If you’re trying to impress God with your good deeds and repetitive rituals, know this: He’s not impressed.
“All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away.”
I was turned off by all the religious exercises and rituals that produced NO CHANGES in me. If religious exercises and rituals weren’t going to help me out, then I would have to seek perfection in myself and in relationship with others. I needed serious changes in my life and I was concerned most about how I was going to make those changes and the things I truly wanted.
There was so much confusion over religion and who was God and Jesus and what was my place in the family dynamic and who I was — and beyond. I was utterly confused by it all, instead of growing up in an environment where I felt safe and things seemed fair, I regularly tried to work things out with logic and reason. (You, too?)
Deep inside, deeper than my psyche, I had a sense of apprehension that many people have (if not all) at some times in our lives — that gnawing, nagging sense of disconnection from a very important relationship. I just couldn’t put my finger on it, nor was I willing to take the time and risk losing my agnostic mind to even more anxiety and disappointment by searching for answers I didn’t think existed.
The Driving Force
I don’t know about your childhood, but mine was aflush with a back catalog of scenes of abuse and dysfunction. I was turned into a whipping boy of sorts — I was punished for the bad things others did.*
I was treated in such a way that was completely counter-productive to raising a healthy individual, let alone a child. (I am not telling you this for you to feel sorry for me, but so you can understand where I’m coming from.) As it was, with the burden of abuse falling onto me for reasons beyond my understanding, I reasoned that if I could somehow be perfect, the beatings would stop. (Notice the dysfunction in my idea.)
In my search for perfection, I tried, countless times, to see myself in view of achievements and success, but the failures continued to mount and that awful, nagging perfectionism hounded and haunted my thoughts, pounding my psyche as ocean waves erode a beach — shifting the sand and pulling it out to sea. Was I ever going to figure out my life?
I desperately needed a baseline of truth and purpose and eventually arrived at the place where nothing made any sense. I had some basic, foundational concepts of reality, conformity, and formality, but there was no system or ideology that pleased me or ever came anywhere close to satisfying my curiosities and that persistent hunger and thirst for righteousness that we all feel until we do one of a few things with it: we either try to repress it, secular society “educates” it out of us, OR we actually get on with it and seek God with our whole heart and discover the TRUTH that’s always been available to us.
Perfectionism is the Problem
Photo by Francesco De Tommaso on Unsplash
A human being achieving perfection is as possible as a bear becoming a whale. I got all twisted up in knots trying to be someone else because of the rejection I felt and I was using this striving toward perfection as a means of soothing my rejected soul. In those motivational tapes, I heard that productive goals, no matter how small, would be good for me, so I figured I’d try a huge goal!
However, the problem isn’t just in how we look at a situation or in the impossibility and the fact that untold numbers of people strive for the ideal of “perfect,” but the fact that humanity has no idea of the cost of the effort wasted and the relationships lost in our struggle to be someone we are not.
“Be yourself. Everyone else is taken.”
I sought to be perfect by working out, dressing nicely, and reading, no, devouring, literature from all over the world because I ‘reasoned’ that, ‘If I could just become perfect enough, I will have all the favor and the answers and I will be the one to come out on top in every situation.’ I reasoned that if I tried hard enough, people would at least appreciate the effort.
“You can think positively all you want, but you’re not going to wrestle an 800 pound gorilla and win.”
The end result? I got philosophically sophisticated as I was exposed to many ideologies, but never accomplished what I set out to achieve — social dominance. Just being honest. After all the ‘struggle to survive’ speeches, self-help manuals, psychological perspectives, and the positivity teachings, I merely became a trivia buff with a perfectionism problem.
I cried out from deep inside my near-exhausted soul, “What is the answer?!”
““Thus you are to be holy to Me, for I the LORD am holy; and I have set you apart from the peoples to be Mine.””
As a Christian, Jesus — the perfect Lamb of God — expects us to follow in His footsteps. You have many decisions to make. Following Jesus requires you to alter your lifestyle forever. As you draw closer and closer to Jesus, you will find that the things that once filled you with lust and envy slowly fade to black and the goals God has for you (His will) are wrapped up in helping others achieve theirs!
“21 Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. 22 But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation— 23 if you continue in your faith, established and firm, and do not move from the hope held out in the gospel.”
God’s greatest desire, and standard, is for us to live in an intimate relationship with Him. He wants to perfect us in His love. As you might have guessed, another translation for ‘holy’ is ‘perfect.’
“Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
Closing Thoughts
Mankind’s idea of perfection is not the same as God’s.
Mankind’s idea of perfection is a false standard based on our individual ability to achieve, entertain, manipulate, and influence with our own strengths and abilities to please ‘the right people’ so we can gain fame and wealth.
God’s idea of perfection is when we completely trust in Him as He guides us by the Holy Spirit enabling and empowering a fully-submitted Christian into a lifestyle of humility while doing all the right things at the right time for all the right reasons.
So, yes, in an intimate relationship with the Holy Spirit, perfection — not perfectionism — is possible! Besides, Jesus didn’t walk around trying to be someone else! :)
Prayer
Father God, in and of myself, I have no chance to be holy. Oh, wait. You say I do have a chance to be perfect. My Lord, it seems impossible to me that I could be perfect at anything, but Your ideas and my ideas sometimes clash. Please help me to understand the things I currently have no ideas about or foundation for. I offer myself to You as a living testimony, holy and pleasing to You so I can fulfill Your will for my life. My Lord, Help me release and relinquish all the negative and nonsensical thoughts I have about You and Heaven. Please show me Your glory! I want to know You so much more than I do now! I remove perfectionism from my heart right now, break it’s power over my life in the name and the blood of Jesus and I ask that You would fill me with a new anointing of Your Holy Spirit, an anointing of love, peace, and joy — the things I lost while dealing with trying to be perfect without You. Please forgive me for trying to impress You and help me to live in Your perfect love! In Jesus’ holy name I pray, amen!
*Note: Discipline and abuse are different things:
Punishment is when someone is hurt in some way so as to discourage them from repeating the error, deliberately excluding discipline.
Discipline is when a person is taught how to do something the right way so they don’t have to be punished.
Banner photo by Simone Dalmeri on Unsplash