Perfection Is Not a Prerequisite for Knowing GodSample

"Becoming" Happens by Being Together

We cannot become alone. We cannot become the men we want to be—or whom God wants us to be—by ourselves. We cannot mature and become whole alone. And we cannot, by ourselves, restore our relationships with God. No amount of planning or preparation, sheer will or self-discipline or sin avoidance will get us there.

Having made us, only God knows how to help us become. Only he knows how to make us perfect. Only he knows the process, the right words to say. Only he knows where we need to go—what we need to go through. Only he knows what we need to face—what we need to experience.

Only God knows how to motivate us without wounding us. Only he knows how to heal what needs healing. Only he knows how to deal with our old tendencies, our neuroses, our bad habits, our coping strategies, our attachments and addictions, our wrong beliefs and bad interpretations.

So, becoming happens by being together. It happens with contact. It happens by encounter. It happens by experience. And the more we’re with him, the more it happens.

So here’s the upshot: we’ve simply got to learn to show up in our sin and shame. We must be willing to come into contact with God while we’re still broken and ashamed.

And then we need to stay. And keep staying. Even when shame tells us to run and hide.

The order is crucial. Be with comes before become. We’d like it to be flipped, for sure. We’d like to be able to get perfect on our own.

But it doesn’t work like that. If we try to flip the order, nothing happens.

“Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Hebrews 4:16).

Nothing happens because grace is precisely what we need and don’t have. “Grace,” wrote the great disentangler Dallas Willard, “is God acting in our lives to accomplish what we can’t accomplish on our own.” We need grace to change. We need grace to become. Without it, we can’t escape the dark dungeons of sin.

God says, “Come as you are, and get better with me, in my love.” And when we go to him like that, he pours grace into our lives. He heals what’s hurt. He cleans us up. God actually deals with our sin. And he doesn’t sweep any of it under the rug.