Impure Performance Is Misdirected Hunger

Ps. Zachariah Thomas didn’t come to The Creative’s Intensive with a prepared sermon. He came to tell his story — and the story, as much as anything he could have taught, turned out to be the teaching.

A drum set and a door that opened too early

Zachariah started playing drums at eight years old, in a small storefront church where he quickly became known for it. His father, a pastor, would encourage him from the pulpit. It felt good — until the day a visiting teenager sat down at the same drum kit and outplayed him without trying. Zachariah ran out of the building in tears, and couldn’t explain why.

Looking back, he can: he’d built his sense of self entirely on being the best at something, and someone being better broke that. “It’s not that my parents were wrong, or my church was wrong, for giving me attention,” he says. “It’s just that there was intention that wasn’t had. And where intention doesn’t happen, attention tries to take its place.” Attention, he says, only produces bad fruit when it’s substituting for something else — it becomes the door for a lifetime of proving yourself, because the actual need underneath was never addressed.

The memory that explained everything

Years later, in a worship service, Zachariah kept getting distracted by imagining himself being noticed — pulled up to play, to sing, to matter. Frustrated that he couldn’t just worship, he asked God why. What came back was a specific childhood memory: waiting for his father to watch a movie together as promised, giving up after two days, writing in a journal, “I’m done waiting.”

That, he realized, was the moment he’d quietly given up on needing his father’s intentional love — and started looking for it somewhere else instead. “Your relationship with your father bleeds into your relationship with God,” he says. From that point on, without knowing it, he’d been trying to earn from God what he’d stopped expecting from anyone: real, unearned, intentional attention.

The season every child skips

The center of Zachariah’s teaching is an image he calls “the season of his arms” — the idea that a newborn’s very first season of life happens entirely in a parent’s arms, before language, before instruction, before any “doing” at all. His observation about faith: religion is very good at teaching people what walking with God looks like, and not nearly as good at leading them into that first season of simply being held.

Skip that season, he says, and it doesn’t stop you from being gifted or even effective in ministry — it just means everything downstream becomes performance, even when it looks like obedience. “You can do what God told you to do and still be missing the intimacy he died for,” he says. “You did good doing. But your heart didn’t experience the fullness.”

Pride is the attempt to father yourself

From there, Zachariah offers a working definition that reframes pride not as arrogance but as an orphaned coping mechanism: pride is the attempt to father yourself. When that place of being fathered has never been filled, he says, people sit down in the seat anyway and start narrating their own identity — “this is who I am” — because accepting an actual father feels too vulnerable. Arrogance, in his framing, is the next step: attempting to father others, controlling how they see you rather than simply being seen.

It’s why, he suggests, so many visible leaders eventually fall: they were put on a stage before they’d ever received the season of his arms, and self never actually left the room — it just learned to perform well enough that no one could see it.

Receiving, not just knowing

Zachariah is careful to distinguish between agreeing with a truth and actually receiving it. He’d known, intellectually, that God loved him for years — he could have preached it. But knowing something “between the ears,” he says, is different from letting it reach your spirit, and that only happens in God’s presence, not in repetition or performance.

His own turning point wasn’t more discipline. Years of trying to pray enough, read enough, and perform his way into consistency hadn’t worked. What changed things was yieldedness — staying present with God consistently, without a special formula, until one day, in his words, his mind was simply renewed, and patterns he’d fought for years stopped requiring effort to resist.

“The Holy Spirit will do his job if you just yield,” he says. “It’s crazy that Jesus, leaving the earth, said, ‘I won’t leave you as orphans.’ We were just with him three years. We watched him rise. And he still said that — because he knew the season of the Father’s arms was the one thing we couldn’t build for ourselves.”

This teaching draws from Ps. Zachariah Thomas’s testimony at AXL Creative Co.’s The Creative’s Intensive.