8: I am Not Yet Perfect
Eight
I AM NOT YET PERFECT
There is yet one more truth to grapple with as we seek to realize our true identity in Christ. That is the obvious tension between who we are in Christ and what we see ourselves to be in our daily lives.
The apostle Paul, in the context of wanting to know Christ more and be like him said, “Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect” (Philippians 3:12). Surely all of us can identify with Paul and say, “I am not yet perfect.”
The Tension of an Unfinished Life
We live in the era between the coming of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost and the second coming of Jesus himself, an era described by theologians as “already, but not yet.” There is then a tension between what we already are through our identity in Christ, and what we see ourselves to be in our daily experience.
• In Christ we stand perfectly righteous before God, but in our daily lives, we see much remaining sin.
• In Christ we are adopted sons of God, but in our experience we sometimes feel like orphans.
• In Christ we are new creations, but it does not always seem as if “the old has passed away.”
If we are going to grow in our realization of who we are in Christ, then we must learn to live with the tension of not being in our daily experience what we are in Christ.
Paul seemed to exult in this tension. Not that he rejoiced in his remaining imperfection. Rather, he rejoiced in the contrast between who he was in himself and who he was in Christ. He saw that his remaining imperfection magnified the grace of God. To paraphrase 1 Corinthians 15:9-10, Paul said, “I am not worthy to be an apostle, but I am an apostle by the grace of God.” In Ephesians 3:8 he wrote, “To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ.” And finally near the end of his life he could say, “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost” (1 Timothy 1:15).
This is how Paul viewed himself—not only the least of the apostles, but the very least of all God’s people (the saints), and in fact the foremost of sinners—but he did so in order to magnify the contrast between who he was in himself and who he was in Christ. If you and I are going to make progress in realizing who we are in Christ, we must openly and honestly face who we are in ourselves; we are not yet perfect, we still sin daily in thought, word, deed, and motive. In fact, on some days we sin miserably.
Our tendency, however, is to look within ourselves to try to find some reason to feel good about ourselves, and this, of course, misses the point entirely. We are performance-oriented by nature, that is, by our sinful nature. To use a British term, we don’t want to be “on the dole”—to be a charity case before God. We want to “pay our own way” to self-respect based on what we accomplish.
In the introduction to this book I mentioned a woman with a broken marriage who had said to a mutual friend, “I am just a failure.” I did not add that the man had responded to her by saying kindly, “No, you are not a failure.” When I heard that part of the story, I winced and thought, Oh, I wish you hadn’t said that.
My friend was trying to prop up the lady’s self-esteem. But that is always a futile effort, an exercise in misplaced compassion. You can’t deny reality, and the fact was that this woman had failed in her marriage. But there was another, greater reality. Because this woman is a believer, the greater reality was and is that, as one in Christ, she stands holy and blameless before God (Ephesians1:4). That is why I wish my friend had said something like, “You are right. You are a failure, and so am I. But that’s why Jesus came. He came to die for failures like you and me. Because of Jesus, our failures no longer define who we truly are.”
If we are to grow in the realization of who we are in Christ we must keep the gospel continually before us. To use an expression I heard in the 1980s, “We must preach the gospel to ourselves every day.” We must believe that God forgives and welcomes sinners. As the Puritan Thomas Wilcox said, “In all the Scripture there is not one hard word against a poor sinner stripped of his self-righteousness.”
Sinners Embraced
When a family has “skeletons in the closet,” it can mean they have some particularly disreputable ancestors. As the expression suggests, families usually try to keep these things hidden. Well, Jesus in his humanity had some skeletons in his closet, but it’s fascinating to note that, rather than hiding these connections, the Bible goes to unusual lengths to emphasize them.
Consider the genealogy of Jesus as recorded in Matthew 1:1-16. To begin with, four women are mentioned. That is unusual because women were not usually included in the biblical genealogies. What’s more, all four of these women had significant immoral baggage in their histories.
• Matthew 1:3 – Tamar, the daughter-in-law of Judah, disguised herself as a prostitute and committed incest with Judah.
• Matthew 1:5 – Rahab is clearly identified as a prostitute. See Hebrews 11:31.
• Matthew 1:5 – Ruth, though a virtuous woman herself, was a Moabite. The Moabite tribe originated as a result of incest between drunken Lot and one of his daughters. Later, Moabite women committed immorality with the Israelite men when they were in the wilderness.
• Matthew 1:6 – Bathsheba had committed adultery with David
Three of the men in Jesus’ genealogy didn’t look so good either.
• Jacob was a deceiver, yet in Luke 1:33 the angel said to Mary, “he will reign over the house of Jacob forever.”
• Judah was an immoral man, yet in Revelation 5:5 Jesus is called “the Lion of the tribe of Judah.”
• David committed adultery with Bathsheba and orchestrated the death of her husband, yet in Luke 1:32 the angel Gabriel said, “the Lord God will give to [Jesus] the throne of his father David.”
So Jesus had plenty of skeletons in the closet of his genealogy. And Matthew, writing under the divine guidance of the Holy Spirit, does not hesitate to mention them. In fact, he seems to make a point of doing so. What’s going on here? What is the Holy Spirit saying to us through these skeletons in the closet?
