sleep, and decrease our stress and anxiety.

In 2020, “self-care” expanded to a $450 billion industry, 45 times larger than it was just one decade earlier.[2] From Fitbit to candles and from self-help books to meditation apps, we are spending close to half a trillion dollars annually in our attempt to purchase hope.

But our experience and observation tell us that our cultural obsession with self-improvement is entirely insufficient. The rates of depression, anxiety, stress, and suicidal thoughts continue to increase throughout the United States.[3]More than half of Americans say they are more anxious today than they were one year ago, a reality we acutely feel as we write this in 2021.[4]

The solutions proposed by Christians are often just as unhelpful. Trite Jeremiah 29:11 memes, assuring us our hardships are NBD—no big deal—because God has a plan, aren’t helpful. We don’t need any more advice amounting to tying theological bows on disappointment and pain.

In our leadership journey, we have benefited from and enthusiastically endorsed books like Grit by Angela Duckworth and The Resilience Factor by Andrew Shatte and Karen Reivich. But we recognized our own temptation to embrace our culture’s obsession with self-improvement—to place our trust in our own abilities, grit, and resilience and to make these good things the ultimate thing. And we began to recognize that they make a faulty foundation for sustaining our service.

Tumbleweeds and Fruit-Bearing Trees

Throughout the Bible, we read of the shocking prevalence of idols. Despite God’s desire for proximity and relationship, time and again the Israelites traded the real thing for a counterfeit. We may be tempted to scoff at their worship of physical idols. The prophet Jeremiah certainly put it bluntly: “People who worship idols are stupid and foolish.”[5] Yet today, our hearts remain equally capable of idol worship, and we suspect Jeremiah might speak the same words to us.

Though most of us aren’t bowing to statues or poles, we’d argue from personal experience that many leaders’ idol of choice is the idol of our own abilities: a good thing we are tempted to distort into the ultimate thing. Too often, we create a god in our own image—a god we can understand and control. Yet, Jeremiah reminds us that we need a bigger, more mysterious, and more wonderful picture of God. His ancient words to the people of Judah resonate with contemporary truth as he calls out their idols—and ours—and offers an alternative.

In Jeremiah 17:5-6, God leads us into the dirt, literally, by providing, through Jeremiah, an agricultural object lesson.

This is what the Lord says:
“Cursed are those who put their trust in mere humans,
who rely on human strength
and turn their hearts away from the Lord.
They are like stunted shrubs in the desert,
with no hope for the future.
They will live in the barren wilderness,
in an uninhabited salty land.”

Cursed. Stunted. Barren. The image is bleak. God gives us a picture of unfulfilled promise—a living thing created to flourish but rooted in its own deficiency. The Message translation says, “Cursed is the strong one … who thinks he can make it on muscle alone and sets God aside as dead weight. He’s like a tumbleweed on the prairie, out of touch with the good earth. He lives rootless and aimless in a land where nothing grows.”[6]

Tumbleweeds, a common nickname for a plant also known as Russian thistle, dot the landscape of the American West. When winter arrives, the brittle plants die, detach from their roots, and aimlessly blow wherever the wind carries them. Tumbleweeds inhabit places “where nothing grows.”

Jeremiah saw God’s people picking the wrong soil, putting down roots not in God but in idols or allies that couldn’t sustain them. Jeremiah relates this image of the stunted shrub or the aimless tumbleweed to those who choose to sink their hopes in anything but God.

Most temptingly today, we place our confidence in the idol of self-reliance. With clenched teeth and gritty resolve, we say, I’ve got this. We wage war against the most intractable issues of our day, and often, we attempt it in our own strength. We believe ourselves qualified and capable, relying on all the resolve and resilience we can muster. It’s pride and, Jeremiah would suggest, idolatry. We bow to the idol of our own grit. But this type of humanism rarely holds when the winds of pain and disappointment blow. Unmitigated disappointment opens the door to cynicism, as our focus shifts inward.

Turning inward and attempting to live within our own strength will eventually let us down. Relying on our abilities, we become brittle.

We rightly recognize and celebrate grit and resilience in our culture. But grit alone will not sustain us.

In her book, Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, journalist Anne Peterson describes our society’s addiction to easy fixes to the hopelessness we feel.[7]

We gravitate toward these personal cures because they seem tenable, and promise that our lives can be recentered, and regrounded, with just a bit more discipline, a new app, a better email organization strategy, or a new approach to meal planning. But these are merely Band-Aids on an open wound. They might temporarily stop the bleeding, but when they fall off, and we fail at our new-found discipline, we just feel worse. (sic)

While Peterson may not agree with Jeremiah’s prescription, she identifies just how insufficient these strategies are to creating the change they promise. Jeremiah leads us to a conclusion that is far simpler and far more profound than we anticipated: grit and resilience flow from our rootedness in the God of hope.

