Mt 5:48 Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
-Which we can't be, it was proven over and over gain. That is why we needed the second Adam, to impute his righteousness to us,
Heb 12:14Make every effort to live in peace with all men and to be holy; without holiness no one will see the Lord.
-see above
James 3:2We all stumble in many ways. If anyone is never at fault in what he says, he is a perfect man, able to keep his whole body in check.
-That's right, we all do stumble. There is one perfect man...
Revelation 21:27 Nothing impure will ever enter it, nor will anyone who does what is shameful or deceitful, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb's book of life.
-That is 100% correct. But we have already seen that all have stumbled, and we know that it is written that all have fallen short. That is why we need the one who lived the life we can't live, and died for our sins so we don't have to.
Christ didn't die for the righteous, but for the sinner.
I could go on, but you get the point
'all have sinned' there are no 'righteous whom Christ didn't die for; Christ died for all for all have sinned.
Amen, GC. as the great Hermann Sasse reminds us, The church, that is, Ubi Christus, ibi ecclesia, lives from Repentence.
Only a sinner must repent, not a righteous man, but since there is no such perfectly righteous man, except for Jesus, then all need to repent. The sinner was justified and the publican not. Through humility (as did blessed Abel) he approached God, and declared himself a sinner, and I never got the impression that this was a one time declaration of sin in a mere moment of time.
And as far as the purgatory thing is concerned. We went from it being a suburb of hell, to a suburb of heaven and now a brief nanosecond in time when the dross of sin is refined away through fire (I'm presuming the mechanism remains the same, but who knows?)