God Is Not Mad at You: You Can Experience Real Love, Acceptance & Guilt-free Living (4 page)

Perfectionism is a cold and sterile symptom of a legalistic mind-set. Jesus scolded the Pharisees when He said, “They tie up heavy loads, hard to bear, and place them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves will not lift a finger to help bear them” (Matthew 23:4).

The Pharisees were great at making others feel as if they didn’t measure up. This is the opposite of grace, and perhaps that is why Jesus so vehemently opposed the Pharisees’ behavior. Satan is The Accuser of the brethren, and he delights in trying to make us feel that we don’t measure up to God’s expectations.

God not only does not expect us to be perfect, but it is precisely
because
we are not and never will be perfect that He sent Jesus to save us and the Holy Spirit to help us in our daily life. If we could do it by ourselves, we would not need help. Jesus didn’t come to make us perfect people with no flaws, but He came to forgive our imperfections and to wipe them away in God’s sight. We actually are perfect through Jesus, but we can never be perfect in our own performance.

Jesus did say, “Be perfect even as your Father in heaven is perfect,” (Matthew 5:48) but a study of the original language reveals that He meant that we should grow into complete maturity of godliness in mind and character. The thought of growing doesn’t frighten or overwhelm me because it is a process that goes on all throughout our lives. I love to learn, to change and to grow. However, when I thought I was being commanded to “be perfect right now,” I did feel frightened and it overwhelmed me because I knew that I wasn’t perfect and didn’t know how I ever could be. Now I know that I will still be growing even when Jesus returns to take me to heaven. God is not disappointed that we have not arrived at manifesting perfect behavior, but He does delight in finding us growing into maturity.

We are called to be excellent, but God leaves flaws in even His choicest saints so that they will always need Him. I like to say that excellence is not perfection, but it is taking what you have to work with and doing the best you can with it, all the while trusting Jesus to fill in the gaps.

Although I don’t believe that we can have a perfect performance, I do believe that we can have a perfect heart toward God. That means that we love Him wholeheartedly, and we want to please Him and do what is right. When we receive Jesus as the perfect sacrifice for our sins, He gives us a new heart and puts His Spirit in us. The heart He gives us is a perfect heart. I like to say that He gives us a new “want to.” He gives us a desire to please Him.

Do you love God? I believe you do, or you wouldn’t be reading this book. If you don’t have an intimate relationship of love with God, you are probably searching for one, and God is also pleased with your desire to know Him. There is a lot in life that I don’t know, and a lot about God that I still don’t completely understand, but I do know that I love Him as much as I possibly can at this point in my spiritual journey with Him. I hope to love Him more as I grow in Him, but for now I trust that my love for Him is what He delights in. You probably have that same kind of love for God, but you may not have come to the conclusion that your love for God is the most important thing to Him. God wants us to love Him because of Who He is, not just for what He does for us.

You may still be thinking that you have to perform perfectly in order to have His acceptance. If you believe that, it is a lie! The devil has lied to you, people have misled you, you are confused
and the truth is that God does not expect us to be perfect in our performance.

Think about your children or other intimate relationships that you have. Do you really think that anyone you are in relationship with is going to be perfect all of the time? Of course you don’t! I already know that there will be times when Dave or my children will disappoint me or fail to treat me just right, but I am committed to them for life, so I have already decided to forgive them. I may have to go through the process of forgiveness each time they hurt me, but ultimately I will forgive and we will go on in our relationship.

God has this same kind of commitment to His children, only His is even more perfect than ours as parents could ever be. God already knows that you and I won’t manifest perfection and He has already decided to forgive us. Wow! That takes the pressure off, doesn’t it? When Jesus died for our sins, paying the ransom to redeem us, He died not only for the sins we have committed in the past, but for every wrong thing we would ever do as long as we live. All of our sins are already forgiven, past, present and future, and all we need to do is admit them and thankfully receive God’s forgiveness. We are safe in His arms and completely covered by His grace. All He really wants is for us to love Him and out of that love do the best we can to serve and obey Him. I am convinced that if I do the best I can each day, even though my best is still imperfect, God sees my heart and views me as perfect anyway because of His grace (undeserved favor and blessing).

In I Kings 11:4, we read that David had a perfect heart. Now if you know anything about David, you know that he was not perfect in his behavior. He committed murder and adultery, but God says that he had a perfect heart. Just try to wrap your religious brain around that! How could God say that David’s heart was
perfect? He could say it because David thoroughly repented of his sin, and although he sinned greatly, he never stopped loving God. He manifested weakness due to the temptations of the flesh, and yes, he was guilty and very wrong in his behavior. What he did not only hurt God, but hurt a lot of other people, too. David was an imperfect man with a perfect heart.

It is said of Amaziah, king of Judah, “He did right in the Lord’s sight, but not with a perfect or blameless heart” (2 Chronicles 25:2). There are people who do right, but their heart is far from God. The Pharisees had a polished performance, but because of their pride, their hearts were filled with criticism and judgment. I believe that God is more delighted with someone who has a perfect heart and makes mistakes than He is with someone who follows the law to the letter but whose heart is not right.

