The summer after my first year in college, I joined a group of twenty freshman Christians who wanted to change the world by serving in the inner city. We spent a week sleeping on the floor, serving in homeless kitchens and talking about what Jesus really meant when he said, “Love your neighbor.” We spent a couple hours each evening studying the Sermon on the Mount, talking about how wonderful life would be if we really lived that way. It seemed to be challenging, but totally possible, until we came to this single sentence: “But you are to be perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.” Matthew 5:48. That’s when I realized, this whole thing is simply impossible. I can’t be perfect like God is perfect.
It’s not like I haven’t tried to be perfect. I am after all the oldest child and a straight A student and a leader in my high school youth group. I was too “goody goody” for many of my peers. I had reached and reached for perfection, but all that reaching led to stumble after stumble. I could cover it up, but I had failed perfection, and I knew it. It’s not like you get do-overs on perfection. One mistake, one slip and perfection is forever gone. Why would God give such an impossible command?
What I learned was that in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is showing us how the world was designed to be and the fact that we can’t reach it on our own shows us just why we need Jesus.
Yet now he has reconciled you to himself through the death of Christ in his physical body. As a result, he has brought you into his own presence, and you are holy and blameless as you stand before him without a single fault. Colossians 1:22
Jesus knew that we would strive for perfection and never reach it, so he reached the goal for us, then died and rose again, so that we don’t have to reach anymore. Because of Jesus, God sees us as perfect, without a single fault. Then he shows us piece by piece the world he wants us to recreate and suddenly the impossible is possible.
No comments:
Post a Comment