As an engineer, I was fortunate to work in countries all over the world. My family and I moved for my career more than once. I worked in Namibia, South Africa, Ireland, Australia, and Canada. I designed projects for the United States, China, Malaysia, and Brazil. By the time I left the profession, I had designed structures on six of the seven continents.
Every country I worked in had one thing in common. When you do an engineering design, you have to comply with design standards. A design standard is a published document that sets the minimum requirement for a design. Roads, bridges, buildings, cars, planes. It doesn’t matter what you’re designing. The standard is legislated. You’re allowed to exceed it, but you’re never allowed to fall short of it. Your design has to meet the minimum, every time.
God has a standard too. It comes in the form of His Word. It sets out how He wants us to live.
Man’s standards and God’s standard have the same objective. Safety and security in our daily lives. What differs is our compliance. We treat man’s law as a floor, the least we should do. We treat God’s law as a ceiling, something out of reach.
In our spiritual lives, we tell ourselves we’ll never get there. We say we’re trying, and that’s enough, because surely God isn’t looking for perfection anyway.
I don’t think that’s what God intended.
I think God wants us to meet His standard. Even exceed it. He made us capable of it. We need to stop telling ourselves He isn’t looking for perfection. He is. He wants a close, intimate relationship with us. Because He is holy, the only way we get near Him is by being holy too. “Be holy, for I am holy,” He tells us in 1 Peter 1:16. And that requires perfection.
But God sees our imperfection. He made a way for us to come to Him anyway, through the blood of Jesus Christ. Because of that sacrifice, we are counted holy. But His grace covering our imperfection is not permission to stop reaching for it. That’s what sanctification is. It’s the ongoing work of becoming like Christ, pursuing holiness, so we can draw near to God.
In my career, if a design fell below the minimum standard, the consequences weren’t hypothetical. Structures fail. People die.
I believe the stakes are the same here. God’s standard was never meant to be an aspiration. It was meant to be met. Without Christ, none of us meet it. And a soul apart from Christ is a soul lost. Forever.
Brilliant
Amen