Born Free: 16 Principles to Help You Be FreeVoorbeeld

Principle 8: Be Glad When Dogs Play Checkers

Power principle number eight: When a dog plays checkers, we don’t criticize his game. We are just pleased and surprised that he is playing at all. Likewise, we should be pleased when fallen human beings do anything good at all: “For we know that the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now. Not only that, but we also who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for the adoption, the redemption of our body. For we were saved in this hope” (Romans 8:22-24). “Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him” (1 John 3:2). “Not that I have already attained, or am already perfected; but I press on, that I may lay hold of that for which Christ Jesus has also laid hold of me. Brethren, I do not count myself to have apprehended; but one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead, I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:12-14).

We tend to let our culture creep into our theology. We believe that everything should be instant. In the Christian life, everything happens in a process, and it is a source of great grief when a Christian doesn’t recognize that. That is why it is desperately important that we don’t have a mold into which all Christians have to fit.

We tend to make the excellent the enemy of the good. And often the good is about all that you can get in this world. Your husband isn’t perfectible. Your wife isn’t perfectible. Your pastor isn’t perfectible. Your church isn’t perfectible. And most of all, you are not perfectible. Once you accept that, you can accept a lot about yourself and others.

This is not a brief for slovenly living. It is, rather, the facing of an unpleasant truth—that you and your family and your pastor and your church and your friends are not perfectible. The worker who is aware of imperfections will create a more perfect product. Just so, a Christian aware of and accepting of his or her imperfections will become a more perfect Christian.