Perfectly Imperfect // 24th May 2026

Dr Brendan Roach

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Lord, we praise and we thank you, Father, as we come together on this Pentecost Sunday. We just invite your Holy Spirit to be with us to move in this place in Jesus' name. Amen? Cool. I didn't know there was any other Australians here today. You know, Scott tells me he hasn't got an Australian passport anymore and he doesn't intend on renewing it because he's completely renounced everything. Australian doesn't barrack for Geelong anymore because they just cheat the salary cap. Untrustworthy. I'm just uh so you anybody who follows football in this country knows that there's a relegation season on, right? My team's we don't have relegation, but my team's been in relegation for the last 10 years. So it's very uh upsetting and depressing for me, but we won yesterday. Woohoo! Very exciting. I went to sleep happy last night until the hotel alarm went off at 3 a.m. in the morning. So I realized all you do that in this country is just to wake up people. Do it again, wake up people, stuck my head out the door because it wasn't appropriate to leave just yet if there was a fire. And nobody else was moving, so I went back to sleep, but I couldn't sleep, of course, because I was terrified I was gonna burn to death in my bed. But hey, no one else was out. So uh yeah, so I'm uh Dr. Brendan Roach, and uh I was uh Scott's principal and president and employer and friend over over many years. He was just reminding me of a a story about how and and I've done this several times with with students, and he and we've done a few study tours, and I've done several trips to the Holy Lands of different parts of Greece, Turkey, Israel, Egypt, and and Scott was with me on one of these. And one of the things I do is I take the students out for coffee or an ice cream, depending on how hot it is or what the weather's like or what it might be, but I don't tell them that. So I just say, Who wants to come out for a bit? And so I started, and Scott reminded me this time he 20 of us started, and there was only about five left because and Scott was one of the five left, and because I just went, I'm just gonna, it's a little little experiment, little test to see who's gonna keep and who's gonna be distracted by the rug market, the handbag shop, the leather shoes, the shopping, the jewelry, and that's just the guys. So, and and then Scott was there, and I and he told me a few other stories, we were reminiscing a bit over lunch. And definitely what you have in your leader is someone who is constantly pursuing and wanting to learn. And he just said, he said, Oh, yeah, I wasn't gonna I wasn't gonna leave you because I figured this is a really good opportunity to learn something. And I've seen that not just with me, but with so many people who've encountered Scott over the years who I know of, and he's just constantly seeking and searching and wanting to learn and wanting to grow, and he's still like that today. So uh you've got a great leader here, and Scott is just constantly growing, constantly learning. And I just want to encourage you and congratulate you for that, Scott. So, Pentecost Sunday, where I was on Pentecost Sunday two years ago was digging in Jerusalem. Uh anybody been to Jerusalem at all? Okay. So those of you who've been there know that you would have probably mostly seen that the temple mount with the dome of the rock and all the western wall. Well, we were digging, so say that's the temple mount where the back wall is. This is where we were digging, and in between is the steps where Peter preached on the day of Pentecost. So it was 101 biblical archaeology, uh, prime location. And I would get there at 5 a.m. in the morning, the dig would start at 6, and I'd just be hanging out, praying where Peter was. And as we were talking about the day of Pentecost, it was such a cool experience to be in the place where the Holy Spirit came down in Jerusalem on that day. So yeah, just if you haven't received the Holy Spirit with the gifts, just really, and if you have, just could just press press in to what God has for you because that's a special place that only the Holy Spirit can give, and only God can give. But today I want to talk about uh Philippians, but I'll tell you a little bit about me first of all. So after eight years ago, I started a ministry called Axe AXX, uh, and we train uh pastors all around the world. So we currently have 25,000 pastors in training from over 110 different countries of the world. We're doing we're in French, we're in English. I've just come from Mozambique where I've been working with the Portuguese translators, and a little bit later on in the year, John will be going, who works with me, will be going to Kenya and starting to work with the Swahili translators in in Kenya. So around the world, there's about two and a half million untrained pastors. In Brazil alone, 17 churches are being started every day, which is awesome. And but 16 of them have had no training whatsoever. So our ministry is to provide free, high-quality online training, which was all the old resources from Harvest Bible College, which they donated to us. And so we've got up to 150 online courses, and