Perfection or Attention?
Mark 12:30 “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength”.
I was listening to Graham Cooke’s teaching on “Identity” for the tenth time, and one of his illustrations of how God loves us is a mother encouraging her baby to walk. The image hit me in the heart, soul, and mind. I began to cry and say, “Yes Lord you have already covered all my short comings, my mistakes, and the amount of times it takes for me to actually get it.” I fully understood in that moment that I had been withholding myself from Him due to these faculties. That God was standing there saying “come on, come on” like a mother calling her baby to step towards her, and “me” unlike that baby who is loving the new game she’s playing falls down and crawls straight towards her. I withhold and prolong the coming to Him because of the falling. Holy Spirit said to me in that moment “I want your attention not your perfection”.
It is truly in our weakness that He makes us strong. Otherwise why would we need Him like we do? Sadly, somewhere along the way we have bought and believed a horrible lie about the character and nature of God, resulting in millions of believers not coming to salvation because they aren’t pure or clean enough. There’s that perfection being the leader again! Or millions saved but not walking in their purpose or destiny because they feel inadequate. Perfectionism is a dangerous game to play with God’s will!
As a parent, I would be devastated if I found out my child would not or could not come to me due to a false belief that he/she had about my character or nature. However this happens all the time. Children hide things from their parents because they fear the response. We probably all can say, “Yep, me too”. So it makes the understanding of what I am saying easy to comprehend. Some of us can honestly say, from experiencing the wrath of an angry parent, it is best to hide things. The mistake made, is God isn’t an earthly parent, He is a heavenly parent. But somewhere along the way we may begin to pin our experiences with our earthly parents onto the character of God who is totally innocent, and incapable of the of responses we received from our earthly parents.
Here’s the thing, God doesn’t need or want us to be perfect. Perfection is His job not ours. Our job is to fully come to Him no matter what our condition and to fully trust His parenting. For us to love Him with our whole heart even if it’s broken, dead, shattered, or numb. For us to love Him with our whole mind even if it’s not completely renewed, distracted, worried, or afraid. For us to love Him with all of our souls even if we don’t understand full surrender yet. For us to love Him with all of our strength even if that measure is small. The willingness to give Him what we have to give, pleases Him.
Going Beyond
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