Ever since Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowing good and evil, we humans have tended to see ourselves, God and our relationship with God in terms of performance. Adam and Eve hid from God out of fear because they were ashamed. They felt their sin made their relationship with God change and God’s stance towards them negative, even though this wasn’t true - for God came looking for them and lovingly desired fellowship with them even after they sinned. Failure makes no difference to God! God is always welcoming towards us, always accepting, always open, always friends with us. Our performance thinking blinded us, though. We thought failure made a difference. We believed a lie that we were inferior and separated from God and needed to perform better to get back in His good graces. Humanity has spent a long time trying to earn God’s favor and presence through self effort, trying to do what’s right and stop doing what’s wrong, trying to improve ourselves. Yet whatever we did, it never seemed to be enough to get rid of those feelings of separation, inferiority, and shame, never enough to make us feel comfortable about ourselves or about approaching God.
So Christ came to take us out of this performance thinking into the reality of His grace and love. Since we felt inferior and ashamed to even be in God’s presence, Christ united Himself with us in the incarnation and infused us with His own perfection - His perfect obedience and righteousness - so that we are perfect with His perfection and righteous with His righteousness. This is a gift of pure grace!
We are forever perfected in Christ, once and for all and for all time. We are as righteous and perfect as can be; we can’t get any more righteous, complete, perfect or holy than what we are right now in Him. No failure on our part could ever undo what Jesus did or change one iota of His righteousness and completeness, which is given to us in our union with Him. This banishes any idea of inferiority or “not being good enough!”
But there is more that Christ did for us! In uniting with our humanity, Christ took our humanity where we could never seem to get it to - right into perfect fellowship with God! We died with Christ to sin, separation anxiety, shame, performance systems, and inferiority, and we also rose with Christ and ascended to heaven with Him to the ultimate place of love and communion in the Trinity family circle. So we have the perfect relationship with God because we are included in Christ’s relationship with the Father. Could anything ever alter that relationship? No!
So what happens between us and God when we fail? Nothing! Our failures don’t change a thing in our relationship with God. We are still kept whole in His perfect love. We are still perfect before Him. We are still righteous. We are still one with Him in perfect harmony and friendship. According to God, we never fall. We always stand righteous in the righteousness of Christ, perfect in the perfection of Christ. We are always included in Christ’s perfect communion with the Father. That’s what He did for us, so that we can feel good about ourselves and be confident in God’s presence, so that we can feel safe, welcomed, loved by Him, even if we don’t perform perfectly, even if we fail. It was never about perfect performance to earn God’s presence; it was always about a love that was present no matter what our performance!
Isn’t grace so wonderful? Isn’t God so wonderful?