You Therefore Must Be Perfect
Caleb Hyers | Matthew 5:48 | The Resting Place Apostolic Family
THE TWO CAMPS THAT SURVIVE THE VERSE
“You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” There are two kinds of people who really struggle with this verse. There are the ones who feel totally crushed by it — like, are you ever going to be able to do that? And then there are the ones who quietly decided it cannot mean what it says. Both of those camps have found a way to survive the verse without letting it change them.
I want to be someone who is changed by the word. So one of the most important words in this verse is not the word “perfect.” Anyone want to guess? Therefore. You therefore must be perfect. Whenever you read “therefore,” you have to ask, what is it there for? Never take a statement like this and start to meditate on it without understanding the immediate context.
THE HINGE OF THE ENTIRE SERMON ON THE MOUNT
I want to argue quickly that Matthew 5:48 is actually the hinge point of the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus moves into chapters six and seven and away from the Beatitudes into more practical application. This is what it looks like. This is what you do. This is what you do not do.
The beginning of this section is verse 17, where Jesus says he came to fulfill the law and the prophets, not abolish them. That word is pleroō. It means to fill, to make full, or to complete. He says, “I came not to do away with, but to complete the mission of the law and the prophets.”
Then starting in verse 21, he begins talking about what the law addressed. He says, “You have heard it said, you shall not murder.” But then he says if you are angry in your heart toward your brother, you are already committing murder. He moves into adultery and says lust in your heart is already adultery. He talks about divorce, retaliation, and then the most radical of all: love your enemies. Perfect love is actually loving those who hate you, not those who love you. That being the context, he says, “You therefore must be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” He takes the law out of actions only and into the thought realm, the meditations of your heart, even the motivations of your heart. And then he says, “Now be perfect.”
Jesus is being very intentional here. He says, “I came to complete the law,” and then, “you must be perfect as your Father is perfect.” There is a play on words in the Greek that I want to point out. Verse 48 is the hinge and the heart of the greatest sermon of all time. That is my argument.
WHAT “PERFECT” ACTUALLY MEANS IN THE GREEK
The word is teleios, and it means perfect. But here is the full definition. It means complete. It means mature. It means fully grown. It means completeness. It has various applications in Scripture of completing a job, completing a growth pattern, being fully grown in mental and moral character.
Helps Word Studies breaks it down and gives us an excellent picture. This word “perfect” is actually better understood as mature or consummated from going through the necessary stages to reach the end goal. It means developed into a consummated completion by fulfilling the necessary process or spiritual journey.
Think of a pirate’s telescope, the kind that folds in and out one stage at a time. That is the right way to think of teleios — the unfolding, extending out one stage at a time to function at full strength perfection.
This is from Strong’s Concordance 5046 in the Greek, a lexicon with approximately 25 contributing scholars. It says this word clusters around the idea of completeness brought to its intended goal. It speaks less of flawlessness and more of the wholeness that results when God’s purpose is fully realized in a person, an act, or an era. Jesus in this moment in Matthew 5:48 summons the disciples to mirror the Father’s all-inclusive love, even of enemies. And the standard is divine, but the context shows that perfection expresses itself through mercy and enemy love, not moral faultlessness.
Our English understanding of “perfect” betrays the Greek intent. We think of a surgical clean room where one little speck of dust means everything is ruined and you have to start over. That is not what God intends in this verse. He says there is a perfect process. It is not about a clean room environment where nothing goes wrong. It is not faultlessness. It is about mercy and loving your enemy.
OTHER PLACES SCRIPTURE USES TELEIOS
There are other places in Scripture that use the same teleios, with telos as the root word. Remember the rich young ruler? Matthew 19:21 — Jesus said to him, “If you would be perfect, go and sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven, and come follow me.” Does selling everything you have and giving it to the poor make you morally perfect? But it is the exact same word. The rich young ruler was not going to become morally perfect by doing that. He was simply going to step into what was missing. It was not his morality that needed addressing. It was what was absent.
“Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away.” — 1 Corinthians 2:6
That word “mature” — teleios again. “Perfect.” Paul is writing to the Corinthian church. Do you know what was going on in that church? A lot. Significant sin. All kinds of things. And he says, “I am trying to impart wisdom to you, the mature ones.” So “mature” there is not an indication that nothing is going wrong. It means they are in a process. It is about the process of wholeness and becoming complete, not about the destination of perfection.
“Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.” — James 1:2-4
That word “mature” — teleios. The sheer act of perseverance does not make you morally flawless. But persevering through trials makes us whole on the inside, like our Father in heaven. That is what it produces.
THE FATHER SEES YOU AS PERFECT
He brings the dimension of relational reality to us as the children of God. Yesterday, Shiloh, my six-year-old, just decided he was going to paint. He got out the supplies and started painting. When he brought it to me, I did not entirely know what it was. It had some symmetry, some different colors. He was using his finger, using the brush. It was abstract. And it was not even done yet. But he brought it to me and said, “Daddy, what do you think?”
I said, “It’s perfect. I think it’s perfect.”
That is how the Father sees you. You come to him saying, “Lord, I tried. I’m doing it. Here I am.” He says, “You’re perfect. You’re perfect. I love you. It’s so good.”
Paul admitted he was in the teleios process. He gave us in Philippians 3:12-15 a clear picture of what this looks like:
“Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us who are mature think this way. And if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you.” — Philippians 3:12-15
Paul lived comfortably inside this paradox. In verse 12, he uses teleoō, meaning to consummate, to reach the end phase of perfection. He says, “I am not at the conclusion.” But then in verse 15 he says, “Let all who are perfect think this way. All who are mature.” Same word. He says, “I am not completed, but I am mature.” He says, “I am not finished, but I am on the right path. I am not at the end, but I am in the perfect process.”
