God Is Not an Auditor

The audit team was in our office for two weeks, which felt like four. My normally pleasant work environment was stressful, and tempers were uncharacteristically short.

My job as a subcontract manager for a company that supports the Department of Defense is to negotiate and award contracts to other companies that partner with us. Because the government wants to ensure its money is spent wisely, procuring functions are subject to audits for regulatory compliance.

I am a girl of details who takes pride in the quality of my work. I do the proverbial dotting of every “i” and crossing of every “t” vital in contract work. My best friend is a twenty-five-page checklist that tells me what is required in various situations as I build my procurement package for approval before issuing any subcontract.

When several of my high-dollar procurements were targeted for review, I was confident they were complete and accurate. That is, until I was asked to go back through them and make sure before we turned them over to the auditors.

I made a lot of mistakes. Despite my best efforts to adhere to the checklist, I missed things. I forgot things. I corrected everything I found, but the auditors still discovered errors. They had reviewed our policies and procedures ahead of time, and they are well versed in government procurement regulations, so they knew what “rules” we were supposed to be following.

Auditors are not your friend. They look for mistakes, and it’s impossible to anticipate where they will focus their attention. But once they find an error, they pick every package apart, looking to see if that error is repetitious and pervasive. Do we keep getting it wrong?

Suddenly, I was questioning my qualifications to do my job. Failing an audit can be career ending. Would I get fired over this? Despite my manager’s assurances that all was well, I felt my confidence erode and my worth come into question.

Maybe this seems silly. I am not the only one who had procurement packages reviewed. I am not the only one who made errors. My immediate boss and everyone up the line from me in the approval process missed the errors as well. But this knowledge did not stop the voice I kept hearing, the one that told me I wasn’t good enough.

Not good enough.

How many of us hear this voice? You might hear it in your own work environment or job search. You might hear it in your relationships, or in your parenting. Or in your commitment to be healthy as you consume an entire box of Thin Mint cookies. We can hear “not good enough” in any aspect of our lives. It’s like life is one big audit, and we never quite measure up.

All too often, we associate this voice with God. After all, he gave us the Bible as his checklist, didn’t he? Chock-full of do this and don’t do this commands, the Bible can certainly seem like a rulebook to be followed. And when we mess up, lose our temper, say an ugly word; when our marriages flail and sometimes fail; when we give in to the cravings of the food, drink, or drug we have committed to live free of, we hear this voice pointing out our failing. Pointing out our “not good enough.”

We do live in the constant presence of someone who seeks to audit our lives and find us lacking. The auditor is not God. It is not Jesus. The auditor is Satan.

The Bible calls Satan our adversary and our enemy. Jesus calls him the “father of lies” (John 8:44 NLT). Paul warns that Satan “disguises himself as an angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14 NLT). He resembles God just enough that he can fool those who don’t really know God. Satan wants us to view God’s Word as a policy-and-procedures manual. He knows what “rules” we are supposed to follow, and he’s looking for reasons to fail us because he wants us living under condemnation and shame.

But Jesus tells us something entirely different. He tells us we are worth dying for just as we are, mess ups and all. When he touches the unclean men and women, he tells us there is no shame. When he forgives the adulteress, he tells us there is no condemnation. The voice of Jesus is grace, not condemnation.

But when we have that nagging knowledge that we’ve messed up? Is that ever from God?

It might be. There is a difference between being condemned (by the auditor) and convicted (by the Holy Spirit). Condemnation drives us away from God, makes us want to give up, and has us questioning our worth. Condemnation says we failed. Conviction gently points out where we have fallen short (and we all do), encourages us to confess and repent our wrong, and securely anchors our worth in Jesus as we let the Spirit teach us how to be more like him. Conviction says we can succeed, and grace grants us the opportunity.

Condemnation says we failed. Conviction says we can succeed, and grace give us that opportunity.

I did not lose my job after the audit, although we can make some improvements and process changes that will help our whole team. Together, we are working to strengthen the areas that were weak or deficient. Our goal is to silence the auditors the next time—and there will be a next time.

This is but a glimmer of what God’s grace looks like for us. We aren’t going to lose our place in God’s family just because we mess up. Together, with Jesus and with God’s life-giving Word, we can strengthen our weak areas. As each one of us grows stronger and more confident in Christ, the church—the whole team—becomes stronger. Together we can silence the voice of our enemy the next time he says, “Not good enough”—because there will be a next time.

Denise Roberts loves doing life with her husband, Blake, morning snuggles with her one-hundred-pound chocolate Lab, French fries, and Chick-fil-A lemonade. She’s an empty-nester mom who prays she didn’t mess up her kids too badly. Her greatest joy is writing about her experiences when Jesus steps on her toes, picks her up, and dusts her off so others can discover him at the intersection of faith and life for themselves. Connect with her at www.deniseroberts.org.

Photograph © Green Chameleon, used with permission