GOD’S
STANDARD

IF WE were to have a jumping contest and aim for the ceiling of the church sanctuary, no one would win. You may jump higher than I can, but I can guarantee you that everyone in the room is going to fall short of the ceiling. If the ceiling is the standard, the fact that you jumped higher than me is irrelevant. You still would have failed to meet the goal.402

[Jesus, Perfection of; Sin, Contamination by]

Rom. 3:23; 6:23

IF SOMEONE is sixty minutes late for a plane and another person is sixty seconds late for a plane, which one is better off? They both miss the flight. Some folks are missing heaven by a lot, while others are missing it by a little, but everyone’s missing it because, unless you’re as good as God, you are unacceptable to God. God’s very nature will not allow Him to lower His standard of perfection.403

[Jesus, Perfection of; Heaven, Entrance into; Sin, Contamination by]

Rom. 3:23; James 2:10–11

MY SON came to me one day and asked me to accompany him to the gym. He told me that he wanted to show me something. He was about eleven years old and barely five feet tall. He wanted to show me that he could dunk! I had to see this!

I took him over to the gym and he bounced the ball, approached the goal, and cupped the ball under his hand in preparation. My eleven-year-old son, not even barely five feet tall, went up and dunked the basketball. It was an amazing sight … until I realized how he did it.

Before we went over to the gym, he called and asked the maintenance man to lower the goal. The standard had been lowered. I had the guy to raise the standard back to its correct height. I explained to my son that the goal should not be lowered so that he could meet it, but that he should continue to work hard to rise to the standard.

Sometimes, we lower the standard and then get all excited because we meet it and think we’ve done something. God is after us meeting His standard. He wants us to rise from wherever we are and rise to His level of excellence.404

[Children, Training; Christian Living, Spiritual Growth; Truth, Importance of]

Lev. 11:45; 1 Peter 1:15–16

IF YOU’VE ever traveled to England, you know the English are fairly prim and proper. A lot of the men wear three-piece suits, and they often carry in the little pouch inside their vests one of those round, stopwatch kind of things on a chain. If you ever happen to see a Londoner take out their timepiece to check the time, you will probably also see them look up and then look back at their watch. Sometimes they will make an adjustment to their watch. What they are doing is looking at Big Ben and adjusting their watch to Big Ben’s time.

In London, Big Ben is the standard for the time of day. Englishmen reach into their pockets, pull out their watches, and adjust it to Big Ben. If your time is different from Ben’s time, Ben doesn’t change. You must change, because there is a fixed standard that is nonnegotiable.

God wants us to adjust our ministry, our program, and our thinking to His ministry, program, and thinking for us. Sometimes we look at one another and measure our spirituality or effectiveness by others, but if are not measuring ourselves against the standard the Lord has set for us, then we are not looking at the right standard.405

[Divine Nature; Jesus Christ, Centrality of; Spiritual Identity, Basis of]

Lev. 19:2; Heb. 12:2; 1 Peter 1:15–16

WHENEVER I’m scheduled to go to the dentist, I spend extra time brushing my teeth. I try to do a good job so I will make a good impression. So I do extra scrubbing, extra flossing, and extra work to make myself look good to the dentist. The only problem is that when I arrive, the dentist is not satisfied with my good works. He’s not satisfied with how much I brushed or how much I flossed. He looks deeper. He takes X-rays of my mouth and then uses sharp tools to dig in between my teeth, coming up with stuff I never even knew was there.

When I go to the dentist he reveals things that I thought I had taken care of on my own. That’s because he’s operating on a different standard. You can brush your teeth all your life long but if you don’t get the stuff that’s down deep, there will still be problems.

The Bible declares that on our best day we’ve still got stuff under the gums. On our best day we do not satisfy the demands of a holy God. We cannot meet the demands of perfection without being perfect.406

[Illumination]

1 Sam. 16:7