Never Stop Producing Fruit

Through the prophet Jeremiah, God invites us to pursue the alternative of “in my own strength” humanism: hopefulness, rooted in trust and active expectation in God’s strength and faithfulness. He invites us to sustain hope amid the drought because He is the One who sustains. He invites us to cultivate deep roots that reach the ever-flowing Source of Living Water.

“But blessed are those who trust in the Lord
and have made the Lord their hope and confidence.
They are like trees planted along a riverbank,
with roots that reach deep into the water.
Such trees are not bothered by the heat
or worried by long months of drought.
Their leaves stay green,
and they never stop producing fruit.”[8]

Jeremiah contrasts stunted shrubs with an image of a firmly planted tree, producing fruit amid the harshest drought. Both will experience droughts and heat. The difference, Jeremiah tells us, is roots that connect to Life. It’s making the Lord, not ourselves, our source of hope—turning upward, not inward. Likewise, in our conversations with global leaders we work alongside, we do not hear self-reliance; we hear faith. We do not hear about strength and resolve; we hear about roots.

Ultimately, where our roots find their source of life makes the difference between a fruit-bearing tree and a brittle shrub. This is the difference Jeremiah calls out. It’s not about our own strength. It’s not about a new model of self-help. It’s a story of deep trust, connection, and reliance on God—despite harsh, even brutal, conditions.

Jesus tells us the way to produce fruit—and speaks frankly of our limitations—in John 15. “A branch cannot produce fruit if it is severed from the vine, and you cannot be fruitful unless you remain in me. … Those who remain in me, and I in them, will produce much fruit. For apart from me you can do nothing.”[9]

Jesus tells us that when we are connected to the Source of Life, there is fresh fruit. On our own, we become barren and stunted, no matter our levels of grit.

When we recognize that we are nearing the end of our abilities, God reminds us that He has been there all along, inviting us to look not inward—to our finite abilities—but upward. As Kyle Idleman argues in Don’t Give Up, “The point of defeat … seems like the most desolate corner of creation. [But] it actually places you in prime position to experience God’s strength and provision because, as it turns out, God is drawn to the desperate.”[10] And the desperate are drawn to God.

As our hope continues to dwindle, cultural remedies point us to something we can discover or architect within ourselves. But Jeremiah proposes a sharply contrasted truth: We cannot master our circumstances, engineer our outcomes, or create utopia for ourselves. We cannot even expect to avoid hardship and deep disappointment.

Turning upward, rather than inward, is a radical, life-altering shift. It dislocates our preoccupation with self. It means placing our trust in God amid our pain and disappointments. It means surrendering our strategies. It means obeying regardless of our understanding, following regardless of where we’re led, and loving regardless of the person or circumstance.

This is dramatically different from the self-help formulas that dominate our podcasts, bookshelves, and culture. It’s a decision not to obsess over behavior modification but to seek the power of heart transformation. It’s reaching the end of our own strength and turning to the God who invites us into holy surrender. It’s not a neat and tidy list of five steps to bulletproof your ministry or organization; it’s far more radical, though perhaps simpler, as well. It’s an invitation to turn to God and away from th idolization of our own abilities.

Peter Greer is President and CEO at HOPE International and lives in Landisville, Pennsylvania, USA.

Chris Horst is Chief Advancement Officer at HOPE International and lives in Denver, Colorado, USA.

[1] Matthew 6:20a

[2] Lindsey Crouse, “Why I Stopped Running During the Pandemic (And How I Started Again),” The New York Times, March 7, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/07/opinion/pandemic-wall-fitness-running.html.

[3] “The State of Mental Health in America,” Mental Health America, https://www.mhanational.org/issues/state-mental-health-america.

[4]“New APA Poll Shows Surge in Anxiety Among Americans Top Causes Are Safety, COVID-19, Health, Gun Violence, and the Upcoming Election,” American Psychological Association, October 21, 2020, https://www.psychiatry.org/newsroom/news-releases/anxiety-poll-2020#:~:text=21%2C%202020%20%E2%80%93%20According%20to%20a,between%2032%25%20and%2039%25.

[5] Jeremiah 10:8a

[6] Jeremiah 17: 5-6, MSG

[7] Anne Helen Peterson, Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation (Boston: HMH Books, 2020).

[8] Jeremiah 17:7-8

[9] John 15:4b, 5b

[10] Kyle Idleman, Don’t Give Up (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2019), 43.

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