"Be Perfect” Series

INTRODUCTION

We’re continuing in our series in the Sermon on the Mount. In our passage for today, Jesus starts by saying, ‘Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.’ What do you think of that!?

Back in March I told you about an interview I heard on Radio 4. The reporter was interviewing a woman who had fled from Ukraine with her child – a six-year-old boy, I think. The interviewer asked if the boy understood what was happening. The woman said he had a pretty good idea. She then said that her son said they should pray for Vladimir Putin, that he would be a better man. That’s great, isn’t it? Exactly what Jesus asks us to do. But loving our enemies and praying for those who persecute us isn’t easy.

But it’s a lot easier than what Jesus asks us of us a moment later...

Jesus concludes this section by saying, ‘You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect’ [Matthew 5:48].

Loving our enemies is difficult. But being as perfect as God the Father is surely impossible!

I’m going to focus today on this statement, ‘You therefore must be perfect!’ I will try to answer three questions:

* What kind of perfection is Jesus looking for?

* Is it reasonable for Jesus to demand that we are perfect?

* Should we make it our goal to be perfect?

WHAT KIND OF PERFECTION IS JESUS LOOKING FOR?

Well, Jesus said ‘you must be perfect, AS YOUR HEAVENLY FATHER IS PERFECT.’ So the kind of perfection Jesus is looking for is the perfection of God the Father.

But we can say more. Jesus is the Son of God. The Bible tells us that he is exactly like God the Father; he is ‘the exact imprint of his nature’ [Hebrews 1:3]. Jesus himself said, ‘Whoever has seen me has seen the Father’ [John 14:9]. So, if we want to know what God the Father is like, we can look at Jesus. Jesus is a man and he walked among us. To know how to be perfect as our Heavenly Father is perfect, we can look at Jesus.

So, the perfection Jesus wants is the perfection of God the Father, which we see in Jesus.

But we can say still more about this perfection. I’m going to introduce this point with an illustration.

In 1976, at the summer Olympics in Montreal, Nadia Comaneci, aged 14, was awarded a perfect 10 for her routine in the uneven bars. She was the first person ever to be awarded a perfect score in gymnastics. For one brief moment, it seemed that perfection had been achieved. But had it? Comaneci’s own assessment was that her routine wasn’t perfect. In the following two Olympic games, 72 perfect tens were awarded in gymnastics! But the gymnastics community started to wonder if these perfect scores were really a good thing. A perfect score meant that a routine could not be better; it could not be improved on. But was that true? Surely a gymnast COULD do better. He or she could do a more challenging routine and execute it perfectly. So the International Gymnastics Federation changed the scoring system.

In the old scoring system, if there were no faults, the routine was considered perfect. But the new scoring system put more weight on achievement. The greater the achievement, the greater the score – provided, of course, that there were very few faults. Now there’s no upper limit to the score that’s possible in Olympic gymnastics.

We can compare this to Jesus. I’d like us to look at a very surprising verse. It’s Hebrews 2:10. It says this:

“For it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering.”

Let’s take a moment to digest what this verse is saying.

‘He for whom and by whom all things exist’ means God.

‘The founder of their salvation’ means Jesus.

We can leave ‘in bringing many sons to glory’ out for the moment as the sentence works without it.

Now, the verse reads as follows:

“For it was fitting that God, SHOULD MAKE JESUS PERFECT through suffering.”

If God had to make Jesus perfect, what does it mean? It means Jesus WASN’T perfect! Wow! There’s a surprise! All this time you thought Jesus is and always has been, perfect. Jesus certainly lived a sinless life. He made no mistakes, no faults. In the old gymnastics scoring system, he would have been considered perfect. He would have been awarded 10. In what sense was he not perfect?

Later on, Hebrews tells us this:

“Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered. And BEING MADE PERFECT, he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him…” [Hebrews 5:8-9].