How to Be a Perfect Christian Without Mr. Legalism

Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect. {Matthew 5:48}

Many a Christian has pondered this verse, wondering how it can be possible to be perfect, knowing so well how much we fall short in even the smallest of things. No lesser lights than Francois Fenelon, John Wesley, Andrew Murray and Watchman Nee have come out for the possibility of Christian perfection, believing that God would never command us to do something that He had not given us the means to perform.

To be perfect in a human sense would be hard enough, but the text commands us to be perfect in something far beyond that – it commands us to be as perfect as God Himself. This means we must be perfect in the sense of “wanting nothing necessary for completeness”, just as God lacks nothing necessary for completeness.

In the past, some Christian bulwarks have gone a long way down the road in contemplating this doctrine before being rebuked and drawn up short by their contemporaries. Wesley, for example, had to repudiate some of his own thinking, and retract much of what he had taught, in the area of Christian perfection. It is so easy to get on the wrong track. It is so easy to confuse perfectionism with the doctrine of being perfect.

First of all, let’s deal with perfectionism. Whenever we wander into an area in which we must do something in order to attain righteousness, holiness or acceptance with God then we have nullified the gospel of Jesus Christ and slipped back into the same sort of error as the Galatians. Christian perfectionism is nothing less than the concept of works invading the sanctification process. If Satan cannot get you to make the error of justifying yourself by works – and thereby keeping you from true repentance and absolute reliance upon Christ alone for salvation – then he will try to spoil your walk by introducing the same poison later. Perfectionism is the doctrine of demons.

Perfectionism will lead you into striving to earn or to be something based upon your own efforts. It will make you link what you do to the results of what you do in an unbiblical way. It will lead you into thinking that you can, in fact, attain to perfection through your own efforts – whether by keeping rules or avoiding certain things. The Bible everywhere teaches the precise opposite of this. Nowhere is the teaching clearer than when we are told in Romans and in Galatians (but originally from Habakkuk) that “the just shall live by his faith.”

Through faith and faith alone is our entire salvation to be found. Not in the faith itself, of course – but in the object of that faith, which is Christ. But the governing principle of abiding in the righteousness of God is that it must be through faith, entirely apart from any sort of work whatsoever. The smallest inclusion of any contribution from us instantly spoils the whole. Either God alone saves us, or we cannot be saved at all. That is what the Bible teaches.

Where so many run into difficulty is by separating the justification we receive by faith at the moment of salvation from the sanctification that God performs in us until the moment He calls us home. Yet they are aspects of the same salvation. “It is finished!” was the Lord’s cry when He gave up the ghost. Salvation in its entirety was finished upon the cross. Christ didn’t just open a door for us to walk through – by His resurrection He became the very means by which we are perfected in Him.

This brings us to the doctrine of Christian perfection. God commands it. We cannot weasel out by manipulating the words or by violating their sense. “Lack nothing necessary for completeness, just as I lack nothing!” is the sense of the command. Well, if God commands it then He must expect us to do something – to strive, to work in some way in order to come to the thing He commands, right? Wrong! The only work God requires of us is that we believe in the One Whom He has sent (John 6:28-29). Faith. The same faith through which we are justified is the faith in which we are made perfect in Christ. This is because we already are perfect in Christ, and this perfection is simply manifested through the obedience of our faith.

Note I say “the obedience of our faith”. Faith is not some tenuous wishful thinking, detached from the life we actually live. It is our very means of life. It is how we live. Faith is the channel through which the Spirit pumps the blood stream of the life of Christ into our as yet mortal bodies. When we believe that we are already perfect in Christ – seated in the heavenly places in Him – it is then that He is in us doing His perfect righteousness. We believe in Him, He performs in us. We believe in Him performing in us when we believe we are in Him. It is so simple it eludes our fallen thinking most of the time.

So we come to see that perfection is not a goal to be attained, but a condition to be rested in. Not something we do, but something we believe Christ has done. This makes sense when we go back to the original command … How can we be perfect in the same way that God is? Well, God is perfect Being. He is not perfect because of what He does, but because of Who He is. Perfect deeds spring from His perfect nature.

Applying this to ourselves, we immediately see that we must be perfect in exactly the same way – not by what we do, but by who we are in Christ. In Christ we are perfect. Therefore, as we abide in Him, and He in us, then perfect deeds will spring from us – not because of what we do, but because of Who it is that is in us to do them. Christian perfection! Christian because it is the perfection of Christ, the true vine in Whom we abide.

Then what is sanctification? Are we not being perfected through this process? How can we already be what we must still live through? Why do we need to be changed if we are already perfect? The answer is so that we will believe that in Christ we are perfect. The unfolding of our sanctification is for us, not for God – it is so that we will know what He has done for us in Christ, and will believe it and walk in it with increasing confidence, trust, gratitude and obedience.