How Can I "Be Perfect As God Is Perfect"? Series

We need to see Jesus as the greatest person who ever lived, as someone that we should be eager to follow.

The perfection we’re talking about is not becoming coldly above-it-all (like Spock) but becoming radiantly loving, deeply peaceful, persistently joyful, etc.

The command that Jesus gives here to “be perfect as your Father is perfect” is easy to dismiss out of hand. It seems so difficult and so high a standard that it’s not even worth taking the first step down this road.

It certainly is a high standard. Perhaps it would help us to think of it as our destination. As I follow Christ, I am going to be moving closer and closer to perfection – not someday, but daily. What’s perfection? To be like Christ, who was without sin and completely followed His Father’s will.

Like all the statements in the Sermon on the Mount that we were just talking about, this is not a command we’re going to completely fulfill perfectly right off the bat. I’m not going to immediately get rid of all the lust in my heart or speak without sometimes lying. But that doesn’t mean I get to quit or dismiss Jesus’ words.

In a parallel passage to this one (Luke 6:36), at this point in His message, Jesus says for us to merciful even as our Father is merciful. Mercy is something that’s going to have to grow through experiences in my life.

Every day as a Christian I can get closer to Christ’s perfect example.

The beautiful thing to consider here is that this is indeed our destination. I will someday be able to speak without a trace of deception or deceit. I will someday be able completely without lust in my heart. I will someday have no selfish anger. I will someday be able to forgive with an open hand.

We will never be completely without sin in this life. 1 John 1:8 reminds us that to say we’re without sin makes us a liar.

But that doesn’t mean that we can’t make enormous progress down this road. That’s doesn’t mean that we can’t become significantly more like Christ.

I heard Chuck Swindoll preach one time that he believed that we could get to the place where we could go for days without sinning. Wow! What an awesome thought.

What That Looks Like: At my core, I am a new creation guided by God’s own Holy Spirit.

- Romans 6:6-7; Romans 8:9; 2 Corinthians 5:17; Galatians 6:15; Ephesians 4:23-24; Colossians 3:10.

Where is the line between soul-stifling guilt from the weight of trying to maintain perfection versus sin-embracing cheap grace?

On the one hand, if we try to pursue God’s perfection in our own strength, we’re quickly going to become frustrated by our inability to maintain the standard. This can be seen in legalistic churches where people try to keep up the standards that someone in the church has dictated as being essential. This leads to crushing guilt.

On the other hand, as I mentioned early, we can misuse grace as a blank check for our sin that allows us to sin without remorse. This notion earned a strong “God forbid” from Paul as he spoke of it in Romans.