How To Be Perfect

Life of the Church

Good morning everyone, happy Sunday to you all. It’s good to see you here in person or have you watching online. If you’re visiting us for the first time today, you should find a visitor card in the pocket of the seat right in front of you. Please fill that out and place it in the offering plate as it passes to let us know you were here.

I have a few announcements to touch upon before we begin our worship. First, thank you to everyone who came to our business meeting this past Wednesday, where we voted on and passed motions to both replace two electrical boxes and all the church windows. Some much-needed improvements there.

You’ll also see up here a whole lot of shoeboxes for Samaritan’s Purse that will be sent to children all over the world. Thank you to everyone who participated in that, and just a reminder that your shoe boxes are due by Tuesday the 16th.

The men’s ministry will not be meeting this evening but will meet next Sunday the 21st in the young at heart classroom. That will be at 6:00.

And you’ll also find an insert in your bulletin for Christmas poinsettias. If you’d like to order one of those, please fill that form out and drop it in the offering plate or by the church office by December 5.

Della, can you tellus about

Harvey, would you give us an update about how you’re trying to make us all smarter?

Sue, do you have anything?

Opening Prayer

Heavenly Father, we thank you for allowing us to be here as we worship you.

Thank you for each and every one of us for helping us to find time to come and hear your word.

Fill us with the knowledge of truth and give us the spirit of understanding, teach us on how to obey your word.

Give us the wisdom that comes from you so that we can know how to love each other, as we begin the service during this Sunday morning, be with us until we finish for we have prayed through Jesus’s name, Amen

Sermon

If I were to ask you what the definition of a Christian is, how would you answer? Not who is a Christian, but what makes a Christian.

Chances are good you’d say something like this: “A Christian is someone who believes a man named Jesus once lived on this earth, and that man was also God, and through him we have eternal life because his death and resurrection paid for our sins.”

And you would be right. You would for sure probably have that last word somewhere in there, wouldn’t you? “Sins.” Or “sinner” — a Christian is a sinner who is forgiven by the shed blood of Jesus Christ, the son of God.

In fact, it’s hard to find a statement of faith in any denomination that doesn’t have the word “sin” or “sinner” in it, because humanity’s fallen nature is so much a part of what we all believe.

We are all sinners, whether we’re Christian or not. We all live in a world drowned in sin, a world that’s groaning for the moment when God remakes all of creation into what it should have been and was always meant to be.

You can’t be saved until you know you’re a sinner, and you can’t live the Christian life if you don’t understand that you might be forgiven, you may be pardoned, but as long as you are in this world, you will always struggle and fight with the sin in your heart.

We have that part down pretty well, don’t we? There isn’t one of us gathered here today who would ever say, “I’ve never asked God’s forgiveness for anything, because I’ve never done anything wrong.”

We know better. We know we stumble. We know the thoughts we think and the harsh words we say and the hidden things we do.

But while a sermon about sin is always a valuable thing to remind us all how much we need to be forgiven, I think we also need a sermon about what else makes a Christian.

Because the sinful nature that follows us through life is only half of it. The other half doesn’t get talked about as much, but it should, because it defines who we’re made to be as disciples of Christ.

We're sinners, but we’re also a word that the Apostle Paul used often as he greeted the churches he wrote to, and that word is “saints”.

It’s not that hard to be a sinner. All we have to do to be a sinner is keep on doing what feels good, what we’ve always done. But to be a saint? That sounds hard, doesn’t it?

When we think of saints, we think of someone who has a deep and profound devotion to God. Someone whose faith remains unshaken even during the worst storms in life. But most of all, someone who is holy.

Which brings us to today’s scripture. Turn in your Bibles or your bulletins to 1 Peter 1:13-16

Therefore, preparing your minds for action, and being sober-minded, set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.

As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance, but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.”

And now the gospel of Matthew, chapter 5, verse 48:

You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

And this is God’s word.

We see a common thread woven through the letter writers of the New Testament, from Paul to John and James and here to Peter. It’s a simple but very powerful principle, and it’s this: If you don’t live out what you believe, then you really don’t believe it at all.

