“For some people,” writes Jan Johnson, ​“coming to faith has felt a bit like a bait-and-switch operation. At first, we hear mostly about grace. We hear we are saved by grace and that salvation is a free gift. But after a while, we are encouraged to try to be good. Yet it is exhausting to try to be good.”

So, we should stop trying to be good?

Well… Yes. 

This is harder than it sounds. Because for many of us trying hard to be good is a deep-seated habit. (Note that goodness isn’t the habit; trying is.)

The problem with willpower-driven Christianity is that it puts us at the center. Succeed and we pat ourselves on the back. Slip up and we berate ourselves, then vow through stronger willpower not to make the same mistake again (which everyone knows doesn’t work, yet we still try).

We do have a part in cooperating with God, Jan says, ​“but even then, we must not make it our project. We need to ask God to show us what the next small steps are and how to take them.”

Jan enjoys helping people move from trying to training, from self-reliance to cooperating with God in putting on the character of Christ. For years, she has lived into Dallas Willard’s book Renovation of the Heart. In a conversation this week on the podcast, she discusses how to put that book into daily practice.

Thankfully, we’re not called to passivity or to a vaporous ​“let go and let God” (though surely there is a good deal of letting go and letting God that must be done). There is a way toward becoming a truly good person, a way toward inner transformation. It is the way of Jesus, the way of the light burden, the way of being yoked to him instead of trying so hard on our own.