IF THOU WILT BE PERFECT
- Edward D. Andrews
- 6 minutes ago
- 17 min read
The title If Thou Wilt Be Perfect confronts the Christian with one of the most searching questions that can be asked about the life of faith: What does God actually expect of those who desire to belong to Him? The word perfect can sound intimidating. Some hear it and imagine absolute sinlessness, flawless conduct, or a spiritual level attainable only by an exceptional few. Others react in the opposite direction, reasoning that because imperfect humans cannot attain absolute perfection now, the biblical commands to pursue holiness, obedience, maturity, and godliness must be little more than unattainable ideals. Both reactions miss the force of Scripture.
The Bible neither teaches that Christians can make themselves absolutely sinless in the present life nor permits them to become comfortable with spiritual carelessness. It recognizes the reality of inherited human imperfection while repeatedly commanding believers to grow toward maturity, completeness, integrity, and wholehearted devotion to God. The Christian life is therefore neither a claim of present sinlessness nor an excuse for spiritual stagnation. It is a course of faithful movement toward the standard Jehovah has revealed through His Word and perfectly demonstrated in His Son.
This is why the language of perfection must be understood according to Scripture rather than according to assumptions attached to the English word. When Jesus told the rich young man, “If you want to be perfect,” in Matthew 19:21, He was not presenting a doctrine of instantaneous sinless perfection. The Greek adjective teleios carries the idea of being complete, mature, fully developed, or brought to the intended goal. Its precise force must always be determined from context. Jesus was exposing a divided heart. The man professed obedience, but his attachment to his possessions revealed that his devotion was not complete. What he lacked was not one more religious achievement added to an already impressive record. What he lacked was wholehearted allegiance.
The same principle appears in Matthew 5:48, where Jesus commands His followers to be perfect as their heavenly Father is perfect. The surrounding context concerns love, including love toward enemies. Jesus is calling His disciples to a completeness of love that refuses to restrict kindness merely to those who return it. Jehovah does not love according to the narrow calculations common among sinful humans. His moral character supplies the standard. Thus, the command toward perfection is a summons to mature, undivided, God-centered character.
Paul provides an equally important balance. In Philippians 3:12, he explicitly acknowledges that he had not already been made perfect in the ultimate sense. Yet only a few verses later, in Philippians 3:15, he can speak of those who are mature. There is no contradiction. Absolute completion had not yet arrived, but spiritual maturity was nevertheless a present responsibility. Paul did not use his imperfection as permission to remain where he was. He pressed forward. He pursued the goal. His acknowledgment of incompleteness became a reason for continued effort rather than an excuse for spiritual passivity.
That tension stands near the heart of this book. Human beings are imperfect, but Jehovah's standards are not. Christians are affected by inherited sin, but sin must never be renamed as virtue or treated as harmless. Complete sinlessness is not presently available to descendants of Adam, but meaningful growth in knowledge, faith, obedience, discernment, self-control, holiness, and godliness is both possible and required. We are not asked to pretend that we have arrived. We are commanded to keep walking.
The need for such a pursuit becomes clearer when we return to the beginning of human history. Adam and Eve were not created morally defective. Genesis 1:31 declares God's creation “very good.” Human imperfection did not originate in the Creator. Adam possessed what his descendants do not possess: perfect human life. Yet perfection did not mean that Adam was incapable of making a wrong choice. Perfection is not the same thing as infallibility. Jehovah created humans as responsible moral beings capable of meaningful obedience. Genuine love and loyalty cannot be reduced to mechanical behavior. A command that could not possibly be disobeyed would not involve moral choice in the ordinary biblical sense.
Genesis 2–3 therefore provides an indispensable foundation for understanding the entire human predicament. Adam and Eve were given God's instruction. They were capable of obeying it. They chose otherwise. Satan's deception encouraged Eve to distrust the word and character of God, and Adam deliberately joined in disobedience. What entered human existence was not merely an unfortunate habit but sin, alienation, corruption, and death. Romans 5:12 traces the present condition of humanity to that historical act: sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin.
Any serious pursuit of spiritual maturity must begin with this biblical diagnosis. Humanity's central difficulty cannot be corrected merely by education, wealth, political reform, technological progress, physical comfort, or personal determination. Such things may alter circumstances, but they cannot reverse the Adamic condition. Human beings do not merely need improved surroundings. They need reconciliation with their Creator and the redemption made possible by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.
