Perfection Is Not a Prerequisite for Knowing GodSample

A System of Double Lives and Rejecting God

When Be perfect is out there and active, when it’s reverberating through a society, it creates a system that requires double lives. It incentivizes us to project the good and cover up the bad—and there’s always something to cover up. “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8).

Public smiles and private shame.

Be perfect creates a system whereby we move through our days believing that we are different: unlovable and unacceptable. Because, in such a system, other people look great—having hid their failures. But we sure know about our own. So we live with lurking fear: if people knew the real us, the less-than-perfect us, the sinful us, they’d cut us off and cast us out. Families. Friends. Society.

Even God.

When parents and pastors and other authority figures are the ones telling us to be perfect, it’s easy to attribute Be perfect to God. It’s a small jump from Be perfect as a cultural demand to Be perfect as a divine command.

God has a problem with sin. A big one. Absolutely. But not in the way many of us think. Sin does get in the way of our relationships with him. It does disrupt the father-son relationship. But the disruption occurs not because God rejects us or turns away from us or anything like that. He doesn’t. Ever.

Sin disrupts the father-son relationship because it causes us to reject him.

God made humans in love and for love. And because of his love, he gave us free will. Standing in eternity, he’s always known each of us through and through—all the way to the end. He’s always known our frailty. Our foolishness. He’s always known we would abuse our freedom. He’s always known we would rebel and rebel and rebel.

Like an open book, you watched me grow from
conception to birth;
all the stages of my life were spread out before you,
The days of my life all prepared
before I’d even lived one day (Psalm 139:16).

Standing in eternity, God saw what we’d do—and he made us still. He wanted to be in relationship with us still. He loved us still—outrageously.

And he does not change. “I the LORD do not change” (Malachi. 3:6).