4/26/12

The Perfect Christian


Perfect ends up being the enemy of good.

This is so true. For me ever since I’ve gotten saved, I’ve been striving to be that perfect Christian girl. My intentions are good. I mean we all should try to be the best Christian we can be. The longer I have been a Christian the more I have learned. And I’ve found that there are a lot of things “good Christians” do. Give to the needed, love everyone, go to church, pause every day, don’t talk back to your parents, don’t judge anybody, and trust God even when you don’t believe in yourself. This is just some, but this list was my model of what I believed a perfect Christian should be doing. So that’s what I strived to do – follow everything on this list, and be PERFECT.

Ha. Yeah as you can tell, if you know me, I haven’t even came close to living up to this list perfectly. Sure sometimes I’ve done well and kept to this list, but when I didn’t, I thought I was a bad person, a bad Christian, I thought that God didn’t love me as much when I didn’t keep them. So this ideal we all have of the perfect Christian started getting to me.

I don’t know if any of you have felt that way to – having to be your best for God. I mean we all should try to be our best. But what I found is that I was almost limiting my view of God. See I had set this perfect model in my head so high, that when I found myself not keeping these standards I’d get discouraged.

“For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” Romans 3:23

We all sin. Yes, everyone will sin even when we mean to do well. My ideal, this list, see that’s what perfect Christians do, and I’m not perfect to say the least, only one man to live was perfect and that’s Jesus Christ. See this perfect man, lived a perfect life, so that imperfect people can go to a perfect place. Yeah, imperfect people, me. Jesus doesn’t expect us to live up to this ideal we have! We don’t have to! He wants us to do our best but don’t get the idea in your head that you have to be perfect because hun that’s impossible.

Perfect ends up being the enemy of good.

So in a sense our image of being a perfect Christian does end up being the enemy of good. I started getting so discouraged that I wasn’t living up to what God wants of me that I stopped trying, stopped praying, stopped pausing. See I felt as though I wasn’t living up to His expectations so why even try anymore? So wanting to do well, to be better, actually caused me to do worse! As Christians we need to stop striving toward perfection and start going day by day and seeing God for Himself. We need to stop focusing on what we are doing wrong and start focusing on Him. Because He already forgave everything you’re going to do wrong!

Don’t get caught up in perfect, get caught up in Him and He’ll make you perfect.
But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Matthew 6:33

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