If you ever want to be delivered from the tyranny of perfectionism, you will have to understand the difference between a perfect heart and a perfect performance. The story below taken from the website of the Sicklerville United Methodist Church shows how a flawed gift can be utterly perfect in the eyes of a parent.

“Picture a sunny, humid and very hot August Saturday afternoon. You are mowing your lawn. You are about three-quarters finished and you are perspiring greatly. Your five-year-old has been playing in the sandbox. As you turn to make another pass with the lawnmower, you see him standing in front of you with a glass filled with ice and water. As your eyes meet, he lifts the glass toward you offering its cold refreshment. You turn off the lawnmower and reach for the glass. As you take it, you notice the sandbox sand is mixed in with the ice, clippings of grass are floating on top and dirty droplets of water are running down the sides of the glass. That is a picture of Christian perfection and of what Jesus meant when He said, ‘Be perfect even as my Father is perfect.’ Was
that ice water absolutely perfect? Not at all; it had grass, sand and dirt floating in it. What made the glass of ice water perfect? It was a pure, genuine, sincere and loving heart of a little boy wanting to do something kind and loving for his father.”

We conducted a survey at our office, asking our employees what one of their greatest concerns was in their walk with God. The number one response was, “When can I know that I am doing enough?”

Perfectionism is fueled with the tyranny of the
shoulds
and
oughts
. It is the constant nagging feeling of never doing well enough or being good enough. We ought to be doing so-and-so, or at least more of it, and should be better than we are. We should pray better, read the Bible more and be kinder and more patient. We should be less selfish, more loving and on and on. We never run out of things on our list to make us dissatisfied with ourselves. This feeling haunts us in all areas of life, but more in our spiritual life than any other area. We instinctively want to be pleasing to God, and we are deeply afraid that we aren’t. We believe that God is mad at us!

I grew up in a home with an angry father who was impossible to please. I spent every waking moment trying to please him, but no matter what I did, I lived with the gnawing feeling that he was probably still mad at me.

Perfectionists usually have low self-esteem, and they hope that more perfection in their performance will allow them to feel better about themselves. If we never feel quite good enough about ourselves, then it is easy to believe that God is not satisfied with us either. We should learn to love ourselves, and to not be against ourselves, rejecting ourselves, or even worse, hating ourselves. Learning to love yourself is the essence of receiving God’s love. It
is the ointment that brings healing to your wounded soul. Until we receive God’s love and learn to love ourselves because of it, we will remain sick in our souls and live dysfunctional lives.

I well remember how I struggled to be strong and good at all times and continually felt that I did not measure up to God’s expectations. I can truthfully say that I went through years of agony before I finally heard God whisper in my heart, “Joyce, it is okay for you to have weaknesses.” I am sure that He had tried to teach me that previously but I was unable to hear it due to the wrong thinking I had. God wasn’t telling me to try to be weak, but He was letting me know that He understood that I was, and that He wasn’t angry with me because of it.

When God told me that it was okay for me to have some weaknesses it sounded too good to be true. I immediately began a Bible study of the word “weakness,” and I discovered that Jesus actually understands our weaknesses (Hebrews 4:15). He understands them because He took on human flesh in order to identify with us, and He was tempted in every respect just as we are; while He never sinned, He is not shocked when we fail. I am certainly not saying that we should not work with the Holy Spirit to overcome our weaknesses, but it is a process, and even as we overcome some of them, there are others that still remain. We should learn to be happy about our progress instead of feeling guilty about how far we still have to go.

If we focus on our weaknesses we will continually feel discouraged, but if we focus on our progress it increases our joy.

Through my study of the word “weakness,” I also learned that God encourages us to be long-suffering with the weak. We are told to bear with the failings of the weak, to endure, and carry one another’s troublesome moral faults (Galatians 6:1–2). Surely, if God expects us to do that for one another, He is prepared to do
it for us. God would never ask us to do something that He wasn’t willing to do.

There is a wonderful story by Dan Clark called “Puppies for Sale” that gives us a beautiful picture of earthly love that mirrors God’s love for us:

Many people in the world feel that they are worthless and that nobody wants them because they have flaws, but Jesus understands and wants them! His strength is made perfect in our
weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9). His love and total acceptance give us the courage to live with confidence in the midst of our imperfections.

You have permission to have weaknesses and not to have to constantly strive to attain something that is not attainable. You are probably feeling the same fear, and asking the same question that I did when I dared to believe this freeing truth: “If I think I am free to have weakness, won’t it just invite me to sin more and more?” The answer is, no it won’t. God’s grace and love, and the freedom it offers, never entices us to sin more, but it does entice us to fall radically in love with Jesus. The more we realize that He loves us the way we are, the more we love Him, and that love for Him causes us to want to change for the right reason.

God gave Israel the law through Moses. It was a system stating that if they would keep His law, then He would bless them. When they failed, sacrifices had to be made by them or the High Priest who stood in their place. These sacrifices atoned for their sins. They were given laws that told them the right thing to do, but they were not given any help in doing them. They had to try to be good, but they failed and had to make sacrifices to make up for their mistakes. This explanation, of course, is a very basic and simple one, but I hope it will serve my purpose in this portion of the book.