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Mable learned early and often that God was good, holy, and to be feared. These truths were foundational in her upbringing and echoed through every Sunday sermon and Christian conversation. She saw God perform many incredible things in the life of her family, chief among them being their regeneration. The miracle of salvation was not theoretical in her world; it was personal. She was genuinely amazed at God’s kindness, not just to her family, but also to others who had yet to experience the miracle of regeneration.
Theologians call this common grace (Matthew 5:45), and Mable understood it intuitively. She often repeated the familiar refrain: “We serve an awesome God!” She was right. God is perfect. He is holy. He is to be feared. He is astoundingly good. All of these things were true, and Mable truly believed them. Mable loved God. She was, by all external appearances, a good Christian. There were no red flags in her story—nothing obviously amiss.
In fact, you could take the basic outline of her life and map it onto the story of millions of other believers. Scroll through a typical Christian’s social media feed and you’ll see it: photos of smiling families, verses posted in gratitude, and captions exclaiming how good God is. But what you will rarely see is the darker side—the parts that feel more like pressure than peace, more like fear than faith.
Now, I’m not suggesting that we publicly parade our sin and struggles for everyone to see. That would be unwise. But the discerning soul knows how the cover might not always reveal the true contents of the book. Mable had intentionally buried her fears in the deepest places of her soul. There was another version of her—a quieter, more guarded, more conflicted self.
There was a discernible gap between the version of Mable everyone experienced and the one whom only God truly knew. Omniscience has no blind spots, and that reality was not comforting for Mable (Hebrews 4:13). She was shaped by a legalistic religious culture that emphasized external behavior. The unspoken expectation was to keep things looking good on the outside. Superficiality, though never stated outright, was the assumed standard.
Though she would say God saved her by grace and not by works, she lived under the relentless internal pressure of never making mistakes (Ephesians 2:8–9). Mable was trapped—bound in religious and spiritual bondage. Her legalistic environment had trained her to focus on rules, obedience, holiness, and behavior. These were noble-sounding values. But for Mable, they translated into a pressure cooker of self-imposed demands. The need to be perfect was always lurking beneath the surface. She knew she wasn’t perfect. But she had never been in a community or culture where she could openly say so. She lacked a context in which she could be transparent, where confession was welcomed and not weaponized.
Her mistakes, failures, and sin patterns were visible enough to her family members, but the family code was clear: we don’t talk about those things. They were complicit in the silence. Of course, they had their own secrets too. “Judge not lest you be judged”—so the misused and misunderstood saying goes. Though Christ came to set the captive free, Mable found herself trapped inside the walls of Christianity, not because of the gospel, but because of her culture’s distorted version of it. The worldview she adopted—part self-imposed, part externally enforced—instilled a paralyzing fear that she could never truly please God. Every misstep or transgression sent her spiraling into discouragement and despair. The only solution she had learned was to live two lives.
Outwardly, she looked like a God-loving Christian. In many ways, she truly was. But inwardly, she felt out of sync. She was not free from her secret battles. Constantly juggling her inner turmoil with how she assumed others viewed her, she lived in a state of psychological fragmentation. Her sins—her shame—were internalized and hidden. This posture was her best strategy to maintain what I call reasonable insanity. Some people label her lifestyle as reputation management. She developed habits to excuse her failures. When honest confession and soul-level transparency weren’t options, she had to default to other tools: excusing, blaming, justifying. These became her way of life.
Her pride, shaped and sustained in a legalistic context, was simply too strong to allow for repentance. So she doubled down on her façade. She privately searched the internet, desperate to find a way to change without having to tell anyone how deeply she was struggling. Her internal self-condemnation, coupled with the imagined judgment of her perfect-non-sinning friends, was building toward a crisis point. Mable lived the first forty-two years of her life like this:
As long as she could manage her low-level, respectable sins and justify the rest, she could convince herself she was okay. It was a functioning plan. She applied it daily. Until the day it all collapsed. She calls it “the beginning of woes”—the day her son wrote a long, honest email declaring his renunciation of God. Biffy vowed never to return to Christianity. He denounced his roots with finality. Mable was devastated. She had no one to confide in. Her son, like her, had learned to suppress anger and bitterness—to keep his inner struggles hidden from those who pounded away at sin like convicts breaking rocks.
He learned well.
He learned to confess only the acceptable sins, act out a few manageable ones, and bury the rest. What he would not do was be honest—not with himself, not with others. He had internalized the unspoken hypocrisy modeled in his own home. As he matured, his bitterness outpaced his ability—or desire—to mask it. Mable had no framework to process this collapse. Legalism doesn’t offer a road to restoration—only condemnation. Biffy responded with rage and rejection. Mable responded with fear, inward turmoil, and a continued belief in God, even as her faith teetered.
At first, Mable could not accept that God had anything to do with her suffering or her family’s unraveling. Her understanding of God was too clean, too sanitary. She had spent her life believing God was good, and in her mind, that meant God would never allow something this publicly humiliating. Not to her. Not to her family. And yet, it happened. “God is good!” she had exclaimed for years. But now she questioned: What kind of good God lets this happen to His people? Her heart looked for a culprit. Mable was angry.
