THE BEST THING ABOUT BEING A CHRISTIAN:
Perfectionism, Shame and God’s Love

The greatest things about being a Christian are not the most obvious to people outside the faith. Perhaps the greatest thing of all is knowing that you are the beloved of God, the apple of His eye, the special object of His favour. “But doesn’t He love everyone?” you may ask. Yes, He does, because He is love (1 John 4:8b). He can’t help but love everyone because that is His nature. He is the God who sends His rain on the farms of the just and the unjust (Matthew 5:45), showing love even to the most miserable specimens of humanity. But many whom God loves are lost to Him and will be for all eternity. Jesus came “to seek and to save what was lost” (Luke 19:10). However, many will not receive Him. They will reject Him until the day they die, and then they will be lost forever.

But some won’t be lost. Some will receive Jesus, and “to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God - children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband's will, but born of God” (John 1:12-13). They are adopted into God’s family. They are His “sons and daughters” (2 Corinthians 6:18). They are the bride of Christ (Revelation 19:7-9). They are bound to God in a love relationship that will carry on into eternity. They are not just loved in a general way. They are the Beloved of God.

God’s love is so different from the love we are used to in our earthly lives. In the natural, you have to prove you’re worthy to be loved. You have to be nice enough, have enough in common with the other person, be attractive enough, be social enough, and so on, before people will be friends with you. If you don’t meet the standards, you don’t get friendship or to be part of the group or a marriage.

I’m not sure than any of us naturally grows up thinking we’re valuable and lovable just because we are who we are. And so we spend our lives trying to be good enough, trying to be what other people want, and hiding the ugliest parts of ourselves so that no one will see something in us that will cause them to withdraw their love and acceptance.

God’s love is very different from that. God knows the absolute nastiest thing there is to know about us and still loves us. He loves us at our best, but He also loves us at our worst (Romans 5:8): “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” We all start out in life as His enemies, but He loves us even then and always makes the first move toward friendship (Romans 5:10): “For if, when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!”

When we get caught in the trap of thinking that we have to earn all the love we get, we in essence reject ourselves. We don’t present ourselves naked, vulnerable and 100% honest to anyone because we don’t believe we are good enough to be loved on that basis. There is truth to our belief that we are not good enough to be loved just as we are. In our sinful state, there are some extremely ugly, dark, wicked things within us. We all shun child abusers, but every parent has at least once reached a point of such extreme fatigue and frustration with our child that we understand how child abuse is motivated. We would not kill, but we have all touched the level of pure rage and hate of a killer. We would not cheat on our spouse, but some do it in their hearts as they look with lust on someone who isn’t their mate.

However, I believe that we all long for someone who will love us no matter what. Someone with whom we can completely relax and let it all hang out, and who will still love us. Someone whom we need never fear will criticize us, reject us or look at us with eyes that tell us we are shameful or shocking or repulsive. Someone who will stand with us no matter what and help us on to better things. Someone who sees us as the Beloved.

Shame seems to be a universal human dilemma. If you don’t think so, consider how often you have heard the words:
            Shame on you!
            You should be ashamed of yourself!
            For shame!

Or other words that say the same thing:

What were you thinking!
What will people think!
You’ll never be able to show your face around here again!
How could you!
How could you be so stupid!
I can’t even stand to look at you!
What kind of person would ____!

Or consider how often you have got the same message through someone’s tone of voice or a look they gave you. Getting the cold shoulder is a wonderful communication of shame. So is the job termination, whether for cause or not - when our job loss is simply part of company cutbacks, some of us still wonder if we might have escaped the cutbacks if we had somehow done better at work. A low mark on an exam paper, divorce proceedings, parental discipline, a smaller than usual merit bonus, not being invited to ___, the person we always call but who never calls us - all communicate that we aren’t quite measuring up, not quite making the grade.

