I never considered myself a perfectionist until I started back to school. Suddenly every assignment and every course had to be an “A.” The first B I got felt like a total failure. I expected to be perfect.
I find it interesting that while the Bible uses the word “perfect” just forty-two times, the word “good” appears more than six hundred times. After completing each day’s creative work, God examined what He had done and “saw that it was good.” In the original Hebrew, this means that God found His work “pleasing, favorable, and satisfactory.” Think about it – if God, at the zenith of His creative work, was content with “good” shouldn’t “good” be good enough for us?
There’s more: He promised a good land to the Israelites when they escaped Egyptian bondage (Ex 3:8). Jesus said the Father gives “good gifts” (Mat 7:11), He proclaimed the soil with the greatest harvest good (Luke 8:8) and Paul tells us to “overcome evil with good” (Rom 12:21) – not perfection. Even the Gospel that saves us is called “the Good News” (Acts 5:42). Why then are we trying so hard to be perfect?
God didn’t saddle us with this obsession for perfection – it was the enemy who planted that impossible seed. But we have watered and nurtured it until it has become a weed of gigantic proportions and, as weeds so often do, it has choked the life out of us and the “good works” we were created to do (Ephesians 2:10). It’s his way of keeping us distracted, dissatisfied, frustrated – and fruitless. Perfectionism will drive us to the point of exhaustion as we push ourselves to reach for an unreachable standard. Or, on the flip side, it will leave us in a state of paralysis, fearful of even attempting anything because we know we’ll never measure up. I’ve been both – and it’s no way to live. You and I will never pull off perfection this side of heaven. And that’s okay.
Only God is perfect and making you perfect is His work alone, through the blood of Jesus and the power of the Spirit. But you won’t see the perfectly finished product until you stand before Him in heaven. So hang all your perfectionist tendencies on Him and be free from that burden you were never meant to carry. Beloved, being good is good enough.
Deeper Roots 