Our faith isn’t something we can keep hidden even if we wanted to, because it always leaks out in everything we do and think and say. That’s what Peter is getting at in these few verses.

As a Christian, you’re given a special place before God because of the redemptive power of Jesus. Everyone who identifies with Christ and puts faith in Him is holy before God. Not because of anything we’ve done, but because of what Christ has done for us.

And because we stand as holy before God, our lives should display that holiness as well. In other words, since we are saints, we should act like saints. We should be holy.

But what does being holy mean? For most of us, holiness means never making a mistake, never sinning at all. It’s being perfect, which is what Jesus seems to say in Matthew 5:48.

But how can we possibly be perfect when we’re so aware of the sinful nature that’s still in us even after we’re saved? It seems impossible, doesn’t it? Not just intellectually, with our minds, but practically, in our experience.

Maybe our problem is that we have the wrong idea of holiness, and that’s what Peter and Jesus need to help us understand things a little better. That’s what they do in these two sections of scripture. They tell us what holiness is, what holiness does, and what holiness is for.

First, what holiness is, and we see right away in 1 Peter that holiness isn't just about being a moral person. That’s part of it, but just a part, and certainly not the whole. It’s more than always doing the right thing, always being upright and honorable, because we can be moral people for a lot of reasons.

We can be moral out of a sense of duty — this is what’s expected of me, so I need to do it. We can be moral because it fulfills someone’s expectations — my wife or my husband or my parents expect me to be a good person, so I’m going to make the right choices in life.

We can be moral because it makes us feel good about ourselves, or because it’s a good business model — if we’re moral, then we’ll have a good reputation to the public.

But do you see what all of those examples have in common? They’re all selfish, aren’t they? All focused on us. They all say I’m going to make the right choices in life because of what it gets me, because of how I can benefit.

Does that sound like a godly way to live? No, of course not. A godly way of living puts others first and ourselves second. Godly living is selfless living. So it’s not enough to just be moral in God’s eyes, to just be a good person. That’s not holiness.

But then what is it? Peter gives us a clue down in verse 16 when he says, “since it is written, ‘You shall be holy, for I am holy.’” That’s a quote from the book of Leviticus in the Old Testament, and that’s very telling, because the book of Leviticus is about the laws the Israelites were to follow.

That book doesn’t talk too much about holy people, but it does talk about holy things. If you go to Leviticus you’ll find there are all sorts of things that God calls holy. Tables are called holy, and utensils, even pots are called holy.

So right here we see that when Peter is talking about holiness, he’s not just talking about morality. Because how can a pot be moral? Or a table? That doesn’t work, does it?

What Peter says is holiness doesn’t just mean doing something the right way, it means being something always. And in the Hebrew, that’s exactly what we find. In the Hebrew, holiness means “to be set apart.”

Right away we can see, then, why God is holy. Because He is set apart. He is utterly apart from any other beings, totally unique, with no one else like him. And we can also see how a pot can be considered holy, because it means that pot has been set apart for God alone to use.

Being holy means moral behavior absolutely, but making the right choices isn’t where it begins. We don’t start there, it’s more like we finish there. Living the right way and being people of honor and integrity isn’t the cause of holiness at all. Instead, it’s an effect of holiness. We live upright and moral lives because God has set us apart for Himself to use.

Where we often mess up is thinking that becoming a disciple of Jesus and living the Christian life means turning over a new leaf. That’s not what happens at all. God doesn’t turn over our leaf, God prunes our entire tree so we can grow fuller and taller than we were before.

When Peter quotes the book of Leviticus, he’s talking about belonging to God, living on His terms, delighting in Him, obeying and honoring Him, and now we’re getting close to a real definition of what holiness is, aren’t we?

Peter defines holiness very simply. He says that holiness is simply saying yes to God every moment with all of your heart, and when we do that, we realize just how life-changing being holy is.

But it has to be with everything you have. It has to be all or nothing with God. The treasure is yours for the having, but you have to sell everything to get it. You have to say yes to God with your whole heart.

