Let’s clarify something, okay? God wants you to go deeper in your faith. He didn’t save you so he could move on to the next person. He saved you so he could start something – a process of spiritual growth – that will ultimately lead you to perfection.
That’s right: perfection.
God is a perfectionist. I can hear you protesting right now that there’s no way he can be. If God were a perfectionist, he would never accept the likes of you and me. But that’s just the thing: he doesn’t accept us. Not as is, at any rate. He accepts us solely on the basis of the blood of Jesus. The message of the Bible is clear: we can’t be saved by our works. Why? Because nothing we could ever do would ever be good enough to merit God’s grace. It wouldn’t be good enough because it wouldn’t be perfect.
And God is a perfectionist.
I’m betting the thought makes you cringe. Maybe because you work with or are married to a human perfectionist: a picky, petty person who always fails to see the forest because they’re busy hyperventilating over the condition of one particular tree. Maybe due to growing up in a religious environment that expected you to be perfect: not from the work of the Holy Spirit in your life over time, but as a result of your own sadomasochistic efforts to please the people around you.
But don’t write the idea that God is a perfectionist off too quickly. You’re probably comparing him to those who are drastically dissimilar to him in one important way:
They’re not perfect.
He is. And because God is perfect, he’s the only one qualified to be a perfectionist. Your legalistic friend isn’t. Your disapproving parent isn’t. Your hypocritical sister isn’t. Only God gets the right to sweat the details at every level.
So he freely embraces that right, refusing to stop until his work is concluded. He won’t quit shaping, blessing, or permitting productive pain over time in order to totally complete the project.
(And you’re the project.)
God wants you to be perfect. That’s why he’s so relentless about challenging, instructing, directing, and convicting you. Not because he’s mean or selfish or disillusioned about how imperfect you currently are; just because he’s committed to finishing what he started. His job is to shape you. Your job is to be shaped. A little more today and tomorrow and the next day and the next… until you’re perfect.
Would you want it any other way? Do you really want where you are now, spiritually, morally, mentally, and relationally, to be your destination?
If the growth has ground to a halt in your life, it’s probably not because God has given up on his goal. It’s because you’ve forgotten that perfect is what you’re on your way toward.
“But you are to be perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect” (Jesus in Matthew 5:48 – NLT).
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