The Kingdom Movement

A Literary & Pastoral Study Guide to the Gospel of Matthew

The Inspiration of Matthew,

by Caravaggio

 

On the King's Errand

Devotional Reflections on Matthew's Gospel

 

Heart Transformation for Love, Part Twelve – Be Like Your Father:  Mt.5:45, 48

 

5:45 so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous…48 Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

 

          Is there someone in your life who you find hard to like?  Maybe they are moody and withdrawn.  Maybe they are too sarcastic, abrasive, and inconsiderate for you.  Maybe they are just from another cultural background that you don’t resonate with. 

When I’m with people who I find hard to like, I remember one of my mentors.  He had a great quality.  As I observed him interacting with people, he found something in every person to like.  After the small talk and chit chat, he started getting to know the other person.  He tried to connect something he enjoyed to something the other person enjoyed, or could enjoy.  Or if that didn’t come easily, he tried to see if there was something the other person could teach him:  art, baseball stats, cooking tips, an aspect of politics, etc.  He enjoyed learning, and becoming a broader person.  He tried to find out what the other person found funny.  He worked patiently to find something in every single person he could like.  That took love.  I sensed that his depth and broadness as a person came from this way of relating to people.  He loved people in order to find something to like in them.

          That gave me an insight into the quality of Christian love.  Jesus calls us to love people in order to find something we like in them.  Too often, we make quick judgments based on first impressions.  We develop feelings about the person based on how s/he treats us, rather than how God sees her/him.  To God, each person is precious.  He loves each person with His whole Self.  He is invested in each person in a profound, personal way.  But not only that:  God also sees them as embedded in relationships with other people:  to parents, friends, significant others, co-workers, possibly even future children.  So God sees each person as a potential partner in His mission to love and bless others.

          So when we read this passage in Matthew 5, especially the call to be perfect in 5:48, we have to remember what God’s heart is.  God loves us equally.  But He doesn’t like us all equally.  Since He is a personal being of love, we can please Him (Heb.11:6) or grieve Him (Eph.4:30) based on how we become recipients and vessels of His love.  God calls us to receive His unconditional love and then express it to others.  That’s why He sent Jesus:  to reshape and cleanse our very human nature with the love of the Father, and then come into us by His Spirit, so we can participate in the new humanity of Jesus.  God loves us in order to like us.  He is able to produce the very qualities He likes most in us, by loving us.  And He likes us when we love others the way He does.  That’s why it’s so important to love people in order to like them.  Sometimes it means just bearing with a person until they let down their guard.  At other times, it means being a friend in some limited way until you can tell them how they hurt you or others.  But it is with the hope of that they would also become the type of person God wants them to become:  a person who is becoming broader and deeper because they find more and more things to like about others, too.  It’s with the hope that they’d become a better friend, to you and others.

God provides the material world for us.  He provides the context.  He scatters sunshine and rain upon all of us indiscriminately.  He sustains our very being.  He sends Jesus to us to redeem our nature, and His Spirit to redeem our personhood.  He loves us in order to like us.  In fact, He loves us in order to make us more likeable, to like us more and more.  He always looks to establish a connection with us, to broaden and deepen that connection with each one of us.  And so in our own limited, human way, be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.