This explains why the pursuit of a satisfying life remains so frustrating when God is removed from the center. Human beings can accumulate possessions and still remain dissatisfied. They can gain knowledge without gaining wisdom. They can possess entertainment without possessing peace of mind. They can enjoy freedom while becoming enslaved to harmful desires. They can be surrounded by people and remain inwardly isolated. They can devote themselves to achievement and eventually discover that achievement cannot answer the most fundamental questions of existence.
Scripture does not condemn legitimate enjoyment. Jehovah is the Giver of life and of the good things that sustain it. The problem arises when created things are required to perform a task they were never designed to perform. Wealth cannot reconcile a sinner to God. Pleasure cannot remove guilt. Accomplishment cannot cancel death. Human approval cannot establish objective righteousness. Material security cannot guarantee life. A satisfying life therefore requires more than arranging favorable circumstances. It requires understanding why we exist, who made us, what has gone wrong, what God has done through Christ, and how we are to live in response.
Those questions immediately raise another: Where can reliable answers be found?
This book answers without hesitation: in the inspired Word of God.
The Christian pursuit of maturity cannot be governed by religious intuition, changing cultural standards, private mystical impressions, or the authority of human philosophy. Christians require an objective revelation outside themselves. Human reasoning is valuable, but fallen humans are capable of reasoning from faulty premises, suppressing unwelcome truths, rationalizing sinful desires, and mistaking cultural acceptance for moral legitimacy. A person cannot safely become his own final authority.
The Bible stands in a fundamentally different position. “All Scripture is inspired by God,” Paul states in 2 Timothy 3:16. Peter explains that men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit (2 Peter 1:21). Biblical inspiration therefore does not describe religious geniuses recording elevated personal insights. Scripture originates with God while being communicated through human writers who used their languages, vocabularies, circumstances, and recognizable styles. The result is genuinely human writing and, at the same time, the reliable Word of God.
For that reason, confidence in Scripture is not peripheral to the Christian life. If the Bible cannot be trusted, the Christian has no stable basis for defining God, Christ, sin, righteousness, salvation, holiness, truth, or future hope. Once the authority of Scripture is displaced, something else inevitably occupies its position. Sometimes that substitute is tradition. Sometimes it is philosophy. Sometimes it is personal experience. Sometimes it is contemporary culture. Sometimes it is an academic theory constructed on assumptions that deny supernatural revelation before the biblical evidence has even been considered. Whatever form the substitute takes, the result is the same: man's judgment is placed above God's Word.
A mature Christian must therefore know not only that he believes the Bible but why he has good reason to trust it. The Scriptures come to us as historical documents rooted in real people, places, languages, nations, rulers, events, and periods of time. They contain claims that invite examination. Their transmission can be investigated. Their manuscript evidence can be studied. Their historical statements can be compared with what is known of the ancient world. Their internal coherence can be examined. Their prophetic claims can be considered. The Christian faith does not require the abandonment of thought.
Indeed, reason has an important place in Christian life. Jesus commanded love for God with the whole mind (Matthew 22:37). Paul reasoned from the Scriptures (Acts 17:2). Christian faith is not credulity, nor is biblical submission intellectual surrender. The question is not whether Christians should reason but what position reason should occupy.
Human reason is a tool, not an independent source of divine revelation. It helps us observe, compare, distinguish, infer, analyze, and understand. It cannot legitimately sit in judgment over Jehovah and decide which revealed truths may be accepted according to current human preferences. Rightly employed, reason receives the evidence, examines the text, recognizes valid arguments, identifies contradictions in false claims, and seeks the intended meaning of Scripture. Wrongly employed, autonomous reason begins with human assumptions and then requires God's Word to conform to them.
There is therefore no genuine conflict between sound reasoning and biblical faith. There is conflict between revelation and reasoning governed by false premises. If a person begins with the assumption that miracles cannot occur, every biblical miracle must be explained away before its historical evidence is considered. If he begins with the assumption that predictive prophecy is impossible, genuine prophecy must automatically be dated after the event predicted. If he assumes that God cannot communicate propositional truth to human beings, the doctrine of inspiration is rejected before the biblical claims are allowed to speak for themselves. Those are not neutral conclusions produced by reason alone. They are conclusions controlled by prior philosophical commitments.
The historical-grammatical approach followed throughout this work moves in another direction. It asks what the inspired writer communicated through the words he used within his historical and literary context. It respects grammar, syntax, vocabulary, historical setting, immediate context, literary form, and the wider testimony of Scripture. It does not search beneath the text for a supposedly more authentic message constructed by modern theories. It does not turn biblical narratives into allegories at the interpreter's pleasure. It does not permit the reader to manufacture meanings foreign to the author's communication. Our responsibility is not to make Scripture say something relevant. God's Word is already relevant. Our responsibility is to understand accurately what it says and then submit our thinking and conduct to it.
