When Strivings Cease

Replacing the Gospel of Self-Improvement with the Gospel of Life-Transforming Grace

by Ruth Chou Simons

**Summary**

Ruth Chou Simons describes a few of the sneaky ways that our culture has corrupted the gospel message. She explains how these false versions of the gospel lead us into a life of constant striving with its associated feelings of weariness, shame, and resentment.
But the gospel is this: we are saved by God’s grace. When God looks at us, He no longer sees our sin. He sees Jesus’s perfect righteousness. We are pleasing to God because of Jesus’s birth, life, death, and resurrection. Not because of anything that we do.
**Author’s Website:** When Strivings Cease - Book by Ruth Chou Simons

Favorite Quotes

“God wants our true worship, not our perfect performance.”

“…[shame] is the nagging feeling that no matter what you do or don’t do, you’ll never get it right. Not enough. Forever lacking. Fundamentally incapable of being who others expect or hope you’ll be.”

“Jesus loves you so much that he rescued by grace. If you’ve received his gift through faith you don’t need to figure out how to be a model Christian, how to be more ‘on fire’ for God, or even how to please God—if you’re in Christ, you are already pleasing to him because of Jesus.”

“Striving doesn’t simply look like keeping the law through good works or earning your salvation through right behavior. It can also look like constantly trying to repay the gift of grace with your offerings of holiness. It’s being grateful for salvation but feeling so tethered to guilt and indebtedness that you miss the blessing and keep paying for the gift instead.”

“The gospel is this: God sent Christ to live the perfect life that we couldn’t live, and die the criminal death we deserved in our sin, so that we wouldn’t just be freed from the debt we owed but granted eternal worthiness in his presence on account of Christ.”

“This is the trifecta of freedom in a believer’s life. His faithfulness eclipses our clawing for control; his forgiveness erases debilitating guilt and shame; and his favor eradicates our need to look anywhere else for love than God himself.”