The Missing Behavior Chart

When I was a kid, I lived with a quiet, ever-present pressure: don’t disappoint your parents. That pressure wasn’t coming from them. They were wonderful parents. They loved me unconditionally. Somewhere in my little brain, I decided that their love was best protected by performance. I had been told that I was the best kid, so I performed. I got 100—or close to it—on nearly everything. I stayed out of trouble; I followed the rules faithfully. Anxiety is a powerful motivator.

In elementary school, we had one of those behavior charts that seemed designed to terrify quiet children. Everyone’s name was on the wall next to a pocket holding a green card. Green meant you were good. If you misbehaved, your card got moved to yellow. Keep it up, and you’d graduate to red, which came with consequences ominous enough that no one ever really explained them out loud.

One day, we had a substitute teacher. She was clearly having a rough go of it. A handful of kids were acting up, and she’d had enough. In a moment of scorched-earth classroom management, she announced that everyone was being moved to yellow.

Collective punishment.

This did not land the way she expected.

The loud kids shrugged. But the quiet, rule-following, probably-on-the-spectrum kids? We were spiraling. Anxiety rippled through the room.

Then, something remarkable happened.

Other students started speaking up:

“He never gets his color changed.” “He didn’t do anything.” “You’re going to get him beaten for nothing when he gets home.”

(For the record: I was not, in fact, going to get beaten.)

Their protest wasn’t about my goodness so much as about fairness. I hadn’t earned yellow. Yellow belonged to someone else. Yellow was for people who failed to perform. That instinct—that there must be a chart, and it must be accurate—is deeply human, which brings me to the gospel…

Many people relate to God as if He were a behavior chart in the sky. We have green days, yellow days, and red days (that we hope no one noticed). We assume God’s love is real, but fragile, and that it must be protected by good behavior and explained away after bad days.

Scripture tells a very different story.

“When you were dead in your sins… God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; He has taken it away, nailing it to the cross.” (Colossians 2:13–14)

And again:

“For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.” (Hebrews 8:12)

Notice what’s missing.

There’s no chart, no pockets, no colors, and no escalating system of divine disappointment. Jesus—the only One who actually did perform perfectly—did such a thorough job saving us that all our sins and the entire record-keeping system are gone. The ledger's not adjusted, not relaxed, and not mercifully ignored.

It is removed, as far as the east is from the west (as Psalm 103 puts it).

The gospel does not say, “Try harder and stay green.” It says, “The chart is missing, and it’s not coming back.”

A better picture might be this:

There’s a popular pastor that, as a kid, became a state champion in amateur wrestling. It wasn’t because he trained harder than everyone else, or because he dominated the competition; it was because he was literally the only person who showed up in his weight class.

Imagine: He steps onto the mat, there’s no opponent, the ref shrugs, and the kid gets the medal.

Did he win? Technically.

Did he earn it? That depends on how attached you are to scorekeeping.

The gospel says salvation works like that.

You don’t win because you outperformed the competition.

You win because Jesus already did—and then invited you to stand with Him.

Show up by believing in Him and receive your medal.

The anxiety-driven child in some of us wants to double-check the chart, just to be safe.

The gospel gently replies: There is no chart.

And that is very, very good news.

(There is no chart at that school anymore, either. Some of the “bad” kids—armed with far more self-confidence than I possessed back then—eventually stole it on their way from green to yellow, red, misdemeanors, and felonies.)

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