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Be Perfect
There is a song that was popular not long ago. I don't know the exact lyrics, but it mentions all the things "you gotta be." You gotta be strong, you gotta be wise, you gotta be ... and on and on it goes. I love a comedian's response to that song: "You gotta be kidding!"
We are constantly bombarded with messages of who or what we ought to be. Everything from strong and wise to sexy. But when all is said and done, whose standard really matters? God's. Not even our own. Only God's.
So who does God say we ought to be? Jesus put it very succinctly: "Be perfect ... as your heavenly Father is perfect." (Matthew 5:48) ... That sounds like an impossibility; doesn't it?
I like Alexander Maclaren's commentary on that verse:
The sum of religion is to imitate the God whom we worship. The ideal which draws us to aim at its realisation must be absolutely perfect, however imperfect may be all our attempts to reproduce it. We sometimes hear it said that to set up perfection as our goal is to smite effort dead and to enthrone despair. But to set up an incomplete ideal is the surest way to take the heart out of effort after it. It is the Christian's prerogative to have ever gleaming before him an unattained aim, to which he is progressively approximating, and which, unreached, beckons ...
The effort must be ours, but the power comes only from on high: "It is God who arms me with strength and makes my way perfect." (Psalm 18:32). When you've blown it (again), and you're discouraged and tempted to believe that you can never be like your Father, be still. He will draw near and you will almost hear Him whisper: Yes, you can. Because I am at work in you, and My aim is to reproduce in you the character of My Son. Have you ever watched a baby learning to walk? The effort is clumsy with many a fall. But the process is a joy to behold. Yes, you do fall in your clumsy efforts to be more like Me, but it isn't disappointment or disgust that I feel. I rejoice in the process! Get up, try again. Hold on to Me. I'm strengthening those legs, steadying your feet. In time you will walk ... just like Me.
In time you will walk. Because you not only have the Perfect Teacher, you have the Almighty God at work in you. And for Him nothing is impossible.
-Maria Lund