With all that has transpired in the past few days, following the assassination of Charlie Kirk, I was challenged by what Oswald Chambers wrote regarding our response as the bride of Christ and my personal response. And the word that challenged me was one that I am not sure I fully understood.
Matt 5:48 Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.
In the Greek the word perfect is Teleios, which I understood to mean “without flaw, meeting an extreme standard or improving something to its best possible state.” When I looked it up in the Greek, I read what he wrote in a new light: complete in various applications of labor, growth, mental and moral character. It reflects directly to our Walk With God on the path to spiritual maturity as the Holy Spirit leads us in dealing with our “flaws.”
“Our Lord’s exhortation in these verses is to be generous in our behavior to all men. In the spiritual life beware of walking according to natural affinities. Everyone has natural affinities; some people we like and others we do not like. We must never let those likes and dislikes rule in our Christian life. “If we walk in the light as God is in the light,” God will give us communion with people for whom we have no natural affinity.
The example our Lord gives us is not that of a good man, or even a good Christian, but God Himself. “Be therefore perfect even as your Father in heaven is perfect.” Show to the other man what God has shown to you; and God will give us ample opportunities in actual life to prove whether we are perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect. To be a disciple means that we deliberately identify ourselves with God’s interests in other people. “That ye love one another; As I have loved you …”
The expression of Christian character is not good doing, but God likeness. If the Spirit of God has transformed you within, you will exhibit Divine characteristics in your life, not good human characteristics. God’s life in us expresses itself as God’s life, not human life trying to be godly. The secret of a Christian is that the supernatural is made natural in him by the grace of God, and the experience of this works out in the practical details of life, not in times of communion with God. When we come in contact with things that create a buzz, we find to our amazement that we have power to keep wonderfully poised in the center of it all.” Oswald Chambers