Stop Herding the Cats: When We Try to Impress a God Who’s Already Pleased

What if our spiritual striving sounds less like devotion and more like a tiny dog panic-herding cats? This reflection explores how fear-based works quietly turn Jesus into a checklist—and how the gospel invites us back into a love affair where obedience flows naturally from being already accepted.

My tiny dog is a big softy, but he feels like he needs to be someone else to impress me. As soon as I walk into a room, he feels compelled to show off his Sheltie instincts and herd my cats around. He dashes at them full force and lets out a growl, even though he was peacefully coexisting with them before I made my presence known.

If he paid more attention to me, he’d know just how annoying I (and the cats) find this. He is my dog, and therefore, he is accepted. I do not need him to try to be something that he deems “better” to be accepted. (Indeed, what he deems “better” is not so.) You’d think he’d learn this lesson by now.

Then again, you’d think I would have learned it too.

How often we try to prove ourselves to God to earn his attention. During my college days, I created a checklist of things I intended to do every day to become a better Christian. At the end of day one, my mentor prophetically prayed, “God, would you not be a checklist to Jamin.” I hadn’t told him about my new endeavor, but it was over before I had even gotten started.

Don’t get me wrong. Works are expected of us—required even. As E.P. Sanders once wrote, “Salvation is by grace, but judgment is according to works. Works are the condition of remaining ‘in,’ but they do not earn salvation.”

But fear-based works come across like my dog trying to impress me when I’m already impressed with him. Turning a relationship with Jesus into a works-based journey morphs him from a person into a checklist.

Christianity at its core is simply this: a love affair with Jesus. When you are in love, works come naturally out of the overflow of your heart. The compassion of Jesus so overwhelms you that you can’t help but mirror it. Your time in his presence is so full of wisdom that you can’t help but think differently than you used to. His gentle whisper is enough to keep you steady when the whole world is against you. Your joy and your peace do not fluctuate drastically with the variables of life because they’re grounded in a person who is defined as the way, the truth, and the life. This is the calling for Christians—to be so overwhelmed with Christ that to live is Christ and to die is gain.

Jamin Bradley