Nobody's Perfect

Nobody’s perfect. I think most of us have heard that pretty much all of our lives, and yet, I think sometimes we don’t really believe it. Jesus actually commanded us to be perfect; the commandment is echoed in First Peter and in James but, we will never be perfect, at least, not in this lifetime.

Don’t misunderstand me, each of us should strive to be perfect, but not take it personally when we don’t succeed. We all have faults; that’s why we are commanded to confess our faults one to another. Each of us will come short of the glory of God, the Bible says so. Apostle Paul wrote in one place about having a thorn in his flesh, that God would not remove, and in another place about not being perfect yet.

If you aren’t making mistakes, then you aren’t making any progress, either. You may have heard that Thomas Edison tried over a thousand different things before he figured out how to make a filament glow as a result of electric current in an evacuated globe. I’m not sure how many different materials he tried before he hit on the idea of keeping the filament in a vacuum, or whether he went back and tried each of the previous materials in a vacuum when it did occur to him. I have heard it said that he didn’t fail a thousand times, but that the invention of the light bulb was a journey of a thousand steps. It’s all a matter of perspective.

One thing to keep in mind is that God can bring good out of anything. Now, the good that comes from your mistake may not be the good that God had intended for that situation, but He can turn it into good, anyway. I just recently finished reading C. S. Lewis’s Perelandra, and there is some discussion in there about the good that is, and the good that would have been. In that discussion, it seems pretty clear that the good that God intended is better than the good that came from error, but it’s hard to judge reality against a hypothetical. I have to say though, that it seems pretty obvious that God wants the best for us, and if He has to bring good out of our mistakes, then that good will not be as good as the good that He had intended for us.

My point though, is this: Everybody makes mistakes, but God forgives mistakes. He has a harder time forgiving inaction. Remember the parable of the talents? The guy that didn’t do anything with his talent got into trouble. Why didn’t he do anything with it? Because he was afraid of making a mistake! James tells us that faith without works is dead. It seems to me that it’s better to the wrong thing for the right reason, than to do nothing at all for fear of doing the wrong thing. I admit it, many times I find myself in the situation that if I say something, I may offend the person that I am trying to help, but, if I don’t say something, they may suffer the ultimate price, and I have to ask myself, which would offend them more? It is those times that I have to prayerfully evaluate what is the best way to say what needs to be said, and try to warn that individual away from the path that they are taking while creating the least possible offense…