Of course, the logical conclusion is that none of us is perfect and that if we did the best we could then that’s good enough. But we don’t tend to come to the logical conclusion. At some deep, gut level, we tend to come to the conclusion, not that what we accomplished just didn’t quite meet someone else’s standard, but that we didn’t make that standard, that we’re not good enough as people, that we are of little value in the world. That’s shame.

Shame has a long history among mankind. It dates back to the first man and woman. When Adam and Eve made their catastrophic decision to live life without God and, as a first step, to do what He had told them not to do, their immediate reaction in the aftermath was shame. What they did next we can all understand because we’ve all been there. When we feel shame, don’t we want to cringe into a tiny, invisible ball and disappear into some crack in the floor that we hope will magically appear? People caught by TV cameras in shameful situations try to cover the camera lens or hide their faces, or they pull their coat up over their head so as not to be seen by the viewers. Children will run away and hide in a closet or under the bed or in a tree house. In whatever which way we can, we try to cover our sense of nakedness, of being exposed as inadequate and unworthy. Which is exactly what Adam and Eve did. They sewed fig leaves together to cover themselves, and they ran and hid - hid from the only other person in their world - God. When God questioned them about it, Adam answered (Genesis 3:10): “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.” From which we learn that fear is part of shame.

When Adam and Eve realized that they were exposed as the sinners they had become, they tried to cover up their shame, and they hid in fear. Which explains a lot about what makes people tick. None of us measures up 100%. We haven’t since Adam and Eve. And we all know that no one is perfect. Yet we continue to buy the same lie that caused Adam and Eve to sin in the first place - “you will be like God” (Genesis 3:5). And so we continue to set perfectionist standards for ourselves and for others. And, when none of us measures up because sinners are far from perfect, we shame one another. Some of us even shame ourselves, thinking things like:

Stupid! How could I have been so stupid!
What was I thinking!
What kind of person does/says/thinks what I just did!
I’m hopeless!
That’s it! My life is over!

Or we just wordlessly feel at fault, dirty, awful, dark and/or hopeless about ourselves. So few people stop long enough to realize that shame and the understanding that no one is perfect are contradictory. The two cannot logically exist at once. I’ll explain further tomorrow.

Before we get any further into this topic, let us clear up one possible source of confusion. Shame is not the same thing as guilt. Guilt tells me I did something wrong, or I sinned. Guilt is healthy. It drives me to the Saviour, who forgives me and sets me free. (As an aside, the truth about faith and guilt is quite the opposite of what I used to be told in psychology classes. There, atheist professors used to say that Christianity makes people feel guilty for their acts, and unresolved guilt produces all kinds of neuroses. Christianity would say that God’s morals are written in people’s hearts (Romans 2:15) and, when we transgress those, we feel guilt. Unprocessed guilt, indeed, creates all kinds of neuroses. So God, at great personal cost, provided a Saviour to forgive all our sins and shortcomings and to end all our guilt - not just our guilt feelings, either, but our real guilt before God and the person against whom we sinned.) So guilt is a logical result of sin and is a healthy prod toward God and His solution for sin. Shame is very different.

So sometimes, in our shame, we don’t run and hide. Sometimes we attack, either head to head (openly bragging about ourselves or cutting down another person verbally), or behind the scenes (damaging reputations through gossip, stealing a promotion, cheating, etc.).

Believing you can and should meet every standard there is is called perfectionism. Perfectionists are people who live a lie. The lie usually goes like this: “If I’m not perfect, I won’t be loved and I certainly won’t love myself. I have what it takes to be perfect. If I try hard enough, I’ll get there.” Perfectionism is what Satan whispered to Adam and Eve to tempt them into obedience to him: “‘[Y]ou will be like God’ (Genesis 3:5). All on your own, you can be perfect. You have it within you. Try harder.” Christian perfectionists believe that God is pleased as they drive themselves to extremely high standards of performance. In fact, though, they have bought into Satan’s way of thinking. Such Christians sometimes justify themselves with Scriptures like:

1 Corinthians 10:31
“So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.”

Colossians 3:23
Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men . . .

