The Lord caught up to my thinking the other morning and gave me something to ponder. While spiritual maturity is a message He has called me to share … perfection from God’s perspective is often misunderstood.

Phil 3:12 Not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect: but I follow after, if that I may apprehend that for which also I am apprehended of Christ Jesus.

Christian perfection is not human perfection. It’s the perfection our relationship with Jesus and in that relationship He reveals to us what Oswald Chambers refers to as the “irrelevancies of human life.” It’s those efforts through human effort and devotion that we focus on that we believe will help us to attain the standard God has set before us. It can never be done, never be accomplished in our own effort. In fact, over the years, many who have followed the path of becoming perfect before God have fallen in to legalism… do this, don’t do that!  

It is not up to us to determine and decide what a saint should be. That is for the Holy Spirit to reveal to us as He leads us into Christian Perfection. He is the only One who knows all those things in our life that are keeping us from moving ever closer to perfection… the perfection of our relationship to Jesus. Anything else are just “the irrelevancies of human life” that shift our focus away from the One whose example we are to follow and onto what we think we have “to do.”

Yes, we are called to be transformed into the Jesus’ image, but not through our effort to make us a perfect in God’s eyes. That is the job of the Holy Spirit.  He is the One who is focused on getting us to the place where God can use us in His Kingdom, spreading His love and the good news of His gospel.

Our focus is to let Him do His job and become all that we were created to be.