in the other languages, we're in French, and we're gonna do up to 70 different courses and things like that, which are all BA or uh certificate diploma, bachelor's degree, and master's degree level. So they're all really good quality, they get it for free, and so that's that's what I've been doing for the last last couple of years. So please pray for us as we start to move into these different areas and different languages. There's about two, three hundred, sorry, about two hundred and fifty million Swahili speakers who really don't have much training except for a couple of missionaries in capital cities and locations like Nairobi and things like that. In Dia Congo, the Bible college of the main assemblies of God leader in that country, which has more French-speaking people in Kinshasa than any other city of the world, more than Paris. He has a Bible college who can only train 20 people a year, and they have 10,000 unreach people groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The need is so huge. Uh, they don't actually need our help church planting, they're doing that, but they do need a little bit of help with their training and and things like that. So that's what we're there for, and uh, and that's where I've just come from. So please pray for that. And as we as you do, just um encourage and support what we're doing. And on the slide at the end, there'll be a link to uh and a QR code to my website, or if you just go AXX, be very careful about make sure you only do two X's, don't do three or four. I can't guarantee where you'll end up if you do more than two. So just a warning. Uh so I want to talk to you about being perfectly imperfect. And we want to have a look at Philippians chapter three from verse 12 today. And there's a lot of pressure in our world today to appear to lead a perfect life on social media, on different things, with so many phones and WhatsApp groups and sharing, and I'm sure that many of you have already had great photos and stories and things about what people are doing. I've got lots of photos from my family. I've got a new grandson. Uh I I took my daughter, she had an emergency caesarean, and uh I took her to one of the follow-up uh we call them healthcare nurses. We go in the first couple of weeks afterwards, and he's uh he's tall. Dad's African, he's tall. And and my my daughter's sort of a little bit above average height, and he and he goes in, he goes, All right, he's on the 97th percentile for growth, you know. And so I went, so I said to the healthcare nurse, I went, that's really good. He'll be a great AFL footballer. And she went, don't put so much pressure on him. But let me tell you, my daughter just sent a photo, he's he's whacking the toys above the crit. So he's got eye-hand coordination, it's all gonna be good. I'm not putting too much pressure on him. He doesn't have to be a tall forward, that's like a striker. He doesn't have to be the one that scores all the goals, he can just be the second best in the forward line. So it's she was accusing me of putting too much pressure on the kid and going, come on, let's be reasonable. So we all put we all live in a world where social media puts a lot of pressure on us, but Paul tells us something different how to be perfectly imperfect. And let's start reading from Philippians 3 12. Not that I have already obtained all of this or have already been made perfect. So even the great apostle Paul talks about the idea that he can't be perfect, talks about in other scriptures about how he struggles with areas of the flesh and he can't understand why he still struggles with this. But if Paul the great apostle, the church planter, the great teacher who who wrote a huge portion of the New Testament says that he hasn't got his act together, then what hope is there for the rest of us? Paul lived basically the biblical version of being perfectly imperfect. And he wrote this from the city of Philippi where he was imprisoned. And it's the perfect place to tell this story. Now, so what I have we can you just is there a picture on the next slide? Okay, so let's just go to the let's have a look at the the pictures. So we've got this is a this is a city of ancient Philippi, which you can go and visit today. That's the uh auditorium which they still have concerts in. And the next photo, so this was a city that how housed tens of thousands of people in the time. And that's not a great photo with that resolution, but that is the actual prison where Paul was imprisoned while he was writing the letter of Philippians, which to give you an idea would be not even the size of this group of chairs here, maybe three of the rows of those group of chairs. It's a very small, very, very small place. So he's writing this and he's talking about his identity and who he is and what's actually important. So it's a really great story for us to have. So the city of Philippi was uh involved in a huge battle around uh 42 BC after the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC. So they were fighting for control of the Roman Empire, and the battle of the two factions that were for Julius Caesar and against Julius Caesar meet in this location, have a huge battle, and the battle's won, and then the soldiers of that