Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Heads On Chickens Part II

Jesus said, flat out, “Therefore, you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48). While you would like to think that a statement that straight forward is pretty hard to dodge, the fact is that most of us have and do. I’ve sat through more than a few sermons that labored to dumb this down and most of them have left me with the sense that I just have to try harder to be a good boy.

That’s not what Jesus is getting at. Our Father in heaven is not a dysfunctional daddy screaming at us from the sidelines of the game to run faster so he can feel better about his own shortcomings when he was a student athlete. What He IS doing is to invite us to join Him in heavenly places and to live from the prophetic “amen” He enjoys.

Leading up to Jesus’ dare to be perfect, He listed a variety of human conditions which, when left to our own resources, we know how to navigate. You punch me, I punch you. You hate me, I hate you. You mistreat me, I mistreat you. Then when the wind is blowing the ashes of our fighting fire with fire, we cry and ask God to fix the mess. In a sense, He is asking us, “How’s that working for you?”.

But His answer is not to turn us in on ourselves. That’s the problem to start with anyway! He dares us to be risen to heavenly places and to live from the perfection of the Father’s Kingdom of Heaven. Perfect here means to live in and see and know the prophetic conclusion of a matter. To experience the “amen” and the “I AM”.

God is right now living in His Kingdom of Absolute Perfection. The Prophetic Conclusion is already giving Him massive delight. He lives in that quality and He would like for us to join Him. To live any other way is to live out of the scraps of our own resources.

This is why we should not pray the problems but prophesy the solutions. This is why He taught us to pray, “THY Kingdom COME, THY WILL be DONE on earth, AS IT IS IN HEAVEN”. We pray from heaven TO earth so that our view is PERFECT. Otherwise we are telling God about how we’ve been lied on, cheated on, beat on, hated on, country songed on, bluesed on, hipped hopped on, and just generally rocked on by bad people.

I don’t know how to put this gently, so I’ll say it in the full context of Matthew 5:38-48 and the Words of Jesus; do you just want to cry and whine about your real and imagined injustices or would you like to live the highest quality of life available to humankind and delight yourself in a banquet table set in the presence of your enemies?

Heads ON or heads OFF, chicken little?

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