Does God Expect You To Be Perfect?

Gradual Growth, Not Perfection

It is normal for people to think that they need to present a picture of perfection in order to gain God’s approval. 

But human beings are “perfect” only in the sense that David, Job, and Peter were perfect. Each loved and responded to God as they knew him, yet each was seriously flawed and prone to human frailty. It was when they stood up and counted themselves as most perfect that they fell on their faces. As the proverb says, “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall” (Pro 16:18).

Haughty Spirit

The perfection that God desires is an ever-humbling growth process in the direction of surrendering your personality patterns to God’s healing agency.

Though imperfections always remain, you are gradually transformed into your unique version of the image of Christ. 

Being Transformed in Christ

God knows the innermost workings of your personality—the motives, foibles, and desires—for “before him no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account” (Heb 4:13).

Because Christ became sin as humanity’s representative, God has patience, not condemnation, for the fear-driven personality patterns that plague people. 

God is Patient

Jesus says, “But the one who endures to the end will be saved” (Mt 24:13). Enduring means committing yourself to an open-ended process of inspired personality development over your lifetime.

I invite you to take your first action step in surrendering your patterns to the Lord:

The Self Compass: Charting Your Personality in Christ 

offers a self-administered inventory that provides a compass reading of patterns that are interfering with your personality growth, as well as revealing dimensions of your Self Compass that are functioning with good balance and integrity.

The Self Compass

The Self Compass and Personality Disorders

How does the Self Compass help you understand personality disorders?

Here's how. The LAWS of personality and relationships form four universal compass points of Love and Assertion, Weakness and Strength.

A personality pattern is a set of manipulative behaviors stemming from unconscious assumptions that directly affect how you perceive, think, feel, and act. Whether you became this way through how you were parented or other factors, you can only change a personality disorder through accurate insight and new choices.

There are primarily nine patterns that hamper personality growth, shown as they are located on the Self Compass. They are serious enough to undermine your attempts for love and happiness. But you can change them more easily than most people think. Self Compass knowledge is the key.

These descriptors are psychologically accurate, yet easy to remember because in the compass model, we pair the clinical name of the disorder with a descriptor that anyone can understand. You can think of these terms as temporary descriptions of a person’s behavior until that you make new choices that reflect personality balance and constructive change.

• Those stuck in the Dependent Pleaser and Histrionic Storyteller personality patterns exaggerate the Love compass point. Too much love makes them compliant or attention craving. They don't realize that they lack a stable identity within themselves.
• Paranoid Arguer and Antisocial Rule-breaker patterned people are stuck on the Assertion compass point. Too much assertion makes them argumentative or exploitive. 
• Avoidant Worrier and Schizoid Loner patterned people are stuck on the Weakness compass point. Too much weakness makes them withdrawn or detached. 
• Narcissistic Boaster and Compulsive Controller patterned people are stuck on the Strength compass point. Too much strength makes them arrogant or compulsive.  
• Borderline Challengers flip-flop from the Top Dog patterns of Strength and Assertion into the Underdog patterns of Weakness and Love and back again. This unstable volatility makes the borderline person believe that everyone else is responsible for their troubles, when the truth is their own personality pattern is to blame.

Most people lay claim to several of these patterns at some point in their lives. But the Self Compass both diagnoses the problem and shows you how to fix it. Whatever compass point your personality is stuck on determines your path for getting unstuck. If you are stuck in the Worrier pattern on the Weakness compass point, you take growth stretches primarily toward the opposite compass point: Strength. Over time, you move from self-defeating thoughts like “No one feels as scared as I do. I may as well give up,” to “I might blow this, because I’m human. But I’m doing it anyway.”

In our book The Self Compass my wife Kate illustrates the Controller Pattern this way:

I hand Dan my printed-out chapter to edit. He picks up the red pen and starts in, crossing out here, adding words there, deleting whole sentences. I bite my tongue to keep from protesting. My shoulders tighten, my jaw clenches, and I watch him like a hawk, ready to swoop down in defense of a brilliant phrase that must be kept just so. 

Even though I know objectively that Dan’s editing greatly improves my writing, when the Controller pattern has the upper hand, I feel driven to present him with a draft so perfect he won’t need to change a thing. 

Without a compass correction, this inner tension would spill over into our relationship, making it difficult for Dan to give honest feedback for fear of upsetting me. Then we’d both be held hostage to the harsh taskmaster of perfection.

Personality patterns left unchecked can undermine and even destroy relationships. They hamper your ability to love God and others as yourself, keeping you from fulfilling Christ’s purpose for your personality. 

To find out more, read:

THE SELF COMPASS: CHARTING YOUR PERSONALITY IN CHRIST

Notre Dame Professor Commends New Christian Personality Theory

The concept of moral psychology was unheard of in Freud's day, and even under the early influence of the behavioral psychologists. This is because, for Freud, human behavior was an offshoot of neurology, or the study of the nervous system, and the human mammal had no soul. 

Likewise, for behaviorists like Thorndike, Pavlov, and the American B. F. Skinner, the human being was a black box of stimulus/response reflexes that could be conditioned by the environment, but possessed no "self" or "free will" within.

Young Child in the Famous "Skinner Box"

This heritage is why modern advertisers for cars, lip gloss, and life insurance all utilize extensive testing programs where market researchers calculate statistically how to control a consumer's psyche through words, promises, and images.

Market Research

But there is a higher realm of human functioning that makes human persons greater than the sum of their physiological reactions or unconscious conditioning. And this is studied in a field called Moral Psychology.

Moral psychology seeks ways to integrate the mammalian instinct, drive, and urges that characterize human behavior with the aspiration, motivation, and inspiration within every person. In other words, like isn't just about what you're made of, but who you are and what you're making of life.

For this reason moral psychology has re-opened the doors to philosophy and theology that psychoanalysis and behavioral psychology had previously slammed shut. These doors had been opened in the history of Western civilization by the presence of Christianity as a worldview within which philosophy and science operated.

However, in the nineteenth and twentieth century many scientists wanted more objectivity to study nature and human nature without the influence of religious beliefs. This was indeed needed to gather data about human behavior and social psychology, but has led to a new conundrum, that we have now assembled a vast amount of information of human anatomical, metabolic, intrapsychic and interpersonal behavior, but are pretty much devoid of a metaphysical overview with which to find meaning and purpose in life.

"Who Am I?"

Compass psychotheology, compass therapy, and the self compass are contemporary concepts and tools designed to aid people in developing a moral compass that holds. This allows for a Christian personality theory that stands alongside Freud's psychoanalytic theory of personality and the behaviorist's learning theory of personality.

In bringing Christian personality theory forward into modern discourse, I naturally wanted it evaluated by professors in the field of moral psychology. 

So I was delighted to receive the following commendation:

Darcia Narvaez, Ph.D.
Developmental and Moral Psychology
University of Notre Dame

"I love the systematic and creative thought that went into Dr. Dan and Kate Montgomery's new book on Christian Personality Theory. 

"I am fascinated by the Self Compass. It has an intuitive resonance and it synthesizes what we know about the human psyche, its pitfalls and redemption. 

"The growth orientation of the Compass Model offers a transformation mindset that can benefit any reader. Well done!"

Christian Personality Theory: A Self Compass for Humanity