Perfection Is Not a Prerequisite for Knowing GodSample

Less Than Perfect in a Be-Perfect Culture

Be perfect hasn’t gone away. It's done quite the opposite; we’ve upped the intensity of the signal and created new and cunning methods of delivering the message. One social critic dubbed this moment, our day, the “age of perfectionism.”

Mass media still does its job, as do our families and communities. But now social media beams Be perfect too. First it shows us, in high-res and high-def, how perfect everyone else is—then it inundates us with advice.

We’ve also, of course, modernized what “perfect” looks like. And so now it looks like this: rich, successful, hip, happy, slim, fit, and loved.

We’ve got to be crushing it at work, winning at home—and looking good doing it.

And because any of us can help ourselves into “perfect,” anything less than perfect is just unacceptable. If we’re ever in pain or ever get stuck, it’s no one’s fault but ours.

The problem is, of course, human beings aren’t perfect. Not one.

We struggle. We blow it. We make mistakes and sin. We all do.

“It’s clear enough, isn’t it, that we’re sinners, every one of us, in the same sinking boat with everybody else?” (Rom. 3:19).

We’re flat out less than perfect. We struggle with honesty. With integrity. With decency. With patience. With kindness. With self-control. We struggle with pornography and infidelity, alcohol and drugs. We all sin. We do so every day. In ways that are big and obvious, of course. But much more often, in ways that are small and sometimes almost imperceptible.

And if we tallied it all up, if we all made lifetime sins lists—honest lists, complete—they would be, by any measure that matters, indistinguishable from one another. Some would lean toward more socially acceptable sins, for sure. But they would all contain more than enough rebellion and sin to disrupt our relationships with God.

Being a member of the human race means (=) being a member of the sinner class.

But there’s no room for that sin—and all those mistakes—in a be-perfect culture.

So what do we do?

Well, we do what human instinct has always told us to do:

They heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden. (Gen. 3:8)

We hide. We obscure failures. We conceal sin. We fake it—in the desperate hope that no one will ever learn the truth.