I’m not talking about the modern way people talk about the heart, which is emotional. I’m not talking about saying yes to God with your feelings. I’m talking about the Biblical definition of the heart, which is the core of your being, the heart of you, the part that makes you you — your identity.

When the Bible uses the word heart, it’s talking about three different human powers working as one: your intellect, which is faith; your will, which is love, and your desires, which is hope.

Faith, hope, and love. Those sound familiar, don’t they? They’re the three Christian virtues, and you have to use them all when you say yes to God. You have to ground all three in God to be holy.

The philosopher Immanuel Kant once said there are three great human questions: What can I know? What should I do? And What may I hope?

Faith, hope, and love answers each of those questions. What can I know? Faith tells us the truth about ourselves — we’re sinners — and our relation to God — we’re made saints through faith in Christ.

What should I do? Love. That is what must always guide every choice we make. And what may I hope?

Peter states it right in verse 13: “Set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.”

And how do we set our hope? By preparing our minds for action, and by having a calm and collected spirit.

If you want a holy life, then you have to roll up the sleeves of your mind and your will and be determined to focus on Christ instead of all the noise that the world throws at you every day. You have to say yes with the three powers of your heart.

Now, what does that look like from a practical perspective? If you want to know the picture of holiness in purely human form, if you want to know what holiness in action looks like, then we only need to look at Mary, Jesus’s mother.

For such an important figure in history, she doesn’t show up very often in the gospels. But when she does, she embodies holiness, and the only definition of holiness we need comes from two things she said.

First, when the angel appears to her in Luke and says she will bear a child named Jesus, she says, “Let it be according to your word.”

And then at the wedding in Cana, when Jesus turned the water to wine, she tells the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.”

“Let it be according to your word.” “Do whatever he tells you.” That’s it. That’s all. That’s exactly what being holy is. And that’s also at the heart of what holiness does.

Remember, the only way to get the kingdom of heaven is to give up all that you have. But doing that isn’t a sacrifice, because what you get in return is far more pleasing in every way than anything you could ever get on your own.

Same with holiness. It transforms your life because what you’re doing is saying no to your desires and saying yes to God’s. It’s setting yourself apart.

Verse 14 calls it obeying, and that’s exactly what holiness is. “As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance ...” We’re not to live as obedient subjects, we’re to live as obedient children.

We’re to look at our lives the way we looked at them when we were children under the care of our parents, and what did we think back then? Or what were we supposed to have thought back then?

It was this: I don’t understand these rules, and I don’t understand what you’re doing, but I’m going to do it anyway because you’re my dad, you’re my mom, and I know all you want is to keep me safe, to grow me up, and to give me the absolute best.

Do you see? We obey, but not in the way that a slave is supposed to obey his or her master — I have to obey or I’m going to be punished. We obey in the way that a child obeys his parents, and that’s an obedience that relies on only two things: trust and love.

And that trust and love should be the easiest things to give him if we do what Peter writes back up in verse 13: if we set our hope fully on the grace of Christ.

How do we do that? It means thinking about what God has done for us. It means dwelling on the fact that He sent his Son into this world so we could one day be with him forever.

We don’t have to sacrifice anything because he sacrificed everything, and if we dwell on that, if we set our minds to that, then holiness doesn’t become something we should do, it becomes something we want to do.

It becomes a way of life that’s centered on thanking him for what he has done for us. It becomes a matter of saying, “God, I understand exactly what You did for me, and by your sacrifice I understand just how much you love and care for me, so I’m not going to waste one minute of my life living any other way except for the way that pleases you, with Your help.”

That is the foundation of holiness — a desire to please Him, to delight in Him. Holiness gives us the joy of no longer living for ourselves and instead living for God and for our neighbors.

We can balk at that. We can say, “Well, that doesn’t sound like freedom at all, and the point of life is to be free. It's to live the way I want to live.”

