It's So Hard to Be Perfect — How Does God Expect Us to Be Perfect?

The Command That Stops Everyone

At the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus delivers what sounds like the most impossible command in the Bible: "Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect" (Matthew 5:48). If you've read that and felt a wave of despair — you're not alone, and you're actually responding correctly. That feeling of impossibility is exactly the point.

But before we can understand what Jesus means, we need to understand what he doesn't mean — because the word "perfect" in English carries a meaning that can mislead us.

What "Perfect" Actually Means

The Greek word translated "perfect" here is teleios — and it does not primarily mean "without any flaws or mistakes." It means complete, mature, whole, fully developed — reaching the end (telos) you were designed for. A teleios adult is one who has reached full maturity. A teleios sacrifice in the Old Testament was one that was whole and without defect — complete for its purpose.

When Jesus says "be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect," he is saying: be complete in love the way God is complete in love. The context makes this clear — he has just been talking about loving your enemies, not just your friends. God, he says, sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. His love is not selective or partial. It is whole. Complete. Teleios.

Jesus is calling his followers to that same wholeness of love — not to moral flawlessness in every thought and action.

So Is God Setting an Impossible Standard?

Yes — and deliberately so. This is one of the central functions of God's law throughout Scripture: to show us what we are not, so we stop trusting in ourselves and turn to him.

Paul makes this explicit in Galatians 3:24: "The law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith." The law is not a ladder we climb to reach God. It is a mirror that shows us we cannot reach him on our own terms.

When Jesus raises the bar in the Sermon on the Mount — anger is as serious as murder, lust as serious as adultery, and love must extend even to enemies — he is not giving us a harder checklist to complete. He is systematically dismantling any confidence we might have in our own righteousness. By the end of the Sermon, the only honest response is: I need something outside of myself.

The Good News: Perfection Has Been Provided

This is where the gospel becomes the most liberating news imaginable. The perfection God requires has already been achieved — by Jesus, on our behalf.

Hebrews 10:14 is one of the most remarkable verses in the New Testament: "For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified." Notice the tenses: those who are being sanctified (an ongoing process) have already been perfected (a completed reality). In God's eyes, every person united to Christ by faith stands before him clothed in Christ's perfect record — not their own.

This is what theologians call imputed righteousness. God does not look at you and grade you on your performance. He looks at you and sees his Son. Paul puts it starkly in 2 Corinthians 5:21: "God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." Christ took our imperfection; we receive his perfection.

But Doesn't That Mean We Stop Trying?

This is the question Paul anticipates in Romans 6:1 — "Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase?" His answer is emphatic: "By no means!" The grace that justifies us also transforms us. We are not just declared righteous; we are being made righteous, through the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit.

There are actually two different things happening simultaneously in the Christian life:

Justification — your legal standing before God. This is perfect, complete, and unchanging from the moment you trust Christ. You are not becoming more or less justified. You are fully accepted.

Sanctification — your actual character and conduct, being gradually transformed to match your new identity. This is a lifelong process, always incomplete in this life, always progressing (sometimes slowly, sometimes painfully) toward what you already are in Christ.

The Christian life is not about earning perfection — it is about growing into what you have already been given. You pursue holiness not to become acceptable to God, but because you already are.

What to Do With the Struggle

The feeling that you are not perfect — the weight of failure, the repetition of the same sins, the gap between who you want to be and who you are — is not evidence that Christianity has failed. It is evidence that your conscience is alive and that you understand what God's standard actually is.

Paul, writing near the end of his life, called himself the "chief of sinners" (1 Timothy 1:15). Not the reformed former chief sinner — the present chief sinner. The apostle who wrote half the New Testament, who planted churches across the Roman world, who was caught up to the third heaven — he did not experience increasing confidence in his own righteousness as he matured. He experienced increasing awareness of his need for grace.

That is the paradox of Christian growth: the closer you get to the light, the more clearly you see the dust. But the answer is never to give up or to lower the standard. The answer is to look away from yourself and back to Christ — who has already done what you cannot.

The Destination Is Real

There is a day coming when the process will be complete. 1 John 3:2 promises: "Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is." Full conformity to Christ — the teleios wholeness Jesus described — is the guaranteed destiny of every believer. It is not achieved in this life, but it is coming.

Until then, the command to be perfect is not a burden to crush you. It is a compass pointing you toward Christ — the only one who has ever fully lived it, and the one who freely gives his perfection to all who trust him.