This naturally brings us to the question of truth.
Modern culture often speaks as though truth were something individuals create for themselves. A statement may be treated as “true for you” while an incompatible statement is simultaneously “true for me.” Such language may describe preferences, perspectives, or personal reactions, but contradictory claims about reality cannot both be true in the same sense at the same time. If God exists, then the claim that no God exists is false. If Jesus was raised from the dead, then the claim that He remained permanently dead is false. If Jehovah has established moral standards, then those standards do not become false because a society rejects them.
Biblical truth is not created by human acceptance. Jesus prayed to His Father, “Your word is truth” (John 17:17). God's Word corresponds to reality because its ultimate Source knows reality perfectly. Jehovah does not discover truth. He does not revise His moral standards as civilizations change. He does not become more informed as history progresses. His revelation provides human beings with an objective standard by which beliefs, values, desires, and conduct can be examined.
Knowing truth, however, involves more than storing facts. Biblical knowledge carries moral responsibility. A person may possess extensive information about Scripture while refusing to live according to it. James warns against hearing the word without becoming a doer of it (James 1:22). Jesus repeatedly connected genuine discipleship with continuing in His word and obeying His teaching. Biblical knowledge is intended to shape judgment and conduct.
That fact explains why Bible study occupies such an important place in the pursuit of spiritual maturity. The Christian cannot consistently think biblically without knowing the Bible. Occasional exposure to isolated verses is insufficient for the development of a thoroughly trained Christian mind. Scripture must be read carefully, regularly, contextually, and with a desire to understand what the inspired authors actually communicated.
Study must also go beyond the collection of favorite passages. The Bible is a unified collection of books written over centuries through different human authors and in different historical circumstances. Narrative must be read as narrative. Poetry must be recognized as poetry. Proverbs must be understood according to the nature of proverbial wisdom. Prophecy must be interpreted according to its historical and grammatical setting. Letters must be read in relation to their recipients, circumstances, arguments, and purposes. Words derive their intended sense from context, not merely from a list of possible dictionary meanings.
Deep study is therefore not an academic luxury reserved for pastors, teachers, or scholars. Christians differ in education, available time, resources, and ability, but every believer can cultivate greater familiarity with Scripture. The goal is not intellectual pride. It is accurate understanding leading to faithful obedience.
Such study trains discernment. Hebrews 5:14 describes mature people as those whose powers of discernment have been trained to distinguish right from wrong. That description is especially important because moral discernment does not arise automatically. Human conscience can be influenced by family, culture, repetition, desire, ignorance, and previous conduct. Something can feel acceptable and still be wrong. Something can produce discomfort merely because it is unfamiliar and still be right. Conscience is valuable, but conscience itself must be educated according to the Word of God.
Christian discernment therefore asks more than, “How do I feel about this?” It asks what Jehovah has revealed, what principles apply, what motives are operating, what consequences can reasonably be expected, and whether the choice harmonizes with the character and commands of God. Romans 12:2 connects transformation with the renewing of the mind so that the believer can discern God's will. Spiritual maturity requires learning to think in categories shaped by Scripture rather than merely absorbing the categories of the surrounding world.
This is where God's Word becomes more than a book consulted during religious activities. It becomes the Christian's daily guide. Psalm 119:105 describes God's word as a lamp for one's foot and a light for one's path. The picture is practical. A lamp provides sufficient light to see where one is walking. Scripture does not merely satisfy theological curiosity; it gives direction.
That direction is objective. Christians do not need to search for secret messages, uncontrolled impressions, or private revelations beyond the Spirit-inspired Word. The Holy Spirit guided the biblical writers so that God's revelation has been given to us in Scripture. Through reading, study, understanding, remembering, and applying that Word, the Christian receives the guidance necessary for faithful living. This safeguards the believer from the instability that results when personal feelings are mistaken for divine communication.
Biblical guidance also clarifies the meaning of happiness. Scripture never promises Christians uninterrupted ease. We live in a world marked by inherited imperfection, wickedness, Satanic opposition, demonic influence, disease, injustice, loss, disappointment, and death. Faithfulness to God does not remove all painful circumstances. Jesus Himself warned His followers that discipleship would bring opposition.
