Mathews Mor Barnabas

Be Perfect as your Heavenly Father is Perfect!

At the Christian Family Conference in Austin on July 1, 2004

Dear friends, while we are gathered here today, I want to invite your attention to the one question we need to ask ourselves today: What is this conference for? Why are we here? Are we here to show our talents? Are we here to see some new people? Or are we here to acquire new ideas and knowledge? I think God's expectation of this conference is a spiritual revival.

In order to have a spiritual revival, we need to ask the basic questions of our existence. The question why we live is the one we need to ask before any other question. Without having a satisfactory answer to this question, we cannot go any further. The question of why we live depends on another question: what are we?

Our tradition answers this question in a profound way. Our Christian tradition affirms that we are God’s children. We are created in God's image with the possibility to grow to the perfection of God. Every human being (not just Christians) is created in God's image and all have to grow to God's perfection as Jesus is perfect. John 3:2 says that in order to see Jesus as he really is, we have to become as perfect as he is.

Loving one another as God loves us is the mark of perfection. Jesus taught us through the parable of the lost sheep that God loves and cares for each one of us as if no one else exists. That is how we should love others.

However, it seems that many of us remain reluctant to grow. We remain self-righteous like the Pharisees we see in the gospels, and Jesus tells us, "The tax collectors and prostitutes will enter the Kingdom of God before you!" We need to cast aside our self-righteousness, and humble ourselves before God, and love one another as God loves us. I think real love has four characteristics. Someone with real love will do the following:

1. Serve one another.  Let us not expect others to serve us. Rather let us follow the example of our master, and serve others. Our master became a servant to us, and asked us to be a servant to each other. Let us look for opportunities to serve others rather than make others serve us.

2. Forgive and seek forgiveness.  If we do a mistake to someone, we need to seek forgiveness as soon as we realize what we have done. Similarly when someone seeks our forgiveness, we should be willing to forgive that person right away. This is true in our relationship with God and with each other. God should be our role model in this. God is always willing to forgive our mistakes, and following this example, we should be willing to forgive the mistakes of others as well. We should not allow anything to break our relationship with God and with our fellow beings.

3. Respect one another. If we see every human being as a child of God, we will have no difficulty in respecting everybody. In India we bow our heads before others saying Namasthe, which means, “I bow before the God who lives in you”. Let us see God in our fellow beings and respect them.

4. Be role models. We do not want to preach to people to follow our way of life because people in general are reluctant to listen to sermons. Instead, let our life become a sermon because our deeds speak more loudly than our words! What we are speaks more loudly than what we say. Let us show God’s love in our lives rather than preaching about love. 

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