But that’s wrong. The point of life is to be holy. Peter says in verse 15 that just as God himself is holy and set apart, we should be holy in all of our conduct. Being holy isn’t just for Sunday, it’s for every day and should be in everything we do. The truth that defines our lives as Christians is that we belong to God.

But we live as if we belong to ourselves, and because of that we miss out on the life of joy that God wants us to have. If we work for ourselves, then we’ll only do what’s necessary to make money or make more money. If we work for our boss, then we’ll only work hard when the boss is noticing. We’ll only work hard to give our boss a good impression of us.

But if we’re working for God, our main motivation is to serve Him. We work harder, we work happier, because we’re not living and dying on whether we get praise from others. It transforms our work, because we’re not doing it for ourselves anymore.

And more than that, by living this way we quickly come to learn one of life’s most important truths: every moment counts in eternity. There are no empty minutes. Every circumstance we find ourselves in, every person we meet, every act no matter how small it seems, affects both our souls and the souls of those around us.

What a great responsibility that is. Just thinking about that can be enough to paralyze us with worry and fear over not doing the right thing, over causing either ourselves or someone else some sort of harm, whether physical or spiritual.

But if we belong to God, if our faith and our will and our hope is constantly tuned to His voice, if we stop living for ourselves and start living for Him and for others, then that holiness of God shines through.

We stop being afraid of our moments and we start living them fully for the first time.

So what is holiness? It’s abandoning ourselves to God. It’s living for him.

It’s Mary saying, “Do whatever He tells you.” It opens our hearts to a larger and more fulfilling life by no longer serving ourselves, but serving Him and serving others.

That leaves our last question: What is holiness for? And for that we turn to the Gospel of Matthew, and to Jesus.

Chapter five of Matthew is the greatest sermon ever preached — the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus gives us the beatitudes. He speaks of being the world’s salt and light. He says that he has come to fulfill all of the law, and that your life should not be ruled by things like anger and lust. He talks about divorce, and giving and taking oaths, and how to treat your enemies.

The whole of the Sermon on the Mount can be described like this: be holy.

Live a holy life. Sell all that’s yours so you can have what God has bought for you. And that’s so hard, isn’t it? These are the sorts of things that we spend our entire lives trying and failing and trying again to do.

So how can we do it? Jesus tells us how in verse 48. He wants us to do all of these things, so “You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

What’s holiness for? It’s for being perfect. Jesus didn’t say, “You know, it would be a good idea if you tried all you could to be just a little bit holier.” He said, “You must be perfect.”

He never exaggerated, never lied, never did a cute little dance around the hard truths of life. This is what he tells us to do.

But here’s the thing: Jesus won’t tell us to do anything that he knows we can’t do. If he tells us we have to do something, it also means that we can do it.

But how? Where we can get tripped up is the word “perfect” itself, because our modern minds tend to think of the word “perfect” the same way as we think of “holy”.

Perfect doesn’t mean perfect. Perfect doesn’t mean doing everything right in every instance all the time. The Greek word for perfect in that sentence is teleios, and it means complete, brought to its end, finished.

Jesus is saying that God loves us so much that all He desires is the very best for us — for us to be complete, and to become the very best versions of ourselves — and the only way to do that is by living a holy life.

That’s the path we walk to our greatest happiness. That’s our call from heaven.

What's holiness for? Daily life. It’s for the grind of living, and there are few things the Bible can teach us that are more valuable than that. You’ll hear people talking about sports, and what they’ll most often say is that defense wins the game. The same is true in life.

An act of heroism, even facing death for your faith, is easy because it’s just one act. It’s one moment in time. But the daily grind? That’s hard. Every day there are stories of people doing extraordinary deeds in the face of great danger, but there are few who can keep up their faith and their love every day, especially when no one is watching.

How do we find the strength to endure those days in our lives that seem no different than all the days before? How do we keep our hope when life presses down hard upon us and the world rears up and bears its teeth?

By letting God make us holy. And He does that in two opposite ways.

First, He makes us holy through our own will, our own free choice of faith, hope, and love.