battle are effectively and their families after that are given the city. So Philippi becomes a mini Rome, except it's actually a much nicer place to live. It has beautiful farmland, it has rivers and mines that are full of gold and silver, and it has it's on the main road going straight to Rome. So it's got all the trade, it's got the sea there, it's got the land routes, it's got great farming land, it's got everything that you would want in the ancient world to live a prosperous life outside of the huge metropolis of Rome. So it was also a place that was full of retired Roman soldiers. So you're sort of going to make sure you're gonna get your way when all the ex-military are in town and they're controlling everything. It's not going to be like you can get away with stuff. These guys could look after themselves and look after their families, and they were deeply proud Romans. Deeply proud Romans. So Paul comes into this and he says, but our citizenship is in heaven. Our citizenship is in heaven. These guys are saying, our citizenship is in Rome. So he's confronting them. Now remind you, he's saying, My citizenship is in heaven, and he's sitting in this tiny prison to these guys who are the most privileged of the Roman Empire outside of Rome, and he's saying, your citizenship as a Roman is incredibly important. So Paul plays what I call the identity game with these guys. He says, I'm a Roman citizen. I am I have perfection under Jewish law as in his status and position. He has perfection in that his bloodline is the right bloodline from the right families. He has he comes from the right race, the right upbringing. He's one of the most highly educated people in the ancient world. He comes from what he believes is the right moral code, and he has the right look, he dresses the right way. And if you don't think that's important, just go on Instagram. And he has the right behavior. So as a Jewish man, he behaves in the right way, he does the right thing. So when he's confronting, he is confronting this Philippi Philip, the Philippians in the city, saying, You think you're good because you're Roman. By the way, I'm Roman, and let me tell you about all the other things that I've got. He's saying, Not only am I your equal, but I'm your better. He's saying this from prison, so reasonably gutsy effort. He had wealth, he had privilege, he had power, he had position, and he identified himself as the elite. He was the elite of his time. He was at as a young man, he was holding the cloaks when they were stoning Stephen, and by within a couple of years, he would have been sitting on the Sanhedrin, which was the 70 Jewish leaders in Jerusalem. He was a man who was set to have everything laid in front of him for his life. And he was going, let me tell you, if you want to play the identity game, if you want to play the status game, let's play, I'm going to win. I don't know if you've ever done that. I come from a family of renowned exaggerators. If my mother was here, she would tell you that I am an author of great renown. I've published thousands of books. Probably I'd be on the top one number one sellers list somewhere. Our family motto was never let the truth get in the way of a good story. So I had to go and investigate stuff in my family's history because I didn't believe them, because very little was true as to what they would say. So as time went on, it sort of went, oh yeah, that's true, that's not true. So if you were here and she met you and you were a McDonald's chef, by the time she got home, she would tell me about the Michelin hat chef that she had met, who is the greatest chef in the whole of the UK. You know, and that's just the way, that's the way she rolls. But but Paul's not doing that. He's not doing this exaggeration. That's actually who he was. He was actually this phenomenally important, incredible person. You know, I'm gonna I'm gonna skip over those those other stories because they're very funny to me, but I'm not sure how they cross over. Let's move on to Philippians 3.12. In verse 12, it says, I don't mean to say that I've already achieved these things or that I've already reached perfection, but I press on to that pr to possess that perfection for which Jesus Christ first possessed me. Or in the BRB, have you heard of the BRB? No, it's the Brendan Revised version. Coming to uh a Christian bookshop in about 150 years at one verse a month being written. But I used to, this is what my transliteration of this verse says. I used to think I was pretty impressive and I had life all sorted out, but deep down I knew something was missing. Then I encountered Jesus and something shifted, and I said to myself, right, crack on. So I think that's really the the very simple way of what Paul's saying when he looked at himself and it was all about him, he was in this place of constant striving to be the best. But when he encountered Jesus, he realized that he was fairly unimpressive. And but he then decided, I'm just going to move on with what God has for me to do. But in every measure of his time, Paul had the right to say, I, in my own eyes, I am perfect. But when Paul encountered true perfection, everything changed. So the illusion of perfection. In my eye, sorry, in my