Never Perfect: Finding hope in Jesus' grace

I worshipped God while knelt down on my knees for hours the other day. It’s true; does that make me sound like a highly spiritual person? I also had a can of Pledge furniture polish in one hand and a dust rag in the other hand.

We had a spring cleaning day at church. People volunteered their time on Saturday morning to deep clean inside and outside the church building. I spent my morning scrubbing windows and base boards.

The coordinators didn’t know they scheduled it for three days before Passover. That’s a significant piece of information, though.

Jewish tradition requires a thorough searching and scrubbing of the entire house before the feast of Passover. They remove all products containing yeast; then clean the entire house to remove all crumbs of food products containing yeast. So, although our spring cleaning day at church wasn’t intended as such, it became the required cleaning of the house before the celebration of Passover.

The removal of yeast is important because yeast symbolizes sin in the Bible.

Back to my hours cleaning the church. I fight perfectionist tendencies - I’m kind of OCD. If I’m going to clean a church, I want to clean the whole thing. I don’t want dust left on any surface, cobwebs in any corners, or smudges on any glass. If I’m going to clean my home, even my church home, for Passover, I want it to be perfect. But here’s the thing – it never will be. No matter how many volunteers we have, how organized the cleaning day is, or how many hours we invest, we will never be able to perfectly clean the entire church building.

We will never remove all the yeast from our homes.

We will never remove all the sin from our lives.

So as I scrubbed the baseboard, recognizing my inadequacy to do the job as thoroughly and perfectly as it needed, I found myself thankful to my Savior.

No number of perfect Passover lambs could ever completely remove my sin, nor could an infinite amount of unleavened bread redeem me. That’s why Jesus gave His life as the final, ultimate, perfect Passover Lamb. “For Christ, our Passover Lamb, has been sacrificed” (1 Corinthians 5:7). That’s why His body was the bread broken for our redemption. “The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, "This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me” (1 Corinthians 11:23-24).