It is
time to think about the possibility that we have hindered the Lord in His
efforts to perfect us. He did not say
for us to "be perfect" in the sense that this is something that we
should do for ourselves. Christ more
literally said that "You, yourselves shall be perfect ones" or
"completed ones" in His Sermon on the Mount. He makes this tremendous pronouncement after
a rather long string of comments on the commandments and how we are to carry
out our response to them. Every time our
Lord makes a demand on our personality in the sermon, He contextualizes it with
impossible behavior. No sane man or
woman has ever seriously contemplated the possibility that those commands have
been followed by him or her. Only Jesus
Christ, the perfect Son of Man carried them out to their end and the rest of us
are perfect basket cases when it comes to not lusting, not being angry with our
friends or enemies, not holding a stain of hatred toward our real enemies but
really loving them, giving to those whose requests are absurd to us. In fact, the Sermon on the Mount is more like
a comedy routine than actual religion before we are born again. Almost at every point of Matthew 5 and on
into 6 and 7, we are presented with a ridiculous lifestyle that no one wants to
take seriously. The moment though we are
born again, the Living Lord Jesus becomes a part of us and if we give Him room
in our soul to have sway, we begin to feel the absurdity of living the old way
of greed, lust, anger, bitterness, selfishness and discontent with what God has
given us. Perfect is not an
impossibility in Christ, it is where we are going. The day shall come when we will be perfect
just like our Heavenly Father and as we let our Savior have His way with us
rather than fight Him at every turn, we shall pull into perfect places...a kind
response to someone who hates us, a nonchalance about what we have, a lack of
interest in men and women whose attractiveness once held our thoughts
captive. Perfect is what we will be when
Christ is so completely aligned with us that we won't be able to tell the
difference between what we are doing and what He is doing. What we want and what He wants are going to
be the same and on the way, we give in to every urge of Christ we have within
us. For so long we have let our sin
corrupted flesh pull us here and there.
In Christ however, we are free to live the good life without the gnawing
beast of sin tearing at us and making so much we do a misery. When we let our crucified Savior live through
us...our actions and our thoughts, we find "rest for our souls".
Therefore
you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. Matthew 5:48 NASB
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