Living without the Inferiority Feelings of Imperfection
Living in the “GAP” between our ideal and our actual behaviors can be either a path to heaven or a dead end feeling of hell. That “gap” is a place of creative tension or destructive impulse. Why? Because in the gap we experience the existential dilemma of freedom with responsibility or resignation and irresponsibility.
Many skeptics and atheists look upon Christians as soft-headed, and as escapists who look to religion as the “opiate of the masses”. Marx of course could make such a sweeping generalization without looking into the specific life of a devoted follower of the Promised One. The Christ was a hard headed realist struggling with the hardships of a world constantly challenging His human limits. He met human suffering and injustice head-on, and paid a daily high price to oppose it.
Living in the “gap” requires spiritual and emotional maturity. Why should a Christian fare better in the gap than non-believers? The answer is that Jesus, as the incarnate God, entered into the Gap also, and demonstrated that we will find God in the gap if we seek Him earnestly. This gap between our current state of sin and our promised state of perfection is closed in a daily process of change through the Spirit of God. Through and in the Spirit of God, we find in the “G”-”A”-”P” :
“G”uidance
“A”biding Presence
“P”rovision.
When we live in the ambiguity and imperfection of the gap, we can take heart that God fully understands that we are not yet perfected, and that mistakes (sins) will continue to be part of our human experience. God does not condemn believers, and believers are not to condemn themselves. Rather, we fail, we acknowledge failure, we seek forgiveness where our failure is by our choice or neglect, and we turn again and again toward God for acceptance and mercy. Believers then rely on the mercy of God expressed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. They feel no neurotic, recurrent guilt. They are not oppressed within the reality of the “gap”. They take hope and strength in knowing God is working a transformation within them that daily is completing the “perfection” process that we cannot achieve on our own.
Therefore we can be free of self-condemnation and feelings of inferiority, even as we continuously fail to be the people we would like to be. God isn’t finished with us yet.