own eyes, Paul thought he was perfect. His identity was built on his heritage, his knowledge, his discipline, and his religious achievements. Sorry, when am I meant to okay? I know. I can my problem is I'm not just a teacher, I'm a I'm a not just a preacher, I'm a teacher. So I can talk to myself for a good three hours. You don't have to be here even. So in the world of first century Judaism, Paul had everything required for spiritual prestige. He was well on his way, but what he did, he was comparing himself to everyone else. And comparison is spiritual death. Even when you're looking in the non-spiritual world, when you compare yourself, your family, your workplace, your career, your football team, whatever, to someone else's, you're either going to be better than them or worse than them. And both of those comparisons are deadly to your mental health, to your spiritual well-being, because when you're better, you think you're superior with no real reason to be. And when someone down the road is better, you feel inferior, and that's never ever the place that God wants us to be. But when we encounter Jesus, the illusions start to collapse. What once looked like perfection is now simply self-indulgence. And that's one thing we don't need in the church. We don't need self-indulgence. We see it sometimes, or we don't want self-righteousness either. We what we want to see is we want to see our righteousness come from him. Even the idea in this world of being a good person. It's become a very strange thing. If you follow any of the podcasts and social media posts and politicians and people who comment on politicians, it's a fight to be who is the good person. And if I'm a really good person, have you ever noticed that they happen to be really, really nasty to everybody else to demonstrate how good they are? Or is that just me who's noticed that? I'm really, really good, and you're bad, and let me show you how bad you are. It's a bizarre world that we live in. There is nothing more self-indulgent than pretending to be a good person. And we see that so often going on in what we see. So many people just want to talk about how good they are, or at least I'm not as bad as you might be. So the next thing that we encounter is encountering perfection, the reality of being perfectly imperfect. Paul now makes a remarkable statement. Now that I have already obtained all of this, or have been made perfect, now think about who's saying this, Paul. He says, I'm yet to arrive. I haven't actually got to this place. I'm striving to get to this place. So if Paul hasn't got there, how can we? If Paul, the one who was the writer of the New Testament, who's done so many different things, hasn't got there, how can we? And one of the great things I love about this is that Paul doesn't swap his pre-Christian achievements or his Jewish achievements for Christian achievements. He doesn't go, you know, I was really bad, but now look what I've done. Look how many churches I've planted, look how much I've written, look how much I've done for the Lord. He doesn't start to, he argues for his apostleship, but he doesn't start to argue to show you how good he is. So it doesn't matter what our achievements were before we came to the Lord, we don't replace them with achievements that we've got. Look how many times I attend church, how many times when I was a young Bible college student, I went to a nursing home because they wanted someone to go preach in the nursing home, and I was up for anything. Five people in the nursing home, I'm good with that. I'll go, I'll preach. And I walk in, and this this gentleman who was there, I'm I think he might. Might have been Sri Lankan. And he looks me up and down and he goes. So English is his second language. He looks me up and down and he goes, I've read my Bible 19 times plus three. How many times have you read your Bible? As in young man. Don't think he sort of put me right in my place before I even started. So it's very easy, but Paul doesn't do that. He doesn't say I met Jesus face to face. He doesn't tell us how many churches he planted or how many, how he's the apostle to the Gentiles, or how many salvations or teachings he did. His list of achievements were to rival anybody in the early church except for Peter. So listen to this. Yet he knew that perfection is not found in his achievements before knowing the Lord or after knowing the Lord. We can fall into the trap of going, here's my I'm saved, now here's my list of achievements after coming to know Jesus. He's not doing that. Because how could we possibly follow him, follow his example, if that was what he was talking about? So he's talking about how to be perfectly imperfect, where our identity is. It's found in Jesus. So when Paul talks about his citizenship, he's not talking about eternity. He's talking about right here, right now, is where his citizenship is here on earth, not his citizenship in eternity. His citizenship in heaven is here right now, and that's what he's basing his life and his ministry on. So in verse 13, Paul tells us how to do that. He said, But I focus on one thing: forgetting the past and looking forward to what lies ahead. So forget the mistakes of your past. Leave them in the past. He had some pretty significant mistakes in his past. Leaving the past. And forget your achievements in the past. Like if you've listened to me at all this weekend, I'll tell you, I've been telling everybody, I can't help tell everybody how I was a failed AFL footballer, except I'll make it sound better than that, as if I just missed out. I was very, very close and I can't get over it, even though I was 17 years of age at the time. But you know, I'm very happy to tell you about certain achievements of my past. But the reality is we all need to just move on with what God wants us to do and not live in the achievements of our past. Verse 13 says, but I press on. Or the BRB version says, crack on. My daughter lived in in London for seven years. She came back with lots of phrases, and my wife's favorite one, she would just come into our house and she goes, crack on. And we we love that British saying. It is a British saying, right? Okay. That's one of my the other you've got the other one is proper. I love proper. I want I saw someone with the t-shirt said proper. I want to get a t-shirt, said proper. I thought that'd be very good. I don't know what it means, but it just sounds good. Verse 17 Dear brothers and sisters, pattern your lives after mine. Learn from those who follow our example. So, how can we follow the example? I've never met Jesus in a vision. If I ask in an audience this size with this church and the morning congregation, I bet you there's someone who's had a vision of Jesus. So it's not completely uncommon, but I certainly haven't. I wasn't an apostle to the early church, I haven't planted church after church or written half the New Testament. So, how can I possibly be like Paul? How can I possibly then say to anybody else, follow me? Which is what he's saying. Surely I need to get my life sorted out first. So hang on, if I create a and some really nice fake online Instagram posts of my perfect life, maybe people can follow that, but how would I do it for real? So my perfection is my identity, not me. Not my identity of self in the world, not my identity of self in the church, but my identity as a believer and as a citizen in heaven. My perfectly imperfect identity is someone who belongs to Christ. Someone who is perfect, complete, lacking nothing in who God has called me to be, but yet I'm still imperfect. I still have my flaws, I still have my failings. So what he's telling us is with all of my identity, with all of your identity as Roman soldiers and having slaves and wealth and prosperity and everything that you think life can give you, you have nothing unless you follow what I'm asking you to do. So when Paul says, follow me as I follow him, we can follow Paul and ask people to follow us because we're not asking them to follow my perfection, my Instagram account, my standard. But what we're actually asking to do is follow who I am in relation to him, that my identity is in Christ, and you can follow that. You can follow that even with my imperfections, even with my lack, even with the mistakes that I make. You can follow that because everybody can follow that identity is who is in him without following the mistakes that we make. And guess what? You don't have to fix all your mistakes to be perfect. James says, you are whole and complete, lacking nothing. I read that scripture for 30 years and said, I don't get it, God. I was focused on the inconsiderate all joy. I'm going, I'm not happy about this, God. I'm grumpy. Once in a hundred times, I'll consider it all joy. A miraculous anointing would come over me, the grace of God would come over me, the joy of the Lord would come over me. But 99% of the time I'm just grumpy about this stuff because I wanted to go another way. But perfect. And then I started to realize that it was about being perfectly complete in Him. Not about I'm broken, and as a believer, I remain broken, but as an unbeliever, before I knew Jesus, I was broken. Now the blood of Jesus has been poured out upon me. I am whole and complete, lacking nothing in him, because my identity is him. He's not broken. I'm a child of the living God. I'm not broken. But yet, so often in life and in ministry, we're going, God, if I just give me a little bit of time to get this personality issue right, to get this habit out of my life, to make sure that I can read the Bible every morning for at least a week, then I'm sure I'd be useful to you. And these different standards that we put up for ourselves and we fail, and we go, I can't do that, I can't do that, I can't do that. But yet God uses us in our perfectly imperfect lives. He's not waiting for us to be perfect in the way the world says we should be perfect. But Paul is saying God can use you now, the way you are, just as he used me. Not because of my identity as a great Jew, my identity as a Roman, but my identity as a citizen in heaven. And once you start to get that, once you start to get that in your head, it releases you from the guilt and the oppression and the feelings of failure and letting down God because suddenly we're moving forward with Him, and my identity is in Him. My identity is not in what I can do, what I can't do, what I have done, what I will do. It's simply one thing and one thing alone. I