You Can’t Hustle Your Way to Holiness

I’m what some would call a competitive person. I hate losing more than I like winning. As I tell my 6-year-old son before his soccer games, “Have fun today. But remember: Winning is more fun.” My wife doesn’t like it, but it’s true.

I like striving for excellence and cultivating discipline. I want to be the best—to out-train, outwork, and outcompete the competition. This drive and aversion to losing has been helpful in almost every area of my life. I mostly like this trait that I have. But in the life of faith, I also think my drive to be the best can make me the spiritually worst.

As I scroll through the social media world, I’ve noticed a new generation of influencers, mostly men, who target men like me. I’m a millennial, and it seems my algorithm wants to capture and capitalize on my attention—selling me on a “rise and grind” mentality that, at first, seems rather winsome.

David Goggins, a retired Navy SEAL known for his ultra-athletic feats, promotes a 75 Hard Challenge that includes a diet, daily exercise, reading, and a daily picture. It’s part discipline, part self-help. The purpose is to commit to something hard and do it every day.

Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist and professor at Stanford, has a viral podcast where he popularizes research on human performance and mindset growth—everything from when to eat and exercise to the benefits of cold plunges. I’ve seen Andy Elliott, a sales and business coach, calling guys out to take off their shirts and shame their fat away. Or, in another video with less cussing, Elliott tells people to pray, “God, break me of my weaknesses.”

The list could go on: Ryan Pineda on buying real estate and making lots of money. Kris Krohn waking up at 4 a.m. to listen to a book on double speed, cultivate a mind palace, and whisper affirmations to his wife, who works out next to him on the treadmill. Alex Hormozi, who tells us how to breathe better with his famous nose strips—and also be successful with side hustles. Many of these people use faith or Christianity to talk about what they do, too.

It seems like these guys are making a lot of money (and they will charge you a lot of money to help you). They promise that wealth will give you the life you want.  People are paying, and they are paying attention—especially young men.

At their best, this new crop of gurus recognizes the embodied realities of life. You can’t think your way to health. Sometimes men, especially Christian men, need to get out of their heads into the concrete world around them.

These gurus teach that sunlight is good for your health, so get outside. Rhythms are formative, so be sure you develop good ones. Money is valuable, so try to work hard to earn it. They can call young people to a higher standard and infuse aimless young people with purpose and discipline.

Such messages are not absent from the Christian faith, either. “Train yourself to be godly” (1 Tim. 4:7) writes the apostle Paul, using the Greek word that shares a common root with the word gymnasium. And elsewhere, he commands “Work out your salvation” (Phil. 2:12). He also uses warfare language when encouraging the church in Ephesus to put on the armor of God in order to stand against the schemes of the Devil (Eph. 6). Win! Discipline! Fight!

But underneath these modern messages is also a deeper, more distorted desire: There’s always more to do, more to read, more money to make, more experiences to have, more people to beat. Life is set up for the grind. Perform. Do better. Money is power, so get some. And what young people can’t know yet is that this mindset leaves you exhausted.

In Christianity, we call upon a higher standard of grace, which has nothing to do with our effort or striving.

You can’t hack your way to holiness because holiness is slow work—a “long obedience in the same direction” as Eugene Peterson said. Formation is less about productivity and more about stillness. This way of life requires discipline, but it’s a discipline of absence, not performance. The battle cry of formation isn’t necessarily “Fight for the Lord!” but “The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still” (Ex. 14:14).

These words don’t excite my Western sensibilities. I want to be deserving of what I get.

Deserving is such a powerful American word. It’s fair and just. It’s the standard of success. It’s one reason why the monastic tradition recommends not pursuing a contemplative life until after 40. Before then, we’re too ambitious. Our desire to be productive is too strong to seek the face of God.

A problem with these online mentors is that I don’t know if they consider death. (There’s even a popular Netflix documentary of a guy who thinks he can defeat death.) They love youthfulness because they love life, and youthfulness is synonymous with life in the modern world. Here’s the tough part: We’re all headed toward death. We’re on our way to aging, wrinkling, weakness. And if we don’t get comfortable with the slow deaths now, then we’re going to have a hard time aging later.

In a letter from the Catholic monk Thomas Merton to the Catholic social activist Dorothy Day, he wrote about struggles and being misaligned and what to do about it. The word perseverance comes up—getting through all life’s challenges and still going. Here’s what Merton writes:

Perseverance—yes, more and more one sees that it is the great thing. But there is a thing that must not be overlooked. Perseverance is not hanging on to some course which we have set our mind to, and refusing to let go. It is not even a matter of getting a bulldog grip on the faith and not letting the devil pry us loose from it—though many of the saints made it look that way.

In my competitive nature, I want to hang on. I want to fight. I want to win. I want to be a saint that doesn’t let go of his bulldog grip. In my work life, this mentality is effective. I can work my way to success. But in my soul life, my strength may be my weakness. Trying hard is often not the way to holiness.

Merton goes on:

Really, there is something lacking in such a hope as that. Hope is a greater scandal than we think. I am coming to think that God … loves and helps best those who are so beat and have so much nothing when they come to die that it is almost as if they had persevered in nothing but had gradually lost everything, piece by piece, until there was nothing left but God. Hence perseverance is not hanging on but letting go. That of course is terrible.

The apostle Paul said something similar in 2 Corinthians 11–12. Instead of boasting about his spiritual pedigree and experience to the Corinthian church to prove his legitimacy, he brags about his failures and weaknesses: imprisonments, lashes, danger, hunger, thirst.

The reason for this is that ever since God told Paul, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness,” Paul made up his mind to “boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me” (2 Cor. 12:9).

For Paul, perseverance involved letting go. Formation was submission. His weakness proved God’s power, which means the scandal of perseverance is this: Even in the emptiness, God loves us.

“We are not what we do. We are not what we have. We are not what others think of us,” writes Henri Nouwen. “Coming home is claiming the truth. I am the beloved child of a loving Creator.” We are God’s beloved children no matter how well we hold on to faith, no matter what fitness hacks we accomplish, no matter what level of income we have, and even no matter what routines we establish.

So in those moments when you’re exhausted from the hustle and you feel like you’re at the end of your proverbial rope, God is there, and you are still his beloved. This is a terrifying truth. But it’s also really good news.

Alexander Sosler is associate professor of Bible and ministry at Montreat College and an assisting priest at Redeemer Anglican Church in Asheville, North Carolina. He is the author of A Short Guide to Spiritual Formation: Finding Life in Truth, Goodness, Beauty, and Community, the 2024 winner of Christianity Today’s Christian Living Book of the Year.

The post You Can’t Hustle Your Way to Holiness appeared first on Christianity Today.

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