But, like with her other sins, she had no intention of letting that one come into the light. Her anger toward God was a river too wide to cross. Good Christians don’t accuse God. They fear Him. Respect Him. Serve Him. But bring their anger to Him? That was unimaginable. To think that God could be in the mess of her life, or her family’s failure, was beyond her theological reach. How could a good God have anything to do with sin? It’s a common conclusion for novice believers, and unfortunately, a place where many mature ones remain stuck. Mable had only ever viewed sin through one lens:
I did something wrong. Now, I have to figure it out and fix it. Because God is not part of this.
The idea that Christ would enter our messes was meaningless to Mable, at least practically (2 Corinthians 5:21). She suffered from what I call gospel amnesia. She remembered Jesus as the Savior who died for sin, but she had forgotten that He is also the Sanctifier who redeems us through it. Just because Christ does not sin, is not tempted by sin, and is never guilty of sin, doesn’t mean He avoids the presence of sin. On the contrary, He enters into it. He became sin so that we might become the righteousness of God. There is no part of your life so dirty that Christ refuses to work in it. Mable’s theology couldn’t grasp that. She had accepted God as a judge, but she never left the courtroom. She never learned that the Judge who declared her justified also welcomed her into His living room as a daughter. That tactical, theological misunderstanding fostered a sinful fear of God, not a redemptive reverence. Her mental stronghold was a trap of logic:
Mable had overshot the gospel. Though she was a believer, she did not understand how the gospel was designed to work in her sanctification. She saw the cross as an entry point, but not a sustaining grace. She accepted God as the Savior who justified her, but not as the Father who disciplines, restores, and sanctifies through every circumstance, even painful ones. Like any faithful father, our heavenly Father never stops working in our lives. His grace is not a one-time transaction; it is a lifelong relationship. And sometimes, that grace is severe.
Sometimes, the Lord will even allow sin to serve His divine purposes. Only God can do this. Only He can take what is evil and bend it toward good. In the hands of a holy, sovereign God, even sin can become a temporary ally. Not because sin is good, but because God is so good that He can use even what is wrong to bring about what is right.
We see this most vividly at the cross. The crucifixion of Christ—the most sinful, unjust event in history—was orchestrated by God to accomplish the greatest good of all: the salvation of sinners. The cross of Christ proclaims, without stuttering, that God is good and God allows evil. That truth doesn’t diminish His character; it magnifies it. Because of His goodness, He executed His Son. Because of that execution, we are set free from sin (Hebrews 2:14–15). This is one of the most challenging yet vital truths in all of Christian theology: sometimes, while living in a fallen world, the Lord permits evil to bring about a greater good. He never sins, but He is never absent in the presence of it.
In fact, He is often working through it. A quick survey of the Old Testament confirms this pattern repeatedly. Adam, Noah, Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Job, and David all saw the Father use sin to accomplish His purposes. None of them were untouched by suffering. And all of them saw, in time, that nothing can thwart God’s plans—not even evil. As Joseph said to his brothers, “You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good” (Genesis 50:20, see also Exodus 9:16).
In Mable’s case, the Lord used suffering to expose something she could not see: hidden idolatry. She had made self-reliance her functional god. She didn’t know she was doing this—it wasn’t intentional. But her choices told the story. Instead of confessing her secret life, she doubled down. She reinforced the walls of her image. She buried the cracks in silence.
But God, in His mercy, allowed the pressure to escalate. At first, she spiraled into depression, anger, and defensiveness. She began to justify herself. She blamed others. She tried, in futility, to regain control. But the dam had broken. Her secret life had spilled out through her son’s crisis. She couldn’t put the lid back on. The pain had forced the exposure she never would have chosen. And yet, grace was doing its work. Slowly, quietly, beneath all the humiliation and heartache, God was softening her heart. The softer it became, the freer she became.
She began to care more about what God thought of her than what others thought. She started seeing sin differently. It became less of a threat and more of a pathway. Not because sin was okay, but because grace was greater. She began to speak more honestly about her transgressions. She started confessing them. Seeking help. Asking for accountability. With a clearer view of the gospel, Mable was no longer controlled by the inner wreckage of hidden religion. Looking back, she marvels at how subtle her descent was—and how devastating. What began as sincere faith had become distorted through cultural expectations and silent fear. Christianity’s baggage had trapped her. It wasn’t the gospel that enslaved her; it was the slight misalignment of the gospel that threw her soul (and eventually her family) off its axis.
Let’s bring this home. Let me ask you some questions—not to accuse you, but to invite you into the same kind of honest examination that rescued Mable.
Here’s where you begin: Acknowledge that reputation management isn’t just a habit. It’s a heart problem. It flows from a distorted theology. You must go upstream. You must identify what you believe about God, about grace, about failure, and about sanctification. Mable wouldn’t do this. So God sent a more potent force into her life: suffering that exposed her bondage. He broke her chains—not through comfort, but through crisis.
Because that’s what love does.
Rick launched the Life Over Coffee global training network in 2008 to bring hope and help for you and others by creating resources that spark conversations for transformation. His primary responsibilities are resource creation and leadership development, which he does through speaking, writing, podcasting, and educating.
In 1990 he earned a BA in Theology and, in 1991, a BS in Education. In 1993, he received his ordination into Christian ministry, and in 2000 he graduated with an MA in Counseling from The Master’s University. In 2006 he was recognized as a Fellow of the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors (ACBC).
