Bible Text: Hebrews 12:23 | Speaker: Darlene Sala | Series: Encouraging Words | Trying to be perfect seems to be a bigger issue for women than for men. After all, the media tells women, “You must have a perfect body to match your perfect personality. Society says, “Your home and family must be perfect, too.”

“You must succeed in your career,” says the professional world.  And the business of plastic surgery mushrooms as women set out on their personal quests for self-esteem, hoping that a perfect nose makes a perfect person.

All of us have a little of the perfectionist in us. Made in the image of God, we can conceive what perfection is. However, because of our sinful nature and selfish ways, we fail to attain it. In his book Living with a Perfectionist, Dr. David Stoop writes: “We want the perfect marriage with the perfect partner. We also want to be perfect parents who raise perfect kids…. Of course, that means we have to be perfect.1”

If our self-esteem is not rooted in Christ, we feel the only way we can prove our own worth is by being perfect. But we always fall short. We sometimes let our husbands down; some days we are impatient with our children; and eventually at our jobs we make some obvious mistake that we can’t excuse away. Then we are faced with the glaring truth: None of us is perfect. Only God is, and we are all only human. As the writer of Proverbs said, “Who can say, “I have kept my heart pure; I am clean and without sin”? (Proverbs 20:9).

That means that we have to accept the fact that life will never go smoothly and perfectly. But that’s okay. God never intended it to. He knew it wouldn’t be good for us if it did. Then we could build our self-esteem on our own perfect lives instead of on Him.

Someday we are going to be perfect. The Bible says so. The book of Hebrews speaks of “the spirits of righteous men made perfect” (Hebrews 12:23). I can hardly wait!