Ridiculous or Doable

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