The
Promise of Perfection
It is so important to realize that those famous words at the last part
of the fifth
chapter of Matthew, "Be you therefore perfect even as your father
in heaven is
perfect," are a promise and not an imperative. It is so important
because in the
Greek there, the future and the imperative are spelled the same way. If
you hear it
as, "you've got to be perfect in order to earn God's favor,"
you have missed the
point altogether. Hear it [instead] as the promise of what God's grace
wants to
make of you eventually, hear Jesus saying, "If you will let the grace
of God into
your life and keep acknowledging that you need that and that you want
to grow,
then I promise you perfection, full-grownness, completeness." That
is where God is
going to take every one of us, because the goal God had in creating us
was that
we would share God's kind of joy and come to the fullness of the measure
of the
stature of Christ. It is promise and not demand that is the essence of
the
gospel.
--from the sermon " Never Never Never Give Up"
by the Rev. Dr. John R. Claypool
Read
the sermon in its entirety.
|