Aug 24, 2022
As a Christian, are you to be perfect? Yes. However, that does not mean you were supposed to be perfect the instant you received salvation, and therefore now you are a failure because you are still imperfect. We are to be perfect, but we do not achieve that by trying to perfect ourselves. We grow up into Christ. We grow up into the perfection that is attributed to us and imparted to us by God.
Show Notes: Christians need a greater understanding of how we grow up into Christ and how God works His perfection in us because our concepts about salvation tend to bring us under condemnation. Yeshua (Jesus) is our example. He was perfect, and therefore we must be perfect. Yet after our salvation experience, we find that we make mistakes and we have problems, even serious problems at times. Since we are not instantly perfect when we are saved, or we do not obtain perfection after years of following Christ, we develop feelings of failure and condemnation.
We need to learn from the examples of faith in the Hebrew Scriptures. Those Scriptures are not shy about pointing out the needs, down fallings, and failures of the wonderful men and women of God who had true problems. Like us, they were seeking to the best of their ability to follow after purity and righteousness and the perfect life that the Scripture talks about. Abraham was as weak as any of us, but God reckoned him righteous. And whatever we think about righteousness or perfection, it is not something that we achieve by our efforts. Perfection is attributed to us by God.
Our example in Christ is that He did not come into the world as an instantly perfect human. He was made perfect by God. He had to learn obedience by the things He suffered. The Father disciplined Him and perfected Him in order that He would become our perfection. And this perfection is not something that comes like a flash when we are first saved and brought into a relationship with the Father through Christ. It is something that begins at that point. And from that point, the Father works in us to equip us to do His will and become those who are pleasing in His sight.
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