Imperfect

Imperfect
Wednesday, February 8, 2023 by Susan Lyttek

I like saving money, so I like food that is less than ideal. Several times a month I place an online order for goods that are deformed or miscolored or something similar. It all tastes great! But that is about the only time I find the label “imperfect” to be a good thing.

Today, as this blog is due to post, I am knee deep in edits that I wanted done last week.

For the most part, I like writing and love coming up with stories. But edits? Why can’t I do it right the first time so that I don’t need to go through this process? Instead, all the writing I do needs to be refined and cleaned up by others. (Don’t get me wrong, I love what the editors do for my work!) I just wish that what I did in life never needed to be corrected. I wish I acted perfectly.

Jesus says in Matthew 5:48, Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

Insert primal scream here.

The problem is not the desire to be perfect, it’s the execution. As a continually reforming perfectionist, I have always longed for that level. Sometimes that longing has shut down any creative efforts on my part because I know I can’t do it as well as I want to. Sometimes that longing has made me obsess about what I’m working on and never submit it or never get past chapter 3. Sometimes that longing and realizing I can’t fulfill it leads me to throw up my hands and say ‘why even bother?’

While so many of us have different issues and different struggles, the perfectionism thing is one that runs throughout my family. On the plus side, we can commiserate with each other about the struggles. But unfortunately, we also tend to reinforce some of those bad habits just by being who we are.

Since it’s a family-wide thing, Gary even came up with a saying that he repeats when he catches any of us falling into the traps of perfectionism. “Never let perfection get in the way of excellence.” In other words, don’t get hung up on being perfect so much that you don’t aim for your best.

God doesn’t struggle with any of this. (He doesn’t struggle with anything, but that’s beside the point that I’m attempting to make.) He is perfect by his very nature. He doesn’t have to work at perfection or strive to improve. He just IS.

Why does Jesus tell us to be perfect then?

In the context, he is finishing the sermon on the Mount. The aim of the sermon is to show them what keeping the law really means. Even the most faithful who thought they were living in a way to honor God could see in those verses where they fell short. Jesus was goading them (in the most loving way possible) to see how much they needed someone else to fulfill the law. Someone else like him.

In the book of Hebrews, my favorite book of the New Testament, it goes a lot farther into this idea. (Search how often the word perfect or a variant thereof appears in the book!) The gist of it this. Christ came to be our perfect priest because the Law of the Old Testament couldn’t convey perfection. He even came under a different system, the one of Melchizedek that predated the law. But not only did he come to be our perfect priest, he came so that he and the Holy Spirit could work in us and draw us to his perfection.

One day, after a life of sanctification, a life in Jesus that improves me iota by iota, I will be perfected in Him. It isn’t a pie in the sky dream. It’s something that he promises me and all who put faith in him.

If we go back to the verse in Matthew, taking into account the passages in Hebrews and elsewhere, when he says “be perfect” it is the same as at the end of Matthew when he says “follow Me.” It is only when we follow him that we have any hope of true perfection, because only true perfection is found in God.

However, there is one other being that is called perfect in Scripture. It is Satan before he fell. That should be sobering to all of us. Our own efforts at perfection imitate the father of lies who sought his own glory, sought to flaunt his beauty before all and seek worship.

Instead, let us realize that on this earthly plain, we will never be perfect, while striving all the while to get closer and closer to the one who is perfect and will always be perfect.

Share This Blog: