Perfectionism and the Fear of Making Mistakes
Christians often shrink back because they fear making a mistake. If you fear making mistakes, you will become a success at doing nothing, which is actually the biggest mistake of all. Everyone makes mistakes. Join the club and get over yourself. If you make a mistake, you’re already forgiven (1 John 2:12 and many other Scriptures), so it won’t mess up your relationship with God.
We can sometimes act as if God can only use people who make no mistakes, but the opposite is true. He can only use people who DO make mistakes. For one thing, those are the only people on the earth. For another, He can’t use anyone who does NOTHING due of fear of making a mistake! I would rather get something done and make some mistakes than do nothing perfectly.
Shrinking back due to fear of making a mistake displeases God and is not humble. It is downright wicked, because that is the word God uses to describe it!
Luke 19:20-26:
And another came, saying, Lord, behold, here is thy pound, which I have kept laid up in a napkin:
For I feared thee, because thou art an austere man: thou takest up that thou layedst not down, and reapest that thou didst not sow.
And he saith unto him, Out of thine own mouth will I judge thee, thou wicked servant. Thou knewest that I was an austere man, taking up that I laid not down, and reaping that I did not sow:
Wherefore then gavest not thou my money into the bank, that at my coming I might have required mine own with usury?
And he said unto them that stood by, Take from him the pound, and give it to him that hath ten pounds.
(And they said unto him, Lord, he hath ten pounds.)
For I say unto you, That unto every one which hath shall be given; and from him that hath not, even that he hath shall be taken away from him.
Holding back on doing the works of Jesus because you are afraid you will let God down is wicked. God wants you out there furthering His kingdom, not getting lost in a morass of self-nit-picking. God will not love you any less if you fail at something because His love for you is unconditional! You can’t “fail” your way out of God’s favor. He is FOR you (Romans 8:31), not AGAINST you.
Perfectionism and the fear of making mistakes show an underlying pride problem – we want other people to think we’re perfect! But that’s the opposite of what James said we should do (James 5:16)!
My wife and I have led worship at church for a long time. I don’t think there was EVER a service where I hit every piano note exactly right or sang every word right. But the worship still blessed people. I knew someone who had professional-level, trained vocal ability, but she would fall apart if she sang even one note slightly off. You won’t be a blessing to people if you’re only focused on your “performance.” Worship isn’t a performance; you can make a joyful noise! God is more concerned with your heart than with your vocal cords.
If we’re honest with ourselves, we would admit that a lot of our fear is really about looking bad in front of other people when they see us make a mistake. But the fear of man brings a snare (Proverbs 29:25). It’s a great day when you do everything you do for the Lord rather than to please men. Paul even said this about others judging him:
1 Corinthians 4:3:
But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged of you, or of man’s judgment: yea, I judge not mine own self.
Paul was almost always going somewhere where a certain faction of people hated his guts. He would never have made it in the ministry if he were preoccupied with what MEN thought about how he preached the good news.
When Paul said he judged not his own self, he wasn’t saying that he failed to “judge himself” concerning conduct when celebrating the Lord’s Supper or something. I believe he meant that he wasn’t always trying to find faults with himself. He didn’t DELIBERATELY violate his conscience, but he was willing to admit that perhaps he was making some mistakes, and he was OK with that.
1 Corinthians 4:4:
For I know nothing by myself; yet am I not hereby justified: but he that judgeth me is the Lord.
Paul was saying that he didn’t KNOW of any mistakes he was making, but he allowed for the fact that he might be making mistakes that he wasn’t aware of. He didn’t trash himself and think that doing the devil’s job of accusing him was somehow humble and holy. He didn’t spend his days analyzing himself to try to find some secret mistake he was making.
God would rather that you get out there and lay hands on the sick and get one of three people healed than have you do nothing because of fear of failure and succeed in getting zero out of three people healed.
When you plan to lay hands on a sick person, the devil may taunt you with the thought, “What if nothing happens? You will look bad!” The devil wants you to focus on yourself instead of on Jesus. That is a good recipe for failure. Meanwhile, Jesus did NOT say that nothing would happen. He said that the sick would recover (Mark 16:18). You should operate with the attitude that every time you lay hands on the sick, the anointing flows through you because you believe the words of Jesus. The sick person may not always receive that anointing, but you should assume that rivers of living water are flowing through you. And if things don’t work out the way you’d hoped, you died with Christ anyway (Colossians 3:3, Galatians 2:20). Dead people don’t get their feelings hurt. Dead people don’t beat themselves up, either.
