Sunday: The Mastery of Perfectionism
WEEK 49
SUNDAY
THE MASTERY OF PERFECTIONISM
Mark 4:26-29
We come now to a new mastery and a necessary one—the mastery of perfectionism.
One of the greatest dangers to the developing spiritual life is to set up goals that are unattainable and then go into a tailspin of depression and self-condemnation if these goals are not reached, and reached to perfection. The goals set up in the New Testament are high goals, the highest ever placed before the mind of humanity, namely, that we are to be perfect as the Lord in heaven is perfect and that we shall be like God for we shall see God as he is. That was for the individual. For the individual and society there was to be nothing less than the coming of the kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven. No higher goals were ever set for the individual or for society. Both of them are perfect goals. Then why didn’t they result in perfectionism? There is not one trace in the pages of the New Testament of paralysis and frustration resulting from what we have come to look on as perfectionism. Why? Because Jesus wisely put into his teaching the idea of gradual growth as well as sudden obtainment. The Holy Spirit came suddenly on them, and the kingdom is to come suddenly, yet in all this was an emphasis on the little things and on the next steps. The perfection was undergirded by gradualism.
“Whoever is faithful with little is also faithful with much” (Luke 16:10). This is vastly important and saved the early Christians from expecting suddenly to leap into perfection. They were Christians in the making, and they would never feel that they were “made.” When the sign was put up at Gibraltar: Ne Plus Ultra (“nothing beyond”); when Columbus discovered America, it was changed by simply rubbing out the Ne and making it Plus Ultra (“everything beyond”). That is the way of the Christians. To us there is everything beyond. For the more we see, the more we see there is to be seen. All our “perfections” turn to imperfections in the light of Jesus’ countenance. Yet it isn’t a paralysis; it is a prod. We have seen what we ought to be.
O Lord, we thank you that in the light of your countenance we see and the seeing turns to seeking. Your perfection judges our imperfection yet sets us afire to find. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I shall not be so intent on distant goals that I shall be unfit for the next step and the little task.