True maturity — perfection, following after God — is the grace-fueled pursuit of the One who already has you. Paul says he already belongs to God. He has been made God’s own. So he endeavors to make God his own. It does not undo the fact that he already belongs to God. He has been made his own, and now Paul wants to make God his own. That is perfection. That is maturity.
WE ARE MADE PERFECT IN CHRIST, NOT BY ACTING PERFECTLY
Let me say it plainly: we are made perfect in Christ, not by acting perfectly while following Christ. This matters. Doing the right thing does not make you righteous. The Righteous One makes you righteous because of who he is, not because of who you are or what you ever do. We have superimposed old covenant paradigms onto the new covenant and concluded it is up to us to get ourselves holy. We say it is not by works, and then we treat our works as the benchmarks for becoming better Christians.
“Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.” — Colossians 3:9-10
The old self is gone. It is done. The old man is dead. You are not fighting a fallen nature. You are fighting the good fight of faith in what the Son of God has finished. It is a fight of faith in what he has done, not a fight against what you are trying not to do. And if you make it about what you are trying not to do, you are going to do all the things you do not want to do.
The new self is here. It has already been put on. You are not trying to put it on. You are trying to believe that you have been clothed in Christ himself.
“This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” — John 6:29
There is work to do, but it is believing. If you spend all your time fighting the fight of faith that he is in you and you are in him, you will have plenty to do. All your time will be occupied.
What is being renewed? The new self is being renewed. We try to renew the old man, and it is impossible. The entire Trinity agreed: “Let’s not pastor the old man. Let’s kill him, raise him, and put ourselves in there. We can shepherd that.” No one in the Trinity wanted the job of pastoring your old man. So they killed him and brought your new man to life. The ongoing process is maturing into the knowledge of the Father. The battlefield is not your behavior. It is your belief.
The orphan does not believe they have a father, so they fight. They think the old man is still alive. They are combating a corpse. A corpse does not win a wrestling match. But some of us are wrestling as if it still has life in it. It is dead. Dead means dead. You just do not believe it. That is the problem.
THE PRACTICAL PARTS OF THE PERFECT PROCESS
Here is what it actually looks like. First, you have to refuse to live off of yesterday’s manna. The Israelites could not store it in the wilderness. Whatever they gathered for tomorrow was rotten by the morning. The renewal that Colossians 3 is talking about is daily, not weekly, not only on Sunday. The new self is already on, but it has to be fed. You have to eat. Be well fed. Be renewed daily. But it is the new self that is being fed. Do you hear the difference?
Second, fight the good fight of faith, not a fight against a removed fallen nature. He has done something radical. He has removed the old self and put himself inside of you. It is no longer you who lives, but Christ who lives in you. And as you believe that, you start to become it. You will be living what you are believing.
Third, establish relationship with God, not just information about God. The word about growing in knowledge after the image of the creator — that knowledge is epignosis. It means encounter. We are actually growing in him when we encounter him. You do not complete that process because there is more of him to encounter. You keep returning to the Person at the center of it. Every time you behold him, you become more of what he already made you to be. Beholding produces becoming. That is the whole mechanism.
SANCTIFICATION IS A PERSON
There is a word people throw around that has been woefully undertaught or wrongly taught, and that word is sanctification. People say there is a process of sanctification, so you are justified forever but still being sanctified. I think that is an inadequate way to understand it according to Scripture.
I submit to you in love that sanctification is a Person we are in the process of knowing and making known. That is a theologically rich statement. The perfect process is knowing Christ and him crucified while we express his likeness on the earth.
“And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption.” — 1 Corinthians 1:30
He became to us sanctification. Sanctification is a Person we are in the process of knowing and making known. You do not complete that process because he is the center. You are continually coming back to him, asking, “What do you want here? What do you love here? What do you hate here?”
“And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.” — Ephesians 4:11-13
That word “mature” — teleios. We learn, we are taught, we are guided, we are shown the way, and then we agree with the Person we are coming to know, and we express him on the earth. You therefore must be perfect. Does that sound different to your hearing now?
MATURITY, NOT MORAL ACHIEVEMENT
We are maturing in Christ through the power of the Spirit, by grace alone. Justification is by faith in what he has done. Sanctification is just as much by faith in what he has done. Glorification is by faith in what he has done. It is all by grace through faith.
So this verse — “you be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” — is about maturity, not moral achievement. It is about wholeness, not flawlessness.
I heard a great distinction once between perfectionism and excellence. Perfectionism is the fear of getting it wrong. You have to get it right because you are afraid of getting it wrong. Excellence is the joy of doing it well. Perfectionism says, “I cannot get it wrong.” Excellence says, “This is going to be so much fun. I am going to do it well, to the best of my ability. It is going to be excellent.”
This verse is about growing up, not measuring up. It is about becoming, not performing. It is about resemblance to the Father, not righteousness by our effort. True maturity is the grace-fueled pursuit of the One who already has you.
When we say we are pursuing God, it is not like he is running away from us. When we say we are waiting on God, it is not like we are waiting for him to show up. He is already here. We are waiting with God. There is grace to recognize his presence. We have been empowered to recognize that we are already here with him. The only reason you can pray is because of the Holy Spirit. The only reason you can breathe is because of the Holy Spirit. It is all by grace. It is not by effort. And you can walk in the perfect process because it is a grace-fueled one that pursues the One who already has you.
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Transcript of a message delivered at The Resting Place Apostolic Family — Tampa Bay, FL — trpfamily.org