Wanting to do an excellent job honors God, but perfectionism does not. I have had to deal with “perfectionist” tendencies. I spent two years working on my 2009 music CD release (in my “spare time”) and I kept tweaking it and tweaking it in the studio until I got what I wanted. The results still weren’t absolutely perfect, but the time came when I had to stop tinkering and release it because it wouldn’t bless anyone if it stayed in my studio forever. For a while, my wife seriously wondered if I would EVER release that CD! We can be our own worst critics. It’s good to try to figure out how you can improve, but if you turn into a perfectionist, you’ll only see the bad side of everything you do, and that’s not healthy. I desperately wanted to put out a CD that I wouldn’t cringe listening to the rest of my life, thinking, “I could have fixed that.” I did succeed in that despite the fact that it was never going to be “perfect.” I even had a professional mastering engineer tell me that I was too picky. That’s getting over into perfectionism when that happens! There’s more to a CD than being “technically perfect.” I listen to some CDs where I notice slight flaws, but I still enjoy them. In fact, any studio engineer can tell you that there is such a thing as being “too perfect.” You can fix slightly out-of-tune vocals with pitch-correction software, fix millisecond drum timing discrepancies by “quantizing” the drums, use the best takes of each individual phrase from 10 or more tries, adjust the volume on tracks to make each note have similar loudness, and I did quite a bit of that stuff. But if you’re not careful, you can destroy the “humanity” of a recording that makes people be able to relate to it. If a computer makes things totally perfect, it can sound to people like a computer, not a real (and imperfect) person, made the recording!
Not much will be perfect on this side of heaven, no matter how hard we try. When I started pastoring, I learned in a hurry that you can’t please everyone. The room is too hot, the room is too cold, the music is too loud, the music doesn’t rock enough, the music is too modern, the music is not trendy enough, we do the same songs too much, we introduce too many new songs, the food in the fellowship hall doesn’t cater to vegetarians or the gluten-free crowd, putting dessert-type food out is too much of a temptation to those on diets, we have too many events, we don’t have enough events to meet everyone’s needs, and so on ad infinitum.
So even if YOU think you’re doing a perfect job, the fact is that you’ll probably be the only one who thinks so! I once took a demo recording of a song I wrote to a sound engineer who had his own studio. I asked him what I could do to improve my vocals, and he replied without hesitation, “Have someone else sing them!” But I went ahead and did my own vocals anyway on my CD, and I’m glad that I did. If I had felt like I had to please him, my CD would never have come out the way that it did, which I thought was quite good. Someone else could have done a more technically “perfect” job, but it wouldn’t sound like ME anymore. No one will have passion for a song like its author!
It’s good to listen to constructive criticism, but if you fall to pieces every time someone says you’re doing something wrong, you’ll never do anything significant. You have to be able to say, “Even if I don’t do everything perfectly, it’s OK. God can still use me to bless others. I will not spend my life hunting for failures.”
More recently, it seemed that every time I thought I was satisfied with this book, I would learn something else and want to put that in here, too. This process went on until the very day I released this book! I had friends who seemed convinced that I would NEVER finish this book because I was always continuing to work on it. Of course, I’m not going to stop learning more about the Word, but the time had to come when I said, “That’s enough – let’s publish this!” I am sure that this is NOT the “ultimate” book on healing and related topics because I will learn more things tomorrow that aren’t in here! But at least I can put out another updated version at some point if I want to.
Wanting to be excellent is a virtue, but perfectionism will cripple you. The Holy Spirit will not flee if you hit a wrong note or mess up a word in a song or cite the wrong chapter and verse numbers in a message. The world will not end if you don’t say exactly the words to a sick person that you think you should have said upon later reflection. The kingdom of God will go on, and so must you. Paul pressed toward the upward call of God (Philippians 3:14). You need to keep your eyes on where you’re going, not on where you’ve been. The perfectionist always second-guesses himself and keeps looking in the rearview mirror with remorse, thinking, “I could have done better.” That is the OPPOSITE of the example Paul set for you. I’m sure Paul wished that he had never persecuted Jesus, but the biggest problem with the past is that you can’t change it! But you CAN change your future by making right choices in the PRESENT.