Yet happiness in the biblical sense is deeper than favorable circumstances. Psalm 1 calls the man happy whose delight is in Jehovah's instruction and who meditates upon it continually. His stability grows from where his life is rooted. Biblical happiness is therefore connected with a rightly ordered relationship with God, a clean conscience before Him, dependable moral direction, meaningful purpose, and confidence in His promises. It does not require pretending that suffering is pleasant. It means that life's deepest good is not controlled by the changing conditions of a fallen world.
This is also why practical Bible counsel matters. Christianity cannot remain an abstraction. Truth must enter ordinary decisions. Godliness must become visible in conduct. What we believe about God must affect how we respond to His commands. What we believe about sin must affect what we resist. What we believe about truth must affect what we accept. What we believe about Scripture must affect whether we obey it when obedience is difficult. What we believe about Christ's sacrifice must affect the value we place on the life made possible through Him.
The biblical path to godliness is neither mystical nor automatic. Paul urged Timothy to train himself for godliness (1 Timothy 4:7). Growth requires purposeful effort. Christians must read, learn, remember, think, reject falsehood, correct harmful habits, strengthen good habits, pray, obey, and continue moving forward. None of this purchases salvation. The sacrifice of Christ accomplishes what imperfect humans could never accomplish for themselves. Yet the grace of God never converts obedience into irrelevance. Those who desire to follow Christ are repeatedly commanded to walk in a manner worthy of their calling.
Salvation itself is presented in Scripture as a course that must be faithfully pursued. Jesus spoke of a narrow road leading to life (Matthew 7:13-14). The imagery is significant. A road is entered, but it is also traveled. Christian faith cannot be reduced to one past profession detached from subsequent life. Genuine faith trusts God, continues with Christ, responds to correction, grows in knowledge, and produces obedience. The believer never reaches a point in this present imperfect existence where further growth becomes unnecessary.
This returns us to the challenge contained in the title. “If thou wilt be perfect” is not an invitation to religious self-exaltation. The mature Christian is not the person most impressed by his own spirituality. The closer one comes to understanding Jehovah's holiness and Christ's sinless example, the less room remains for boasting. Spiritual maturity produces humility because the believer increasingly recognizes both the height of God's standard and his continuing dependence upon the redemption provided through Jesus.
Nor is spiritual maturity measured merely by religious activity. A person can be busy without being mature. He can speak confidently while lacking sound knowledge. He can possess knowledge while lacking obedience. He can defend correct doctrine while tolerating serious moral weakness in himself. He can observe outward religious practices while his deepest loyalties remain attached to something other than God. The rich young man in Matthew 19 demonstrates how impressive outward obedience can coexist with an inward obstacle that must be confronted.
Jesus went directly to that obstacle.
That is one reason His words remain so searching. He did not lower God's standard to protect the man's self-assessment. Neither did He teach that wealth itself automatically makes a person unrighteous. He identified what controlled this particular man's heart. The call to completeness required that God come first without rival.
Every serious reader of Scripture must therefore permit God's Word to expose areas that need correction. Hebrews 4:12 describes the word of God as living and active, able to discern the thoughts and intentions of the heart. Bible reading that never corrects us has not been allowed to perform its proper work. We are not the judges standing above Scripture. Scripture judges our thinking.
That principle governs the movement of the chapters ahead. The pursuit begins with the question of spiritual perfection because the goal must first be understood correctly. It then moves backward to the fall of man because we cannot understand our present moral limitations without understanding what happened in Eden. From the fall comes the problem of sin and its effect upon man's relationship with God. From that broken relationship comes the persistent human difficulty of seeking satisfaction in a world that cannot, by itself, restore what sin has destroyed.
The investigation then turns to the Bible because a fallen humanity requires revelation. We need more than sincerity; we need truth. We need more than intelligence; we need reliable information from the Creator. The trustworthiness of Scripture therefore becomes foundational to everything that follows. Once that foundation is established, reason can be placed in its proper role, truth can be defined objectively, and Bible study can be pursued with confidence that the text before us deserves close attention and obedience.
From there the emphasis becomes increasingly practical. Biblical knowledge trains discernment. Discernment enables the Christian to distinguish right from wrong. God's Word becomes the daily guide by which decisions and values are ordered. Divine guidance shows why genuine happiness does not depend upon satisfying every desire. Practical biblical counsel brings revealed truth into everyday life. Godliness becomes an active course rather than a vague religious feeling. The final question—what must we do to please God?—then becomes unavoidable, because biblical truth always carries the reader toward responsibility.