But our faith, hope, and love aren’t strong enough on their own, so God also makes us holy through what He allows to happen to us against our will. In other words, through suffering. And as much as we hate it, as much as we pray for none of it, that suffering is so important because it helps get rid of the main obstacle to holiness that we have: selfishness.

Most selfishness comes from a fear of losing or missing something good for ourselves. It’s saying “My will be done” instead of “Thy will be done.” Trust in God casts out that fear, because by that trust we know that God will give us everything good that we need.

And faith is the cure for that selfishness, because we know three things: God’s will is to our greatest joy, God never makes mistakes about what leads us to our greatest joy, and God is able to work all things for our greatest joy.

He knows you more than you know yourself, but He also loves you more than you can love yourself. We can’t lose, because God can’t lose. And so long as we believe that, we will be holy, because we will love God’s will more than our own.

Even when God’s will lets evil things happen to us, He does it because it’s part of what we need. God even makes death work for our greatest good in the end, because death is the door to heaven.

If He can do that with death, He can certainly do that with any of the countless other troubles we face in our lives. He makes them all work toward the same end — right to our joy.

William Law wrote a book called A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, and in that book he said that if we look at ourselves honestly, we will discover that the only reason we aren’t as holy as the saints is because we don’t want to be.

You can say that’s not fair. You can say that you honestly and sincerely want to be a saint, that you know being a saint is both the will of God and the secret of joy, but you’re still not a saint.

But remember, you already are. The moment you put your faith in Jesus, you chose the road to holiness. If that desire for holiness is in you, so is God, and He will certainly make sure you’re made perfect and complete.

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied. Seek, and you will find.”

And second, remember that holiness isn’t easy in the sense that it doesn’t require any effort or sacrifice on your part. It costs everything. And because it costs everything, it’s a battle that we’re all born into.

That's why holiness comes gradually, like the growth of the body. When our bodies grow, we’re hardly aware of it. When our spirits grow, we’re also hardly aware of it.

But unlike the body, growing the spirit comes only through effort, will, and the countless small choices we face every day.

The French novelist Leon Bloy said, “Life, in the end, has only one tragedy: not to have been a saint.”

So much of the quality of your life depends on whether or not you agree with that statement. Is being a saint really the whole meaning of everything? Isn’t getting to heaven more important? But think that through. Ask yourself if being saved is more important than being saintly. Be honest. All we really want to do is get to heaven, right? We just need a ticket to the show, we don’t need a front row seat.

Escaping hell is more important than escaping a normal, mediocre, hum-drum life where we’re good but not great, and where we get by but never get better.

Is that the attitude to take? Jesus had a word to describe that sort of attitude. It’s in Revelation 3:16, and that word is “vomit”.

Do you want to live as a saint? Is that what we want for this church? To be a community of saints?

Do we just want to come here every Sunday and gather with family and friends and sing and pray and hear a sermon and then go home and do it all again in six days?

Or do we want to work together and on our own to quit living our own lives and instead surrender them to God, to be holy, and to make it so that wherever you go in this world people will see something in you that they’re missing, something precious, and ask you how you got to be that way?

Every time we choose to love unselfishly, every time we give ourselves away to God and our neighbors, we get something back: a deep, quiet, solid joy. And the more we give, the more we get.

That is the holy life. That is the life of a saint. And if that's the life you want today and moving forward, then I invite you to come up here as we close our service. Dedicate your life to Christ, or rededicate it. Stop living as if you have no hope, and start living like the saint you are.

Let’s pray:

Father, you are such a great and mighty and loving God. When we pause for a moment to consider all You’ve done for us, all the ways You take care of us every day, all of Your goodness and mercy and grace that you pour out upon us this very moment, we can be nothing but thankful. By Your great love we are moved to love ourselves, a love for others but most of all a love for You, and that is why we wish to turn our lives into Your handiwork, to reflect Your love in all that we do and say, and to live the life of saints who are bound not to ourselves or to any worldly pursuit, but only to You and Your perfect will. Make us holy, Father. Let us carry You inside us, and let Your angels gather around us. For it’s in Jesus’s name we pray, Amen.