For a long time I thought walking in purity was the finish line. Get there, and everything else follows. My marriage heals. My wife respects me again. The guilt lifts. I stop hating myself at the end of the day. I stop needing to earn my own forgiveness on repeat.
Those things are real. I’ve wanted every one of them. But I had to learn the hard way that they are results, not the goal itself. And when you turn a result into the goal, you’ve built an idol without even noticing you did it.
Here’s what I mean.
Desired Results Are Not the Same as the Goal
Getting back with your wife. Getting your respect back. Feeling okay in your own skin. Not carrying shame around like a second job. Not needing to beat yourself up every night for something you did that you’re ashamed of. All good. All things I’ve wanted, and still want.
But none of those are the goal. They’re fruit. And fruit doesn’t grow by staring at the fruit. It grows from the root.
The goal is a real relationship with God. Not a religious performance of one. An actual relationship, because He is the only God available in our lives — there isn’t a backup, there isn’t a version of Him we get to custom-build to fit what we’re comfortable with. He is a jealous God. That’s not Him being insecure. That’s Him telling us plainly that He won’t share the center of our lives with anything, including our own self-improvement project.
Even “Being Perfect for God” Can Become the Wrong Thing
This is the part that convicted me the most. You can obsess over being perfect for God, and that itself is not what He wants. That’s religion. That’s doing all the right manners, the right forms of speech, the right behaviors, because you’ve decided that’s what He wants from you — while never actually pursuing Him. Never seeking His face. Never asking what He’s called you to see, to become, to carry.
Jesus was clear about what He wants first. Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness. Not seek first your own righteousness. Not seek first the version of yourself that finally feels clean. Seek Him and His Kingdom, and let righteousness be what it is under that — a response to Him, not a replacement for Him.
His Kingdom has rules. I’m not saying throw those out. But the rules were never meant to be the obsession. That’s exactly what got the Pharisees called out by Jesus, over and over. They loved the law more than they loved the Lawgiver. They built an entire identity around external compliance while their hearts were far from God. That’s the kind of thing that was killing Christ. Not our failures. Not our struggle. The self-righteous obsession with looking clean on the outside while missing Him entirely.
The Warning
So here’s the warning, and it’s one I need to hear as much as anyone reading this: you should walk in purity. But that is not the only goal.
Pursue it. Fight for it. But don’t let it become the thing you’re actually worshipping.
If purity becomes the goal, you’ll white-knuckle your way toward a feeling — the absence of guilt, the presence of self-respect — and you’ll build your whole spiritual life around managing behavior instead of knowing God. You’ll become a Pharisee in recovery clothes. Clean hands, empty pursuit.
But if God is the goal — if the relationship is what you’re actually after — then purity becomes what it was always meant to be. Not the destination. The evidence you’re walking with Him.
Leave a Reply