It\u2019s a trap to imagine that God wants to make us perfect examples of what he can do. God isn\u2019t producing specimens of holiness to put in his museum. His purpose is to make us one with him: \u201cThat they may be one as we are one\u201d (John 17:22).<\/p>\n
If becoming a model of personal holiness is your goal, your life won\u2019t be devoted to God. Instead, it will be devoted to achieving whatever you see as the evidence<\/i> of God in your life, whether it be perfect success or perfect discipline or perfect health. \u201cBut it can\u2019t be God\u2019s will for me to get sick,\u201d you protest. It was God\u2019s will to bruise his own Son; why shouldn\u2019t he bruise you? What matters to God isn\u2019t your consistency to an idea<\/i> of what makes a perfect Christian. What matters is your real, vital relationship with Jesus Christ and your abandonment to him, whether you are sick or well.<\/p>\n
Christian perfection is not, and never can be, human perfection. Christian perfection is the perfection of a relationship to God, a relationship that shows itself in all the irrelevancies of human life. When you obey the call of Jesus Christ, the first thing that strikes you is the seeming irrelevancy of the things he asks you to do. The next is the fact that some people appear to be leading perfectly consistent lives. Such lives might give you the idea that God is unnecessary, that all we need to reach the standard he wants is human effort and devotion. In a fallen world, this can never be true.<\/p>\n
I am called to live in perfect relation to God so that my life will produce a longing for God in other lives, not so that others will admire me. Thoughts about myself will always hinder my usefulness to God. God isn\u2019t perfecting me in order to put me on display; he\u2019s getting me to the place where he can use me. I must let him have his way.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s a trap to imagine that God wants to make us perfect examples of what he can do. God isn\u2019t producing specimens of holiness to put in his museum. His purpose is …<\/p>","protected":false},"featured_media":2410,"template":"","collection":[],"class_list":["post-2768","modern-classic","type-modern-classic","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/utmost.org\/ru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/modern-classic\/2768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/utmost.org\/ru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/modern-classic"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/utmost.org\/ru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/modern-classic"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/utmost.org\/ru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/modern-classic\/2768\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/utmost.org\/ru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/utmost.org\/ru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"collection","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/utmost.org\/ru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/collection?post=2768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}