Our Lord’s exhortation to us in verses 38–48 is to be generous in our behavior toward everyone. Beware of living according to your natural affections in your spiritual life. Everyone has natural affections—some people we like and others we don’t like. Yet we must never let those likes and dislikes rule our Christian life. “If we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another” (1 John 1:7), even those toward whom we have no affection.
The example our Lord gave us here is not that of a good person, or even
of a good Christian, but of God Himself. “… be perfect, just as your Father in
heaven is perfect.” In other words, simply show to the other person what God
has shown to you. And God will give you plenty of real life opportunities to
prove whether or not you are “perfect, just as your Father in heaven is
perfect.” Being a disciple means deliberately identifying yourself with God’s
interests in other people. Jesus says, “A new
commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that
you also love one another. By this all will know that you are My disciples, if
you have love for one another” (John 13:34–35).
The true expression of Christian character is not in good-doing, but in
God-likeness. If the Spirit of God has transformed you within, you will exhibit
divine characteristics in your life, not just good human characteristics. God’s
life in us expresses itself as God’s life, not as human life trying
to be godly. The secret of a Christian’s life is that the supernatural becomes
natural in him as a result of the grace of God, and the experience of this
becomes evident in the practical, everyday details of life, not in times of
intimate fellowship with God. And when we come in contact with things that
create confusion and a flurry of activity, we find to our own amazement that we
have the power to stay wonderfully poised even in the center of it all.
