The Challenge to Believers

“For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? Do not even the publicans the same?  And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others?  Do not even the publicans so?  Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect”.  Matthew 5:46-48

In His Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), Jesus had just urged the crowd and His own disciples to love, do good, bless, and pray for their enemies.  Folks are taught to hate their enemies, but if believers are going to emulate their Father in heaven, they must learn to love all people regardless of others’ status or position in life.  If God didn’t love everyone, then He might have never sent Jesus to die on the cross so that we could be forgiven of our sins.  It was love for His creation which caused Him to make the way of reconciliation for sinners.  If we are going to be like Him, we, too, must be generous with our love.  We must do more, go the extra mile, as Jesus said.  If we just love those who love us, what does that prove?  Even the most wicked godless sinners love those who love them.  Jesus implied to his listeners that if they only loved those who returned their love, then they were no better than the hated tax collectors.

Along this same vein, Jesus also said that to “salute”, that is, to honor, respect, or highly regard only others in your own circle of friends is not going the distance any more than a tax collector or one who is not concerned about pleasing the Lord.  Christians, like other groups of folks, tend to associate mostly with other Christians.  Unbelievers do the same by associating mostly with other unbelievers.  We don’t like to get out of our “comfort zone”, but how can we share the gospel if we only hang out with others who are already knowledgeable about the gospel?  I am reminded of the account of the good Samaritan who stopped to help a wounded man lying on the side of the road who had been bypassed by a priest and then by a Levite, one who served in the temple.  The Samaritan man, who was not 100 percent Jewish thus hated by the Jews, had compassion on the wounded man and took care of him.  The thought came to me that the Samaritan man had been subjected to prejudice all of his life and thus understood the plight of the wounded man.

Then, the really difficult part comes.  Jesus tells us to be “perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect”.  It’s a long way from “ordinary” to “perfect”.  When a person receives Christ as Lord and Savior, repenting of sin and believing Christ as his or her only hope for eternal life, he or she doesn’t automatically become mature in the ways of the Lord.  It’s a process, a lifelong process.  Paul wrote in Philippians 3:12-14 that he had not yet attained godly perfection, but he continued to follow Christ, forgetting the past and reaching forward “toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus”.  A Christian’s desire, if he or she is serious about his or her faith, is to please the Lord, not to earn favor, but as an act of worship and thanksgiving to the Savior.  We show the world what God is like when we strive for excellence in our manner of living.  Peter wrote in I Peter 1:14-16 that to be obedient to the Lord is to leave behind one’s former sinful life and strive for holiness because God is holy.

Oswald Chambers defines “holiness” as “a perfect balance between my disposition and the laws of God”.  Disposition is the character of one’s nature, which is controlled by either the old sin nature which one brings into this world at birth or the new, spiritual nature which is received at the moment of rebirth into Christ.  A person’s disposition can go back and forth.  Again, quoting from Oswald Chambers, he describes this as a pendulum which “does not swing evenly at first; it begins with a tremendous swing to one extreme and only gets back to the right balance gradually, and that is now the Holy Spirit brings the grace of God to bear upon our lives”.  It is only when the pendulum hangs still and straight is it in perfect balance.  The goal of the one who truly loves God and desires to be like Him is to be still and straight and in perfect balance with the God of creation.  Perfection indicates no deviation to the right or left of the straight and narrow.

As blinders are placed upon horses so that they cannot be distracted by what is on either side of them forcing them straight ahead, Christians must be determined to stay on the path to God’s perfection.  They must do right on purpose.  Our standard is God Himself, but we are not left alone to try and meet the goal of perfection.  The Holy Spirit is given to every believer as a helper to keep us on the path of righteousness.  We also have God’s word which must be diligently studied to give us direction and knowledge.  We cannot attain our goal without following God’s directions.  We cannot be like our heavenly Father if we don’t know Him.