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Why Try to Become Perfect? |
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Jesus declared the highest possible standard for His followers: they must be “perfect.” “You be perfect, even as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48). The righteousness that Jesus demanded is nothing less than complete conformity to God’s perfect law in everything a person is and does (22:34-40). Jesus is concerned, not only with our behavior, but with the righteousness of the heart, also. The scribes and Pharisees considered only the outward compliance (5:20). With Jesus’ standard who would ever claim to have reached it?
The very nature of the kingdom of God as taught by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount drives us to despair of ourselves in living this kind of life so that we will turn in faith to Jesus Christ and find new life in Him to live as He lived.
The Holy Spirit produces this kind of life in the believer as we make ourselves available to His indwelling presence. God produces in us by His power what we cannot do ourselves.
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