I'm not perfect!
Ummm…crazy right?!? My family has known this little fact since I was just a baby, and God? Well he's known it since before I was born.
Perfection is a frustrating thing to strive for. It seems that no matter how much effort you put into it, something small is going to go wrong. Whoops. And there goes perfection! We want this in so many aspects of our lives. Perfection in our families. Perfection at work. Perfection in our school work. Perfection when we cook. Perfection, perfection, perfection. But for a good number of us, we just want perfection in our spiritual lives. We want the ability to JUST NOT sin.
I can't even begin to tell you the countless number of times I have told myself and God, "I will NEVER EVER do that again!" And guess what??? I do it.
This kind of failure can bring us to a point of carelessness in our spiritual lives. We lead ourselves to believe that since I'm going to screw up anyway, I'll just go ahead and get it over with. Our imperfections and inability to carry out a life free of sin also let's us soak in what the world tells us. That God will no longer love us and there is now a 10 foot brick wall in the way of our relationship.
The story of a "bummer sheep" was brought to my attention yesterday. My mom read me a blog by Ann Voskamp. A "bummer sheep," I learned, was a lamb that was rejected by it's own mother. It was maybe imperfect or blemished, the mother was tired of having babies, or maybe it was one of twins. Whatever the case, the mother casts the little lamb away to care for itself and probably die. Here's the good part of the story! The shepherd of the "bummer sheep" takes the lamb into his own care and loves and cares for him until he is old enough to survive on his own. This lamb in turn knows the voice of the shephed and always runs to him when he calls.
This is us. This is me! Broken, rejected, and unwanted because of the imperfections and sin we can't seem to get rid of. But God doesn't turn his back on us. There is not 10 foot brick wall between us. No! He calls us to come back to him. Because of our brokeness, we learn the voice of our savior. Our failures lead us to a faithful dependence on the only one who can keep us standing. No matter how frustrating it is to fall into sin, our hope is thankfully not in ourselves. It is in the only perfect Christ Jesus who loves us, splattered in sin and all. It was because of my imperfections that I realized my need for a savior and the Good Shepherd in the first place. If I was perfect, I never would have found him.
May I not focus on my past failures, but my present forgivness.
"He saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by his grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life." – Titus 3:5-7
