“No legacy is so rich as honesty.” — William Shakespeare
The Clothes That Didn’t Fit
I was fifteen the first time I was trusted to buy my own clothes.
Growing up in a single-income household, I was used to wearing what was provided rather than what was chosen. But this time, armed with my mother’s Edgars card and a head full of imagined possibilities, I was free.
I wanted to be impressive. I wandered through the aisles dazzled by colours and patterns, never pausing to ask whether they worked together. When I finally tried on my new wardrobe, I looked, let’s just say, colourfully bold; the whole circus came to town. And no Marine Corp could dull the lighthouse I wore that day.
That day I learned that trying to become someone else can drown out who you already are. Creativity and harmony, usually natural to me, disappeared under the noise of performance. I wasn’t dressing myself; I was costuming an aspiration.
Fifteen years later, after giving my life to Jesus, I found the same instinct replaying itself in faith. I thought I had to perform being a Christian, say the right words, act the right way, hoping God would notice my devotion. Seven years into that exhausting routine, God gently dismantled it. I began to see that He never asked for a show. What He seeks are contrite, authentic hearts, not colourfully bold performances of who we think He wants us to be.
I still don’t fully understand what it means that one day we will be like Christ as He is in heaven. But after twenty-one years of walking with Him, I’ve seen how He patiently shapes what’s real in me, not what’s rehearsed. If trueness before Jesus is what God loves, then I’ll love Him with every ounce of trueness I have.
Because pretending is just too exhausting, and grace, unlike performance, fits perfectly every time.
The Manifestation That Chooses Us
Jesus said,
“He who has My commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves Me.
And he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and manifest Myself to him.” (John 14:21)
The Greek verb emphanizō (ἐμφανίζω) means to make visible, to reveal oneself openly. The weight of the word rests on Christ’s initiative. The disciple does not conjure the revelation; Christ does the manifesting. The keeping of His commandments is not the cause of revelation but the climate of love in which revelation can be received.
Augustine noted that to love is already to see, because the heart that loves God participates in the light by which He is known.¹ Gregory the Great wrote that divine manifestation is mercy, not merit: grace descends; it is never wrestled down.² The Johannine rhythm is always the same: “Because I live, you also will live.” Life flows from Him, never up to Him.
Performance spirituality reverses that order. It assumes that revelation is a wage, not a gift. Yet both theology and psychology tell us that striving for divine approval blinds us to the presence already given.
When Striving Destroys Seeing
Modern research on authenticity echoes the same truth. Sarah A. Schnitker, Benjamin Houltberg and Pamela E. King found that moral and religious “striving” detached from transcendent purpose leads to burnout and fragmentation rather than flourishing.³
Frans de Waal himself admits that science “is not in the business of spelling out the meaning of life… biology helps us understand why morality looks the way it does. But to go from there to offering moral advice is a stretch.”⁴
Even outside faith, the data show that performance without telos empties the soul.
G. K. Leak and colleagues demonstrated that self-transcendent goal striving, seeking meaning beyond achievement, produces higher well-being and authenticity.⁵
Montemaggi argued that performance-based identity “destroys authenticity” by reducing transcendence to social display.⁶
Chickering, Dalton, and Stamm observed that institutional performance pressure suppresses interior formation; education meant to awaken souls becomes an engine of metrics.⁷
Secular psychology and the Gospel meet here: the harder we strive to prove our worth, the more our inner sight fades.
Voices From the Resting World
Across cultures, the Spirit has whispered the same anti-performance gospel.
Julian of Norwich received her Revelations of Divine Love not in labour but in stillness, “for God willeth that we rest in Him.”
Teresa of Ávila, in Interior Castle, found the divine manifestation at the quiet centre of the soul, where “nothing is attained by force.”
From the Global South, Mercy Amba Oduyoye reminds that revelation unfolds in relationship and community, not hierarchy; love is God’s self-manifestation.
Ruth Padilla DeBorst writes that mission is never a display of spiritual success but the lived overflow of grace.
Allan Boesak and José Míguez Bonino both speak of liberation from performative religiosity: grace dismantles every pyramid of proving.
And Kosuke Koyama’s Theology of the Road offers the same humility: God walks slowly because He is love.
Each voice, whether cloistered or post-colonial, testifies that revelation is not achieved, it is received.
The Rest of Revelation
When Jesus promised, “I will manifest Myself,” He offered not a method but Himself.
Revelation is not earned; it is encountered. Obedience does not buy sight; it opens the window.
In the end, striving blinds precisely because it turns us inward, while grace looks outward and upward.
Looking back, I realise that both the teenager in mismatched clothes and the young believer in religious costume were reaching for the same thing: approval. But love that must be earned is never love; it is theatre. The gospel calls us off the stage and back into the light where Christ does the manifesting.
So perhaps the most faithful prayer is not “Lord, make me impressive,” but “Lord, make me real.”
Because the moment we stop performing, we start seeing.
And He, as He promised, manifests Himself to us.
If, as Professor Schwehn reminds us, “‘Epistemologies have ethical implications,’” then the manifestation of Christ is not merely what we see, but how we are shaped by seeing, for “the Christian vision of life is always both character-forming and culture-forming, both personal and political, both individual and institutional,” a revelation meant to be lived, not performed.⁸
Practical Application: Resting Where God Reveals
If the heart of revelation is Christ’s initiative, then our task is not to strive for visibility but to cultivate availability.
This week, make room for holy stillness. Step away from one area where you habitually “perform,” even something that looks spiritual, and instead offer quiet attention.
Ask not, “How can I show my faith?” but, “Where might Christ wish to show Himself?”
Let obedience become communion rather than currency. Read John 14:21–23 slowly, not for information but invitation.
Remember: revelation is not a spotlight for our worth but a window through which divine love passes freely.
Prayer
Father God, Lord Jesus and Holy Spirit,
You promised not to leave us as orphans; teach my restless soul to cease performing and to rest in Your gaze.
Strip away the colours I wear to impress You, until only truth remains; truth clothed in mercy, truth radiant with Your own life.
Manifest Yourself in me, not because I strive, but because You love. Let every act of obedience be a quiet yes, not an audition for approval.
And when I forget, remind me that grace fits perfectly every time.
In Your Holy Name Messiah King Jesus,
Amen.
TRACK TO ENJOY
References
1. Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John 77.3–4, 12.
2. Gregory the Great, Homilies on the Gospels 30, 246.
3. Sarah A. Schnitker, Pamela Ebstyne King, and Benjamin Houltberg, “Religion, Spirituality, and Thriving: Transcendent Narrative, Virtue, and Telos,” Journal of Research on Adolescence 29, no. 2 (2019): 276–280, https://doi.org/10.1111/jora.12443.
4. Frans de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist (New York: Norton, 2013), 19.
5. Leak, G. K., DeNeve, K. M., and Greteman, A. J. (2007). The relationship between spirituality, assessed through self-transcendent goal strivings, and positive psychological attributes. In R. L. Piedmont (Ed.), Research in the Social Scientific Study of Religion, Vol. 18, 263-267, https://doi.org/10.1163/ej.9789004158511.i-301.102.
6. F. E. S. Montemaggi, “Religion as Self-Transcendence,” Society and Social Thought 21, no. 1 (2017): 89-94, https://doi.org/10.7202/1041338ar
7. A. W. Chickering, J. C. Dalton, and L. Stamm, Encouraging Authenticity and Spirituality in Higher Education (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2015), 8, 147, 253-254.
8. Steven Garber, The Fabric of Faithfulness (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996), 171.
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