Perfection

Pardon me while I take this moment to preach. I’ve been working at this ministry, and I’ve been hearing a lot of talk about theology and there’s one thing I’m very tired of—I’ll call it “get to heaven” Christianity. It’s this bizarre unscriptural idea that when you get saved, or become a Christian, or however you want to put it, you get a ticket into heaven and you get to admit yourself into the fellowship of other believers, but essentially your life doesn’t really change.

I hear this phrasing all the time: “Now you’re going to heaven, and you’re saved, but just because you’re saved doesn’t mean you aren’t going to sin anymore. We’re still human, and we still fail, but God forgives us our sins. It’s not that Christians don’t sin anymore, but Christians are forgiven.” I think this displays a view of grace that is fundamentally flawed. Understand, I don’t think that when you convert you suddenly become superman, able to leap over temptation in a single bound. We are still human, and we do still sin. But God help me if after 10 years of Christianity, I’m still sinning in the same way that I was before I became a Christian.

Let me put it this way: The Olympics is going on this summer in Greece. Imagine for a moment that you turn the TV on and watch the gymnastic events. Imagine that there is some there who executes every event flawlessly. She gets a perfect 10 in every event. At the end of the competition, they hand her the gold medal, and what’s more, she’s broken every Olympic record they have. What do people say about this ? She’s very Graceful. I don’t think that’s supposed to mean that somebody else took her place when it came time to stand for the judges. It means that she has the miraculous ability to perform excellently.

The Greek word in the Bible that is translated “grace” does in fact mean a gift. The word is “charis,” from which we get the word “charity.” It is also the word used in 1 Corinthians to describe the “gifts” of the spirit: charismata. But nearly every gift mentioned in 1 Corinthians describes an ability that is not within the normal scope of human ability to perform.

What I’m trying to say is that would be impossible for salvation to be a gift merely of nomenclature. Yes, Abraham believed God, and God accounted it to him as righteousness, which is to say that God just sort of pasted the label “righteous” over him. But God also gave Abraham the ability to act like a righteous man. Yes, Abraham did still sin. And he did some doosies. But that thing where he rescued Lot and didn’t keep any of the treasure was pretty impressive.

Paul makes this classic statement in Philippians 3: “Not that I have already attained, or am already perfected; but I press on, that I may lay hold of that for which Christ Jesus has also laid hold of me.” And to hear some people talk, that means that none of us are ever going to make any major improvements. We’re just supposed to press on, I suppose, for the sake of pressing on. We’re just to demonstrate our faith by working on it, but without the hope of ever actually getting anywhere with it in this life. Paul goes on to say that anyone who is mature in Christ should think about it that way, that he should never claim to have attained it, but should always be pressing on. And then in verse 16, he says, “Only let us live up to what we have already attained.” Which communicates to me that it is possible to attain at least some level of righteousness in this life.

“The wages of sin is ,” but sin brings wages, not an annuity. You don’t get the of sin in one lump sum after you die. Instead you walk out that every day. Sin brings its own suffering. Most people know the wages of sin now, in their lives now. They carry their own hell with them. So what great threat is it to know that when they die, they’ll go to a place where life is pretty much the same as it is here, perhaps a few shades darker? And what great promise is it to know that, that if they believe on Jesus, they will go to a place whose goodness they can’t really imagine?

Let me make this clear: If righteousness were only attainable once you get to heaven, I wouldn’t want to go there. I would ask God to blot me out of his book. What good is a God who can only set you free from sin, who can only make you righteous, once He puts you in a place where sinning is not possible? What kind of weak and powerless God is that? For this Christ died for me? So that once He’s weeded out all the bad people and put all the good people in a perfect environment, then we can finally stop sinning? Let it not be so!

I don’t believe that it is so. I believe that the cross of Christ was far more powerful than we currently imagine. No, I don’t believe that we will ever attain perfection in this life. Quite honestly, I don’t know that we will ever fully attain the perfection of God even in heaven. We are finite; he is infinite. Revelation describes a scene where 24 elders are forever sitting around the throne of God, constantly saying “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God almighty.” I believe that every time those elders look up, they see a new aspect of who God is, and they fall back on their faces, crying “holy!” At that rate, it may take an infinity just to perceive the holiness of God, let alone to attain it. Nevertheless, to follow Christ is to become like Him, and I believe that He gives us the power to become like Him, even as he gives us the ability to perceive how holy He is.

And because it’s who I am, let me end with another geometry illustration. Xanga won’t let me draw much, so please forgive me while I try to describe it. In your mind, draw a line going up and a line going to the right, so that they meet in the bottom left corner. The vertical line represents some imaginary measurement of how much a person is like Jesus. The horizontal line represents your daily walk. On the right hand side, draw an arrow pointing straight up. God’s perfection is infinite, so “having attained it” is infinitely ↑ that-a-way. Hopefully you’ve seen a population curve. That’s the one that starts real close to horizontal, and gradually increases the slope so that, before long, the curve is almost pointing straight up. But the curve never actually attains to a vertical line. That’s how our walk with Christ is supposed to be. Every day is a little more vertical. No, you never quite attain to perfection. But, by God’s grace, every day is a marked improvement.