Matthew 5:48 “Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect.”
This verse with no context surrounding it is daunting. Our entire culture has lived and died by the rational that “nobody is perfect” and here we are in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount hearing Jesus say “be perfect”. What are we supposed to do with these words? Once again, context is always king! These words by themselves can cause bad doctrine, prideful faith and even desperate fear, but in their context, understanding who is speaking and what He is speaking about I believe that they create great peace, that they reveal eternal love and that they have the ability to produce lasting fruit.
This verse is the conclusion of this entire section of the Sermon on the Mount, the last sentence in the definition of surpassing righteousness and the comparison and contrast of the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees and the righteousness prepared for and required of the citizens of the Kingdom of God. The conclusion of the matter of righteousness is simply according to Jesus, “be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect.” The question that we all have to ask and that our time together today will attempt to answer is “what does it mean to be perfect?” Without a definition to fulfill all of our energy will be wasted as we attempt to accomplish an impossible expectation. This is one of our biggest reasons for disappointment in life, we often want people to attain to an expectation that we have never defined for them and then when they fall short we are disappointed but we have literally set them up to fail and then blamed them for their failure. God does not do this to us! When He calls He equips, when He expects He defines, when He speaks He does it in a language that we are able to understand. God doesn’t speak so that He can ease His conscience, meaning God doesn’t speak so He can say, “I did My part, I told you what was right”; God speaks so that we can know Him. The purpose of His voice is a love relationship so He speaks to be heard in ways that He can be understood. So what does perfection mean?