It may sound like a contradiction in terms to have a sermon on the temptation to be perfect. After all aren’t temptations about being imperfect. Doesn’t God want us to be perfect just as he’s perfect? But you know, there is such a thing as the temptation to be perfect. All of us are subject to it from time to time. Some of us fall into it much of the time. It’s the temptation to live perfectly obedient lives in our own strength. It’s the temptation to think we can be like God. Ultimately to think that we no longer need a Saviour.
I’m told that the makers of Persian rugs always build in a flaw because they believe that to attempt to create a perfect product is to be guilty of blasphemy. They realise, you see, that the temptation to be perfect is no minor matter.
Now not many of us, I hope, are like the woman whose husband would get up to go to the toilet in the middle of the night and would come back to find his side of the bed made, and who was so worried about messes that she put newspaper under the cuckoo clock.
You may not be that neurotic about perfection, but some of the characteristics of perfectionists may nevertheless be true of you.
Do you expect the absolute best of yourself at all times?
Do you sometimes put off beginning a project because you don’t have the time or skills to do it perfectly?
Do you have trouble enjoying sports unless you know you can win?
Do you find yourself getting upset with other people because they don’t do things the way you think they should be done?
Are you hard on yourself when you make a mistake? What about when you make the same mistake twice?
Is the idea of being average distasteful to you?
If you can relate to some of those feelings then the temptation to perfectionism may be something you need to watch out for.
Researchers have identified four key characteristics of people who are perfectionists:
1 Perfectionists tend to think in black and white categories.
Everything in life is an either/or proposition. Either I’m perfect or I’m worthless. I’m either a great father or a bad father. If I’m not going to be a great preacher, I won’t preach at all. If I’m not always kind and selfless and loving then I’m a worthless person. If I’m not working flat out, I must be a lazy slob.
2 Perfectionists maximise failures and minimise successes.
So you might say to your perfectionist wife after an enjoyable evening with friends, "That was a lovely evening wasn’t it?" And she’ll say, "No it wasn’t. The casserole needed more salt, the edges of the apple pie were overcooked and the after dinner mints were stale. Whatever will they think of me?" The small, inconsequential things that go wrong far outweigh all the other things that go right. This tendency is also seen in the young executive who feels he has to work late every night because he’s afraid he might not get the next promotion. It’s seen in the woman who can’t enjoy the fact that she got the promotion because she feels she botched one or two of the questions in the interview. It’s seen in the school principal who feels personally responsible for falling enrollments in the middle of a recession, despite the excellent reputation her school enjoys.
This is an easy trap to fall into, because it’s always easier to notice things that go wrong than to see things that go smoothly. (It’s the squeaky wheel that gets the grease.)
3 Perfectionists set unrealistic goals for themselves and others.
The perfectionists world is an "As it should be" world, an ideal world. But because it’s an ideal world, the goals and expectations of the perfectionist are often unattainable in the real world. So the perfectionist is continually set up for failure. What’s more, they tend to redefine life. Average becomes mediocre. Even something well done could have been done better. So their real world successes are robbed of the joy they should have brought.
Similarly they tend to judge others by the same unrealistic standards. So relationships are damaged because others are constantly letting them down or disappointing them.
4 Perfectionists struggle with low self-esteem.
The natural corollary of the other 3 characteristics is that perfectionists end up with a poor self image, because there’s no way they an ever feel good about themselves. This is self compounding because the poorer their self-image, the more they’ll maximise their defects and failures and minimise their successes.
Now you may be wondering at this point how all this fits with the Bible’s repeated exhortations to live lives that are worthy of Christ. How do we understand that command of Jesus in Matt 5:48 to "be perfect, therefore as your heavenly Father is perfect"?
Let me first say that Jesus doesn’t mean be sinless. He knew that was beyond us. No, the word he used for perfect has the idea of being mature or complete, of being finished off. In the context, we’re to love all people, even our enemies, completely, the way God loves us. It’s a call to maturity which is quite different from a call to perfectionism.
Let me give you two related illustrations of this point. The one great desire of parents for their children is to see them grow to maturity. But that doesn’t mean that we judge them by adult standards all along the way. You might tell a teenager to stop acting like a six year old, but you wouldn’t say that to a 6 year old. God’s call to strive for maturity is a call to excellence. But it’s a call based in the real world, based on God’s perfect knowledge of our limitations. It’s a call to have realistic goals and aspirations - based on our current stage of development. The person who strives for excellence understands that failures aren’t final. Rather they’re things we can learn from, and through which we can grow. I’m sure you’ve all seen children learning to walk. They begin by balancing tentatively on 2 feet, then flop over backwards or fall flat on their faces. But that never deters them. They struggle to their feet again until they’ve mastered the sense of balance, and so on until they can walk. And at each stage in that process you can feel the sense of achievement, despite their repeated failure. You never sense that they want to give up because they didn’t get it right the first time, or because they’ve tried 27 times and are still failing.
