Understanding Imperfection

So how are you? Is life treating you good? Are you managing to live a good life? Are you being good to yourself and others? Are you keeping to that life motto of not causing harm to others? Feeling pretty good about yourself? Probably not. Man, we can trying really hard but no matter how hard we try we are always hurting someone, somehow, somewhere. It's just the nature of things; as long as a human is involved it is going to get messed up somehow. It's why we need Jesus.

We don't need Jesus to make us good so we can earn our way into heaven. Too many Christians received the wrong memo. Our living will never be good enough to get us into heaven, no matter how hard we try. Think of Solomon for a moment. Here was a guy who had it all. He was suppose to be the best of the best, the cream of the crop. Yahweh told him that he would have everything that he needs , all he would have to do is stay loyal to Yahweh. Simple. But it is never simple when we are part of the equation:

But King Solomon loved many foreign women, as well as the daughter of Pharaoh: women of the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians, and Hittites— from the nations of whom the Lord had said to the children of Israel, “You shall not intermarry with them, nor they with you. Surely they will turn away your hearts after their gods.” Solomon clung to these in love. (1 Kings 11:1-2)

No matter how hard we try we will always mess up, always fall short, always disappoint. Jesus did not come to make us perfect but to die for our imperfections. He came to cover us, to forgive our past, present and future sins. Because of him we have been declared righteous. It isn't that we are righteous or perfect but that we have been made righteous by Jesus' sacrifice on the cross.

Now we need to grow into that righteousness. It means each day we should be dying more to ourselves and becoming more like Jesus. The Church is not full of perfect people but of people being perfected. That means in our flesh we still mess up and fall short but we have a safety net called grace. This means the Church is a messy place and can only exist as we practice the same love, mercy, grace and forgiveness that has been shown to us. We are not really understanding this as the immature destroy the imperfect mature followers of Jesus. "You who are without sin, cast the first stone."

In our imperfection we will hurt people and people will be hurt, that is the nature of mess ups. But what a wonderful backdrop for a family that is working out and perfecting love, mercy, and forgiveness. Now, if you can understand this, life is going to look much different to you, so will you and so will the Church.