Which means they see God as an irrational and harsh taskmaster, demanding that people who are not yet glorified live as if they are. They also ignore the fact that God is Lord of the Sabbath (Matthew 12:8), that He promises His people rest (Matthew 11:28), that He tells us to make sure we enter into rest (Hebrews 4:11), as they push themselves hard and often into depression or burnout.

Underneath all that striving, if the perfectionist would only stop long enough to reflect, is shame - a deep sense that they don’t yet measure up and, if they do, it’s going to take a lot of work to stay measured up. Perfectionists have no sense of being valuable in themselves. They believe they can only be loved if they do all the right things.

What’s so wrong with striving for perfect performance? For one thing, it’s no longer an option for the human race. We lost it in the fall and none of us can get it back:

For another, much as we might long for Paradise, we can’t have it now:

A final thing wrong with perfectionism is that it keeps us from God’s grace. Jesus died for the real self. Grace flows to the real self. Perfectionists work hard at maintaining a façade - at appearing to be all that people expect them to be. After a while, they come to believe that this façade is them. They begin to live out of a false self of their own creation. This is unfortunate because God loves the person He made, not the façade we create, and His grace and forgiveness and healing are given to the real us, but we can’t receive it if we are hiding behind our false self. That self stands in the way of our blessings.

It would be interesting to know how much of human achievement is birthed out of shame - out of a need to prove wrong the people who have made us feel less than worthy, to prove to others and to ourselves that we can make the grade, that we can produce something of worth. But if that’s our motivation for achievement, then there can never be any rest for us because, if we stop, then we revert to not being valuable. Which makes anything that takes away our ability to achieve really scary. Long-term illness, disability, unemployment, old age, and the like become not just difficult life events, but robbers of human dignity, worth and value.

As Christians, the question we need to ask ourselves is this. Why do WE buy into this way of thinking? Why is it that the busier we are, the better we feel about ourselves, while we look down our noses at those we call “pew warmers”? Does God share this value system? If God were in agreement that people are valuable to the degree they do valuable things, then the Bible would have been written very differently. It would not say things like:

Isaiah 64
6  All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away.

Galatians 2
16b  So we, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by observing the law, because by observing the law no one will be justified.

Ephesians 2
8  For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith - and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God--
9  not by works, so that no one can boast.

Matthew 7 [Jesus speaking]
22  Many will say to me on that day, “Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?”
23  Then I will tell them plainly, “I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!”

Galatians 3
3  Are you so foolish? After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to attain your goal by human effort?

God’s love for us does not go up and down like a thermometer responding to our productivity - or our goodness or our obedience. God describes His love for us in this way (Jeremiah 31:3): “I have loved you with an everlasting love.” God will love us for all eternity future, and He has loved us from all eternity past. Before we even existed and had done anything, either right or wrong, God loved us. He has continued to love us through all our ups and downs, our failures and successes, our obedience and our waywardness. And He will continue to love us no matter what.

How much does He love us? Paul describes it this way as he prays for the people in Ephesus - that they “may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge - that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:18-19). 1 Corinthians 13 describes what God’s love is like. It is:

4  patient … kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.
5  It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.
6  [God’s love] does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.
7  It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
8  [God’s love] never fails.

The Father loves us with the same love He has for His Son Jesus (John 17:23b), and Jesus loves us with all the love He has for the Father (John 15:9). Period.

And what God loves is supremely valuable. What He treasures is true treasure. If you are as boggled as I am at this concept, and if your mouth is hanging open in shock and disbelief, as mine often is when I stop to consider how much God loves people, then let’s pray together in the words of Ephesians 3:

17b  And I pray that [I], being rooted and established in love,
18  may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ,
19  and to know this love that surpasses knowledge - that [I] may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

Sharon Currens

 

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