The Bible is full of encouragement to us to strive for maturity, to leave behind the failures of the past, but these failures are never seen as inhibiting factors, only ever as spurs to growth. The Bible is also very realistic about our failure. "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." God knows our fallenness. "It was while we were still sinners that Christ died for us." God is described by Jesus as being like the father of the prodigal son, who welcomes back the wayward son with a great feast of rejoicing. The trouble with perfectionism is that it portrays a God who is waiting to catch us out; who’s only happy with us if we perfectly obey his law. Well, that isn’t the God of the Bible! The God of the Bible is a gracious God who forbears with fallen humanity, who time and time again rescues his people from the results of their disobedience. He’s the God of the second chance, and the 3rd, and the 4th!
Remember how many times Jesus told his disciples they had to forgive their brother or sister? Seventy times seven. Perfectionists not only have trouble forgiving their brothers and sisters 70x7, they have trouble forgiving themselves. And that then makes it hard for them to accept God’s forgiveness. They feel that for God to forgive them they must first be perfect as God is perfect, and that’s an impossible task. So either they go through life feeling tremendous guilt and seeing God as distant , uncaring and punitive and themselves as worthless failures, or else they feel angry at God for not making a world where it’s possible to be perfect. Worse still, they may begin to doubt the very existence of God since they can’t see any evidence for a perfect God in this imperfect world.
Perfectionism also affects their relationships with other people. They begin to expect people to live up to their standard of perfection. Especially, they expect the Church and the people in it to be perfect. But the real world isn’t like that. Other people don’t have any more chance of attaining perfection than they do. There is no ideal, perfect church. In fact there’s an old adage that if you do find a perfect church, don’t join it because you’ll only spoil it. No, the real church is a fellowship of sinners who live under the grace and forgiveness of Christ. Our unity is based entirely on Christ’s forgiveness. So our fellowship together, in a sense, depends on our ability to accept one another with all our faults just as Jesus does.
Well, what can you do about perfectionism, if that’s your problem?
The first thing you can do is to identify it as a problem in your life. This may be the hardest step. Do those characteristics I listed earlier fit some area of your life? Do you have trouble accepting God’s forgiveness? Are you harder on yourself than on others? Do your standards of excellence drive those around you crazy? Remember you don’t have to be neurotic to suffer from perfectionistic tendencies. If you do have a problem in this area, then the next thing to do is to admit to yourself that you can never achieve perfection in this life. Even Paul found that at the very moment when he wanted to do good, evil was right at hand. But he also realised that Christ’s death and resurrection could free him from the guilt of his constant failure to obey God.
Another thing we can do is to set out to accept and even love our imperfections and those of others. To see that these actually help us to trust God to do his work despite us. Listen to how Solomon put it in Ps 127: "Unless the LORD builds the house, its builders labor in vain. Unless the LORD watches over the city, the watchmen stand guard in vain. 2 In vain you rise early and stay up late, toiling for food to eat-- for he grants sleep to those he loves."
No amount of striving on our part will bring success if God isn’t part of it, and part of God’s provision for us is the peace to sleep, knowing that he’s in control, not us. If your desire for perfection keeps you working long hours then it might be good to examine ways of changing your behaviour. Perhaps you could delegate more work to others even if they won’t be able to do it as well as you. Perhaps you could work on being satisfied with a job that’s 95% perfect rather than striving for that extra 5%. Remember that at that point the law of diminishing returns comes in.
Now I know that there are some jobs which are so critical you can’t afford to have less than 100%. I used to work in one myself, where the safety of aircraft depended on the systems I produced, so I had to be very intolerant of failure. The same would apply to people like computer programmers, surgeons, or accountants. But the danger for people in those sorts of jobs is that they can carry over their need for perfection into other areas of their life where it isn’t critical. For these people it might be good to do some things just because they enjoy doing them, even though they’re only average at them. For example I used to enjoy playing squash with a friend whose level of competence was about as low as mine. We would never have been picked for a squash tournament but we could still enjoy ourselves and be pleased with what improvement we made.
If one of the characteristics of perfectionists is to maximise failures and minimise successes, then you can reverse this by looking for the good things you do; by acknowledging that you have achieved something that was good and useful. That even though you may be imperfect, there are things you do well and there is the possibility of improvement in the things you haven’t done well. That way failures become stepping stones for advancement rather than millstones to weigh you down.
Finally we can decide to accept the fact that God loves us unconditionally, just as we are. Remember it was Peter who had denied Christ, who was given the charge to feed Christ’s flock. Here was the ultimate failure, a flop, yet who was given the care of the Church.
Christ comes to us and says "I know you. I’ve seen all you’ve done, your strengths and weaknesses. I know your imperfections, your painful memories, your hidden thoughts, your hopes and your fears. You don’t have to pretend to me. I love you despite all that, more than you can imagine. Stop trying to be good enough to earn my love. Accept what I freely give you. Let me live my life through you."
If we can give up our attempts to live perfect lives in our own strength, then we’ll be free to serve Christ as he wants us to: in his strength. We’ll be free to grow in maturity in the real world. We’ll be free to give love and forgiveness to other imperfect people.
To be perfect as God is perfect, paradoxically, requires us to understand our own weaknesses and failures the way God does, and to love ourselves, despite those weaknesses and failures, the way God does.
Finally, listen to how Paul follows up that passage in Rom 7 about his failings with an affirmation of God’s unconditional love: (Rom 8:31-39 NRSV) "What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? 32He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? 33Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. 34Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us. 35Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? 36As it is written, "For your sake we are being killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered." 37No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, 39nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord."