Jesus identified with and understood sinners. He identified with sinners in his genealogy. He identified with tax collectors and sinners during his life (Mark 2:15). He identified with the thief at his death and said to him, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43).
Yes, Jesus identified with sinners, and this is good news for us, because we are still sinners—saved sinners to be sure, but we remain sinners nevertheless in our daily lives. And Jesus loves us despite our sin, and sits at the right hand of the Father interceding for us (Romans 8:34).
Grace Trumps Performance
I mentioned in chapter three how we all have good days and bad days. The point is well worth making again, for our daily struggle against sin continually drives us to measure our acceptance before God on the basis of our performance.
On a good day we may get out of bed as soon as the alarm goes off and have a refreshing quiet time. Events of the day generally fall out the right way and we encounter no significant sin issues. A bad day is just the opposite. We oversleep, skip our quiet time, muddle through a difficult day, and struggle all day long with sinful thoughts (resentment, envy, frustration, lust, etc.). On which of those days would you be more expectant of God’s blessing or answers to prayer? Your answer to that question reveals whether you are living by your works, or by the gospel.
Our default setting is to live by our works. But let me repeat a statement that I made to a group of college students some twenty years ago that is still valid and speaks to the good day and bad day scenarios: Your worst days are never so bad that you are beyond the reach of God’s grace. And your best days are never so good that you are beyond the need of God’s grace.
Every day of our lives should be a day of relating to God on the basis of his grace alone, for every day of our lives we are not yet perfect. Someday we will be. Someday each of us will go to be with the Lord (if he does not return first), and at that time we will join the spirits of “the righteous made perfect” (Hebrews 12:23). We look forward to that day with anticipation and hope. In the meantime, despite having died to the dominion of sin through our union with Christ, we still struggle with the presence and activity of sin that remains in us.
So if we are going to grow in the realization of who we are in Christ, we must come to terms with the reality that we are not yet perfect; the presence and activity of sin is still alive and well within us. The reason we must accept this fact is that we cannot look to Christ for our identity if we are still trying to find something about ourselves to prop up our self-esteem. To really grow in the wonderful reality of who we are in Christ, we must abandon any desire to find something within ourselves that makes us acceptable to God.
This does not mean that we should not aspire to grow in holiness, nor does it mean we will never see progress in our lives. It certainly does not mean that we should shrug off the expressions of remaining sin with the thought, “Oh well, that’s just the way I am.” No, all the moral imperatives in the New Testament imply that we are to seriously pursue growth in Christian character. Consider just a few:
• We are to put off the old self and put on the new self (Ephesians 4:22-24).
• We are to put to death the deeds of the body (Romans 8:13).
• We are to put on such character traits as compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, and love (Colossians 3:12-14).
• We are to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against our souls (1 Peter 2:11).
• We are to make every effort to grow in all the traits of Christian character (2 Peter 1:5-7).
These are just representative of many moral imperatives scattered throughout the New Testament. There is no question that it is God’s will that we pursue a holy and Christlike life.
But though we are to vigorously pursue spiritual maturity, both in putting to death sinful traits and putting on Christlike traits, we must never think that God’s approval and acceptance of us is earned by our progress. God is obviously pleased when we seek to please him (Colossians 1:10), but his acceptance of us is based entirely on the work of Christ alone in his sinless life and sin-bearing death.
Let’s return to that thought that God is pleased when we seek to please him. How do our efforts please God? It is by our motive more than it is our actions. If our motive, even unconsciously, is to earn God’s approval and blessing by our obedience, then he is not pleased, because that motive actually demeans the perfect obedience of Christ in our place. It suggests that the work of Christ on our behalf was insufficient, so we need to step in and help out. The motive that God finds acceptable is joyful gratitude for the fact that Christ has already perfectly obeyed for us.
In the previous chapter, I said the concept of Christ’s ownership of our lives is radical and comprehensive. At the risk of overusing the word radical, I want to say that the motive of obeying God out of gratitude, instead of out of the assumption that obedience earns God’s blessing, is a radical concept. It is radical in the sense that the vast majority of believers do not understand what it means to be “in Christ” and to find their basic identity in him. They do not understand the truth of our representative union with him so that his obedience becomes our obedience, and his death for sin becomes our death for sin.
Conclusion
My aim in this book has been to help us understand our basic identity. Our answer to the question, “Who am I?”, is to be found in neither our achievements, nor our failures, nor the evaluations of others, but in Christ alone. It is he who, as our representative before God, lived the perfect life we could never live, died the death we deserved to die, and now sits at the right hand of God, interceding for us—and I suspect, cheering us on.
One of the old Puritans once said, “For every look you take at your sanctification, take two looks at your justification.” I want to borrow that sentence structure and say, “For every look you take at yourself in your daily experience, take two looks at who you are in Christ.”
May God help all of us to do that.
In this life I am and always will be imperfect, a saved sinner, seeking to grow in holiness and relating to God on the basis of grace that is mine because I am...in Christ!