To please God does not mean earning His favor through a ledger of meritorious religious works. Hebrews 11:6 places faith at the foundation: without faith it is impossible to please Him. Yet biblical faith is not mere acknowledgment that God exists. Faith trusts what God says and acts accordingly. Abraham believed God and obeyed. Noah believed God's warning and acted. Moses chose faithfulness over the temporary advantages available in Egypt. The apostles trusted Christ enough to reorganize their lives around His commands. Throughout Scripture, genuine faith moves the believer toward obedience.
Jesus expressed this connection plainly when He linked love for Him with keeping His commandments (John 14:15). John likewise wrote that love for God means keeping His commandments and that His commandments are not burdensome (1 John 5:3). Obedience does not compete with love. Biblical obedience is one of love's necessary expressions.
The pursuit of Christian perfection, rightly understood, therefore reaches into the mind, conscience, desires, decisions, loyalties, and conduct. It is a movement toward completeness under the authority of God's Word. It requires doctrinal truth because one cannot live rightly while persistently believing falsely about God. It requires moral seriousness because truth that never shapes conduct has not been properly received. It requires humility because inherited imperfection remains a present reality. It requires endurance because growth takes place over a lifetime. Above all, it requires faith in Jehovah and in the provision He has made through Jesus Christ.
The Christian who recognizes his imperfection need not surrender to discouragement. Scripture never asks him to manufacture the perfection Adam lost. Nor can discipline, knowledge, moral effort, or religious devotion erase inherited sin. That loss required a redemptive answer outside fallen humanity. Jesus Christ provided that answer through His perfect human life and sacrificial death. The ransom opens the way for reconciliation with God and the future restoration that human effort alone could never secure.
What the believer can do now is respond faithfully to what God has provided. He can learn. He can repent when wrong. He can correct mistaken thinking. He can strengthen faith. He can cultivate biblical discernment. He can resist sinful desires. He can train his conscience by Scripture. He can become more consistent in obedience. He can deepen his knowledge of God. He can follow Christ more closely today than yesterday.
This is not perfection in the absolute sense. It is movement toward Christian maturity.
And that movement matters.
Jehovah does not ask His servants merely to admire truth from a distance. He calls them to walk in it. He does not give His Word merely so that it can occupy a respected place on a shelf. He gives it to teach, reprove, correct, and train in righteousness so that the man of God may be competent and equipped for every good work (2 Timothy 3:16-17). He does not reveal right and wrong merely to increase our information. He calls us to choose what is right. He does not expose human sin merely to deepen despair. He reveals the seriousness of sin so that the value of Christ's sacrifice can be understood and so that reconciliation with Him can be pursued with gratitude.
The question that stands before the reader, then, is not whether complete sinlessness can be attained by human effort in the present life. It cannot. The more searching question is what we will do with the measure of light God has already given us. Will we allow inherited imperfection to become an excuse for avoidable spiritual weakness? Will we permit cultural standards to reshape biblical morality? Will we treat Scripture as authoritative only when it agrees with what we already want? Will we study merely to accumulate information, or will we study so that our minds and conduct are corrected? Will we profess faith while withholding areas of life from God's authority?
The rich young man came to Jesus asking about eternal life. He departed grieving because the answer reached deeper than he expected. The encounter reminds every reader that discipleship eventually touches what we value most. Christ's call does not remain safely within the boundaries we establish for it. It reaches the heart.
So the pursuit begins there—not with a claim that we have become perfect, but with the willingness to let Jehovah define the goal; not with confidence in human ability, but with confidence in His Word; not with the abandonment of reason, but with reason brought into submission to revealed truth; not with vague spirituality, but with informed faith expressed in obedient living.
“If thou wilt be perfect” therefore remains a fitting summons. It asks whether we genuinely desire completeness of devotion. It asks whether we are willing to keep learning when Scripture exposes ignorance, keep correcting ourselves when Scripture exposes error, keep resisting when sin presses upon us, and keep walking when the path requires sacrifice. It directs us away from complacency and toward maturity, away from self-rule and toward God's revealed wisdom, away from the illusion that satisfaction can be found independently of our Creator and toward the life for which human beings were made.
The first question to be faced is therefore the one upon which every later question depends: What does the Bible actually mean when it calls imperfect men and women to pursue perfection, and how far can that pursuit advance in the Christian life now?
About the Author
EDWARD D. ANDREWS (AS in Criminal Justice, BS in Religion, MA in Biblical Studies, and MDiv in Theology) is CEO and President of Christian Publishing House. He has authored over 220+ books. In addition, Andrews is the Chief Translator of the Updated American Standard Version (UASV).
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