A Perfect House - A Perfect Person.

My husband and I live in our daughter's house. We moved in to help look after her children while she was at work. I also home-schooled her youngest daughter. The children are teenagers now and my daughter is selling her house.

We have had to keep the house looking perfect for the realtors and any potential buyers. As I was working today, trying to make my apartment look pristine, I thought how hard it was to keep every room looking perfect every day.

That reminded me of how I tried to keep myself perfect when I was a young Christian. I was 19 and so happy to have accepted Christ, but then I began to work on myself to not sin. It was a difficult - well, impossible task. No matter how hard I tried I still made mistakes and did wrong.

I finally realized that I was looking at myself all the time. In the same way I was looking at the rooms of my house for some imperfection, I was looking at my sins and concentrating on them instead of Jesus. I was feeling guilty and condemned, when those feelings were not helpful and not the way God wanted me to feel. Conviction of sin is good but feeling condemned is not.

Now, when I sin I confess it to God, say I am sorry, ask for His help and then forget it. If I have hurt anyone's feelings I say I'm sorry to them too. It is freeing to look away from myself and upward to God.

You Complete Me!

I once read that the word "perfect" in the Bible means "complete".  When Jesus said, "Be perfect..." he meant to be complete in Him. 

com·plete

  

adjective

1.

having all parts or elements; lacking nothing; whole; entire; full:a complete set of Mark Twain's writings.

2.

finished; ended; concluded: a complete orbit.

3.

having all the required or customary characteristics, skills, or thelike; consummate; perfect in kind or quality: a complete scholar.

4.

thorough; entire; total; undivided, uncompromised, orunmodified: a complete victory; a complete mess.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/complete

I like all these definitions and for me the word complete denotes a beginning and an end. We start out with God incomplete and He works on us until we are complete here or perhaps in Heaven. I'm sure we will have lots to learn there.

The God of peace make you perfect in every good work to do his will.—HEB.13:20,21.

Be perfect, be of good comfort, be of one mind, live in peace; and the God of love and peace shall be with you.

By grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God; not of works, lest any man should boast.—Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness neither shadow of turning.

Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.—Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.—Being filled with the fruits of righteousness, which are by Jesus Christ, unto the glory and praise of God.

Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think anything as of ourselves; but our sufficiency is of God.

II:Cor.13:11.Eph.2:8,9. -Jas.1:17.Phi.2:12,13. -Rom.12:2.--Phi.1:11.II Cor.3:5.

"Our sufficiency is of God." I love this verse......