We encounter one of the more difficult sayings of Jesus in Matthew 5:48: “You . . . must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” And he issues this difficult command immediately after commanding us to “love [our] enemies” (Matthew 5:43). If we think of holiness like a high jump, it’s like Jesus sets the bar at twenty feet — more than twice the height that any human has yet cleared — and then raises it sky high.

Having been a Christian for a half-century, I must honestly admit I’m not perfect. In fact, the older I’ve become, the more aware I’ve become of just how much I am “beset with weakness” (Hebrews 5:2), which also seems to be the self-evaluation of the most mature Christians I’ve known. I have never met a perfect Christian. And neither have you.

So, given the seemingly impossible bar that Jesus sets for us, and the fact that no fallible saint in or outside of Scripture has cleared it, how are we to think of his command that we must “be perfect”? What does he expect from us?

Sinless Perfection Not Expected

We catch an important glimpse of Jesus’s expectation of us in the prayer he taught us to pray: “Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors” (Matthew 6:12). We know what kind of “debts” Jesus has in mind because Luke’s version of the prayer says, “Forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us” (Luke 11:4). Jesus clearly doesn’t expect his followers to be sinlessly perfect if he instructs us to regularly confess our sins.

We also see throughout the Epistles how the apostles, some of the greatest holiness high-jumpers in history, understood Jesus’s expectations. James tells us that “we all stumble in many ways” (James 3:2). John says that “if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:7–8). When speaking of the perfection we will experience in the resurrection, Paul says of himself, “Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own” (Philippians 3:12).

The New Testament neither teaches nor provides models of sinless perfection in redeemed saints. For people like me, that’s good news, because I know that I have no hope of clearing Jesus’s high bar of holiness. But if we stop here, we still haven’t answered the question regarding Jesus’s command that we “be perfect.” Does God let us off the hook because we can’t clear that bar? Not by any means. And here’s where it gets really good.

Sinless Perfection Required

While it’s true that the New Testament doesn’t teach that Christians will achieve sinless perfection in this age, it does teach that God requires perfection of us — that we “be perfect, as [our] heavenly Father is perfect.” So, we have a problem: God requires a moral perfection impossible for us to achieve. That’s a big problem. And solving that problem is at the core of the Bible’s message.

Scripture often refers to God’s moral perfection as his righteousness. And the central question it addresses is how God, in his perfect righteousness (sinless perfection), can be reconciled to unrighteous (sinful) humans without becoming unrighteous himself. The Bible reveals that God’s solution to this problem is what Jesus and all his faithful followers after him have called the “good news,” summarized here in Paul’s famous words:

All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. (Romans 3:23–26)

In Christ’s substitutionary atoning death, God himself cleared the holiness high bar for us by satisfying the justice he demanded for sin — “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). And in Christ’s triumphant resurrection, God can justly grant to those who have faith in Jesus the reward of the righteous — “the free gift of . . . eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 6:23). Paul elsewhere captures in one sentence how God is able to justify unrighteous sinners like us and maintain his perfect righteous justice:

For our sake [the Father] made [the Son] to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Corinthians 5:21)

‘Excel Still More’

That is very, very good news for sinners. It is the greatest story ever told in the history of the world. Yet the implications for us as Christians can still be misunderstood. Because it sounds like, when it comes to pursuing perfection, we’re off the hook. Jesus paid it all; Jesus achieved it all; we’re no longer required to try. We have Christ’s righteousness; what could we hope to add to that? In fact, all our sin magnifies how amazingly great God’s grace is! Aren’t all our efforts to kill sin and strive for holiness just works-righteousness — trying to atone for our sin by our acts of obedience? Paul’s answer to this is “by no means!” (Romans 6:15). Rather,

Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace. (Romans 6:12–14)

It’s wonderfully true that God doesn’t require us to achieve sinless perfection in order to be saved from his judgment against sin. But he does require of us “the obedience of faith” (Romans 1:5), which Paul describes above. The obedience of faith is not works-righteousness. Obedience is what genuine faith looks like as we live it out in real life. It’s why James says, “Faith apart from [obedient] works is dead” (James 2:26). And why Jesus says, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (John 14:15).

“God himself cleared the holiness high bar for us by satisfying the justice he demanded for sin.”

Since the Son of God “loved righteousness and hated wickedness” (Hebrews 1:9), those who truly put their faith in him will increasingly pursue living in accord with what Jesus loves and hates, knowing that they’ll never achieve — or be required to achieve — perfect righteousness in this age. It’s part of what being “conformed to the image of [God’s] Son” means (Romans 8:29). And it’s why there are so many different ways the New Testament exhorts Christians to “excel still more” in pursuing Christlikeness (1 Thessalonians 4:1 NASB).

‘Easy to Please, Hard to Satisfy’

So, because of Jesus, God frees us from having to clear his high bar of holiness. But since he still requires us to “excel still more” in living out the obedience of faith, how do we Christians, beset with weakness and stumbling in many ways, know whether or not God is pleased with our present level of obedience?

There is no one-size-fits-all answer. Learning to discern what the Spirit is saying to us is particular to each one of us. But something I read years ago by C.S. Lewis has helped me remember God’s general disposition toward his children:

[God] who will, in the long run, be satisfied with nothing less than absolute perfection, will also be delighted with the first feeble, stumbling effort you make tomorrow to do the simplest duty. As a great Christian writer (George MacDonald) pointed out, every father is pleased at the baby’s first attempt to walk: no father would be satisfied with anything less than a firm, free, manly walk in a grown-up son. In the same way, he said, “God is easy to please, but hard to satisfy.” (Mere Christianity, 202–3)

When it comes to the obedience of faith, God is concerned more with how our faith in him is growing than with how outwardly impressive and scrupulously observed our acts of obedience appear. As he was with the widow and her two copper coins (Luke 21:1–4), God may, for a host of reasons, be very pleased with one person’s apparently minor act of faithful obedience and less impressed by another’s apparently more significant act of faithful obedience.

But if we see God as a gracious Father who loves us so much that he did everything necessary for us to become his children, a Father who has promised to share with us his kingdom (Luke 12:32), we will receive his exhortations to “excel still more” as invitations to experience fuller joys and greater pleasures (Psalm 16:11) as we grow in Christlike maturity. Because the truth is, God’s being easy to please and hard to satisfy are two sides of the same priceless coin of his fatherly delight in doing us good.