Today’s Podcast
Today’s Bible reading plan:
Read it in a year – Romans 5-6
see the whole year’s plan [here](http://www.bible-reading.com/bible-plan.pdf)
Today’s Devotional
Matthew 5:43-48
Jesus: You have been taught to love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I tell you this: love your enemies. Pray for those who torment you and persecute you— in so doing, you become children of your Father in heaven. He, after all, loves each of us—good and evil, kind and cruel. He causes the sun to rise and shine on evil and good alike. He causes the rain to water the fields of the righteous and the fields of the sinner. It is easy to love those who love you—even a tax collector can love those who love him. And it is easy to greet your friends—even outsiders do that! But you are called to something higher: “Be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect.”
What do Jesus’ words mean for us today?
We really get hung up on that call to “be perfect,” don’t we? But would Jesus tell us to do something that we couldn’t do? Would God give us a command that was impossible to frustrate us throughout our life? I don’t think God works that way. I think God wants us to experience His joy and peace and comfort now and through eternity. I think He wants us to get a glimpse of heaven here before He takes us to be with Him for eternity. So He calls us to “be perfect, as our Father in heaven is perfect.”
Here’s the catch. What does perfect mean? Does it mean I will never make a mistake? Does it mean I can go through life and my math always works? Does it mean I can expect never to say the wrong word and never to hurt someone’s feelings by doing so? Does it mean every business decision I make will end up as a profitable one? Rhetorical questions with a clear answer. No.
We live in fallible human bodies that continue to age and grow old that make mistakes in human areas all the time. But I think Jesus calls us to live on a spiritual plane in which He perfects us each day. I think about a growing infant when I look at these verses. When my kids were infants, I didn’t expect them to walk and talk and dress themselves, yet they were perfect for their age. They ate, cried, cuddled, and pooped. That’s about all they did, but they were perfect. If that’s all they did as toddlers, I would have been very concerned about them. They would not have been perfect if that was the extent of their abilities. As toddlers, I expected them to walk, share some words, show curiosity about their world, interact with me, throw small fits when they didn’t get their way even.
As teenagers, those actions would not indicate perfection, those actions would demonstrate immaturity and possible clinical and psychological deficiencies that needed immediate attention from professionals to help me cope with their imperfections. Do you get my point?
God doesn’t expect us not to make mistakes along our journey with Him. He does expect us to mature, though. He expects us to grow up and learn about Him. He expects us to grab hold of His word, learn it, use it, understand it. God wants and expects us to become more than infants and toddlers in this spiritual journey we are on with Him. Yet too often we remain content to just let someone else feed us a little formula, burp us every once in a while, and change our diaper when we poop on ourself.
Is that really the life you think God wants for you? Is that what you want for yourself? Don’t you want to explore the vast universe He has for you? The only way to do that is to get out of the crib. You must get potty trained and learn to feed yourself before you can break out and explore the promised land God puts before you. He has mountains for you to climb and rivers for you to cross. He made vistas to see that will amaze you, but you will not get to them until you grow up. And spiritual growth has nothing to do with age.
I’ve come to know many people through the years that told me they were saved decades ago that are still spiritual infants. They have no depth, there has been no growth. They are satisfied to sit in a pew and then complain that a particular preacher or sermon or teacher or church isn’t “feeding” them. I’ve decided not to be as gentle to those decade old infants, anymore. If you’re one of them, you need a kick in the pants. Get off the pablum and start feeding yourself.
Will you make a mess of it sometimes, like a toddle feeding himself? Yes. Will you get better at it? Yes. Yes. Yes. But you will grow. You will begin to taste the delicacies God has in store for you. You will mature in Christ. You will break free from the crib and see the wonders God has in store for you. The secret is to let God stay in charge of your life. Decide today to let Him be Lord. That means you always say “yes” to Him. Because as soon as you say “no”, He is no longer Lord, you are. Leave Him on the throne and take your orders from Him. Then grow up. Be perfect, as He is perfect, mature, growing every day.
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