Shayne Looper: Targeting errors and how to avoid them
Matt Emmons is one of the world’s best shots with a rifle. He has won Olympic gold, silver and bronze medals. In the 2004 Athens Olympics, Emmons took gold in the 50-meter rifle prone with a borrowed rifle. His own rifle had been sabotaged.
Two days later, Emmons was competing in the 50-meter, three-position event. He went into the last round with a commanding lead. If he struck near the bullseye, he would win a medal, probably another gold. He calmed himself, took aim, and fired. He thought he hit black but when he looked up at the TV monitor, he could not see that he hit the target at all.
He did hit the target; however, it was the wrong target. He had cross-fired, shooting the target in the adjacent lane. Emmons had been a shoo-in for a medal but his failure to score any points on his final shot dropped him to last place.
Emmons’ mistake cost him a gold medal, but firing at the wrong target can be even more costly in everyday life. We may have the bullseye in our sights — a prestigious advanced degree, for example — and only find out numerous years and thousands of dollars later that we were aiming at the wrong target.
I suspect that aiming at the wrong target is more common than we realize. It seems like an obvious mistake, but it is anything but obvious when in real life we try to look into the future where various targets stand side by side. It is easy to mistake one target for another.
This happens often in love. Many people confuse loving love for loving a person, but they are very different things. Loving love is easy; loving a person who has character flaws and annoying habits is not. We may simply be incapable of loving a real person; our character may not have sufficiently developed for that.
It also is easy to confuse targets when it comes to faith. We can think that we are believing in God when we are only believing in belief. This is a particular problem for those who espouse the prosperity gospel, but any of us can fall into this error.
I frequently have heard people say, “I believe in my faith.” I cringe and respond, “Don’t do that! Believe in God, not in faith.” Belief in God will enable a person to be faithful; belief in faith will not. Belief in God makes obedience to God’s commands possible. Belief in faith does no such thing. Without a worthy object, faith remains anemic. God is a worthy object. Faith is not.
Faith in faith leads to a triumphalist religion where clergy must function as spiritual cheerleaders. In this setting, the worship leader’s job is to whip up enthusiasm in the congregation. But this approach turns faith into fantasy and divorces belief from real life.
Another targeting error makes heaven the believer’s ultimate goal and treats God as a means to that end. The ubiquity of this view makes it nearly impossible for people to see it as an error. They have been taught that the whole purpose of religion is getting into heaven, even though the Bible itself says no such thing. The scriptures speak of who God’s people are; some forms of contemporary Christianity focus almost exclusively on where God’s people will be.
The result is a “plan of salvation” that misunderstands what salvation is. It is more than a destination. It is a life, an eternal life that grows and transforms people in this age, then explodes into blossoms of glory in the next.
How can we know if we have made a targeting error? Emmons discovered his error by looking at the television monitor. We may find ours by looking into the Scriptures. There, we can see if our experience aligns with God’s revelation and with the lives of his saints. For example, do we feel a hunger to know God? Do we have an increasing ability to say no to temptation? Do we love people? We may not hit these bullseyes directly, but are we getting closer?
— Find this and other articles by Shayne Looper at shaynelooper.com.
This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Shayne Looper: Targeting errors and how to avoid them