am a child of God. That's it. It's that simple. And we move forward because I am a child of God. I am perfect. But I have my imperfections. And so what I'm gonna focus on, what Paul's telling us to focus on, is our identity as a citizen of heaven. Now. Not when we die, now we've been given that citizenship. We've been adopted, and we have been made perfectly imperfect. I am perfectly imperfect because of who I am in Him, because I am a citizen in heaven, not what I have done for God, or not what I haven't done for God, or what I've done before, or what I will do for God. I know that even though I can stand here and say that's not important, I am gonna spend the rest of my life serving God and ignoring my own advice to you today. That I am gonna try and make God happy by doing lots for him. That's just the way I am. But it's not the way we need to be. It's not God going, oh, I like Brendan because he he just did stuff in Mozambique, he got eaten by the mosquitoes. That's suffering for Jesus in my word. I don't know about you. I am the total weakest, softest traveler in the world. I would have, I'm like a two-week missionary. I was in the Cook Islands for no, we won't worry about that. I'm taking up too much time. Um, but first Bible college trip. Oh, three days. I want to come home. Can't take it anymore. Let me go back to the big island. So we are citizens of heaven. It's not some future promise, but it's who we are right now, perfectly imperfect. So, what we need to do is change our position. Change our position, change our thought. Remember where his writing is from, this tiny little prison where he's arguing all these things with his captors. He's standing there arguing with the prison guard, saying, By the way, I'm better than you. How do you think that's going? No, dude, you're the one in prison, I'm the one guarding you. But he wasn't talking about his position in or out of prison, he was talking about his position in or out of the kingdom of God. And that means no one can take your possessions, no one can take your job, no one can take your status, no one can take anything from you. Because when Paul was in that prison, he had his status removed, he had his life potentially at risk, he had all his possessions taken from him, he had no place to sleep, no place to eat, he didn't have, he wouldn't have had one valuable item left on him. They would have taken it all the moment they put him in prison. Yet, in that place, he re telling us that all of that is worth nothing when our identity is in heaven, when our citizenship is in heaven. So Paul's position doesn't change, but his posture does. His position is he's in prison, his posture is he bows down before God, wherever he is, and whatever he's doing. So my challenge to you today is Paul understood this. If your identity is based in who you are, what you have, and what you do or don't do for Jesus, sorry, what you do before you meet or after you meet Jesus, what will happen if that can be taken away in a moment? We see it with the wars that are going on in the Middle East at the moment and Ukraine and Russia. People's homes and lives are destroyed in a minute. I don't care which side you're on, but people's lives, one day they had a family, they had a job, they had a house, and then a missile hits it, and the next day it's gone. And if your identity is in what you have and who you are and what you do, it's gone. But if your identity is in him at a citizen in heaven, so that's where Paul gets it that we can't be removed once we have that. So my identity is in Jesus. My identity is in my relationship, my destiny, my future in him, my sense of longing and belonging, my sense of well-being and completeness in is in him. He said, I am a perfectly imperfect follower of Jesus. He had fights with other believers, he had disruptions, he thought he was better than others, he had all sorts of social personality issues going on. But he knew that everything was complete in him. So our life is, I'm finishing now. Our life is the museos can come back. Um life is not about proving ourselves worthy. Let me say it again. Our life is not about proving ourselves worthy in him. In other words, our whole life isn't about deserving what we have, it's not about the things that can be taken away in a moment. Status, wealth, power, achievements. Paul is giving us something more precious than gold, more precious than land, and he here it is. He says, follow me as I follow the Lord. Follow me as I follow the Lord. It's not a list of achievements, it's something that every single one of us can say to a friend, to a family member, to somebody that we meet in the street, to a work colleague. Follow me as I follow Jesus, because I'm following your citizenship. I'm not following your perfection. So let's not follow achievements. Follow me being perfectly imperfect. So, like Paul, let's stand together. Like Paul, we crack on, we move forward, and we follow the call. God does not call perfect people, He calls the perfectly imperfect. Perfectly imperfect in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. So we're gonna have a little bit of a time of worship, and then we're gonna come back and we're gonna set the platform for a time of ministry.