Like Chickens With Their Heads ON

My 7th grade Literature teacher, Miss Ross, made me memorize Rudyard Kipling's poem, "IF" and I fumed. Like most 7th graders I had no clue what this stupid assignment had to do with "real life". The opening line says, "If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you...".

I love this poem now. It only took 40 years of real life to learn to appreciate it. In fact I started a new series of messages with the deeply insightful title, "Chickens with their heads ON" inspired, in part, by Miss Ross and Mr. Kipling. (Don't forget the free podcasts a our church web site; www.lwc1.com).

Jesus gave an unblinking outrageous charge when He said, "Therefore, you are to be perfect, as Your Heavenly Father is perfect". My version of this is, "Hey,all you chickens in the barnyard! How's this 'running around like chickens with your heads cut off' working for you? Try this; while the axe is swinging, you be the chicken who keeps his head ON. You'll stand head and shoulders above the crowd".

Read Matthew 5:38-48 with some serious reflection and meditation. Jesus is shouting into the empty cavern of Jewish religious hard heartedness that wants to give Rome some lessons on morality. Yes, I know we are all different now. Instead of the empty cavern of Jewish hard heartedness now it the empty cavern of Christian hard heartedness. It's totally different...now that we've put the Name of Jesus on our sin.

Jesus came to lead the world into the greatest Spiritual Revolution and its potential is so vast, deep and wide that it still has not reached its possibilities. How vast? PERFECTION IS ITS ONLY STANDARD. And not just any perfection, but Heavenly Perfection. Not the perfection we are vainly waiting to be granted IN heaven when we get there, but a nitty gritty, punch me in the face on earth and you'll get a blast of heaven's perfect Father living in me.

Alanis Morrisset wrote the song, "Perfect" some years ago that gives a contrast to what I am NOT saying here; "Be a good boy, try a little harder. You've got to measure up and make me prouder...be a good girl, you've gotta try a little harder. That simply wasn't good enough to make us proud. I'll live through you. I'll make you what I never was...". Our Father's perfection is not this sick version. His perfection is the substance of His Heavenly Kingdom Life and the quality of His transcendent supremacy which He longs to generously pour into us when we decide that "trying harder to be good boys and girls" is vain at best, and self-righteous at worst.

The greek word for perfect is, "teleios" and it means completeness, the conclusion of an act or state of being, the end prophetic result. God lives in His own conclusions, He is in a constant state of the prophetic AMEN. There are no lose ends, no unresolved conflicts, no injustices left to right, no matters left for discussion, no unanswered questions, no incomplete statements, nothing left hanging "out there", nothing to discuss and nothing unfinished....HE LIVES IN THAT HIGH LEVEL OF THE QUALITY OF HIS OWN LIFE.....where do we live?

Jesus did not write a new law to be performed in a dead state of religious routine. He is baiting humanity out of a low life existence dependant on our own discipline to be "good" and into the highest dimension of The Life, radically immersed in Heaven's irreplacable energy and love. In fact, in Matthew 5:45 He says this is the only path to becoming the sons and daughters of God.

When the book of Ephesians says that we are seated in Heavenly Places in Christ, it is not an invitation to "feel" good about the symbolism of being "saved". It's a transcending reality for the Believer to be "other" than the chickens running around the barnyard separated from their heads! God's Perfection is The Quality of His Kingdom being offered for those who those who hunger for Life that looks, smells, talks, walks and IS the Life of Jesus Christ invested, FOR REAL, in us. Smash me in the face and the Life of the Spirit pours out of me and the blood on your knuckles is God's blood. Sue me, curse me, use me under false pretences and God gets bigger through me. Hate me and the Love of God grows in me and through me.

This is the Revolution of Jesus and this is the hour for the world to see the true face of God in sons and daughters of the Revolution.