Be Just Like Your Father

"Behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called children of God! Therefore the world does not know us, because it did not know Him. Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. And everyone who has this hope in Him purifies himself, just as He is pure." 1 John 3:1-3

We understand that when Jesus said, "You must be born again," the Greek work there is the word gennao, which means 'conception' rather than the English word 'born.' So, in a sense, our experience right now as Christians is that of the development of the child in the womb of the mother. And we are looking forward to the day when we will be born into the full light of day.

The apostle John is speaking of that. Right now we are conceived of God. Right now we are children of God, but what we really look like has not yet appeared. When a child is in the womb, you don't know what that child will be, it is a mystery. But you do know that the child will be like its mother and father. Before modern technology you didn't even know whether it was a boy or a girl until the child came out of the womb. Then it was revealed who the child was.

In the same way we are children of God. We are in the process of development inside the womb. This is a metaphor, an illustration, that God uses throughout the New Covenant to help us understand what He is doing in our lives.

In Galatians 4, Paul talks about our mother. Verse 22 "For it is written that Abraham had two sons: the one by a bondwoman, the other by a free woman. But he who was of the bodwoman was born according to the flesh, and he of the free woman through promise, which things are symbolic. For these are the two covenants: the one from Mount Sinai which gives birth to bondage, which is Hagar – for this Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia, and corresponds to Jesusalem which now is, and is in bondage with her children – but the Jerusalem above is free, which is the mother of us all."

Verse 28 "Now we brethren, as Isaac was, are children of promise."

Paul is saying that the natural child, which is the natural Jew trying to relate to God by the Old Covenant, corresponding to the physical city of Jerusalem, these are children of bondage. They correspond to Hagar and are represented by Ishmael. So the natural child is a child only by the working of the flesh. Ishmael represents the natural Jew in today's world, trying to seize their carnal definition of the inheritance by violence.

But we who are born of God are the children of promise, the children of faith. And our mother is the Jerusalem that is above. Not the Jerusalem on this earth. The Jerusalem on this earth is a city of bondage. But we are the children of the Jerusalem which is above, the heavenly woman.

With that in mind, lets go to Revelation 12. In truth, this is one of the most important chapters in the New Testament. And yet because it is not understood or it is understood in wrongful ways, it has not enjoyed its place of importance in the thinking of Christianity. This is only sad.

Rev 12:1-2 "Now a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a garland of twelve stars. Then being with child, she cried out in labor and in pain to give birth." – v. 5 "And she brought forth a male child who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron. And her child was caught up to God and to His throne."

Of course, in the history of Christianity, most teachers who have interpreted this passage will tell you that this woman is one of two. It is either Israel that brought forth Jesus or Mary who brought forth Jesus. Jesus is the child and the woman is either Mary or Israel. There is a problem (actually several) with that line of thinking. This is a heavenly woman. Now, we just read Paul's testimony concerning these two women, and we read elsewhere that this New Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God is the bride of Jesus Christ. We understand that the church is that bride.

Israel, according to Paul, was an earthly woman. A woman of bondage, a woman who pertains to the earth. And Mary, in her earthly role as the mother of Jesus was a part of that earthly woman. In her role of birthing Jesus into the earth, she was part of that earthly woman. Later, after the resurrection of Jesus, Mary, herself, became a part of the heavenly woman.

This woman in Revelation 12 is a heavenly woman. There is only one heavenly woman in the Bible and that is the church, the Jerusalem which is from above, the church of Jesus Christ, who is the mother of us all.

Revelation 12:5 is the verse we want to focus on because here we have the Greek word tikto that corresponds to the English word 'born,' which refers to the child coming out of the womb into the full light of day. She bore, she brought forth, she tikto'ed, a male child. This child was to rule all nations with a rod of iron and was caught up to God and to His throne.

Now the desire of most of Christianity wants to limit this verse to Jesus only. But we know that Jesus lives in us, His life is in us, we have eternal life inside of us right now, the life of Christ, because that life is in the Son and the Son is in us.

Revelation 2:26 "He who overcomes (he is talking to Christians) and keeps My works until the end, to him will I give power over the nations . . . 'He shall rule them with a rod of iron. . .'" This is the overcoming Christian.

So yes, this is speaking of Jesus, and it is speaking of Jesus in us. Everything Jesus has and is He shares fully with us because He is our life, we have no other life. And we need not think that Jesus shares Himself with us only after returning in some outward way. No, His full return is when we come forth in the full light of day.

This is speaking of he who overcomes.

Revelation 3:21 "To him [the Christian believer] who overcomes, I will grant to sit with Me on My throne, as I also overcame and sat down with My Father on His throne."

And so we know that the woman in Revelation 12 is not Israel because Israel was an earthly woman in bondage, nor was it Mary because Mary was part of Israel. Since the woman of Revelation 12 is a heavenly woman, we know that there is only one heavenly woman that is of God and that is the church, the bride of Christ.

Therefore we are talking about a child that right now is being carried in the womb of the church. And this child, as we read in Revelation 2 and 3, this child shares in the throne of Jesus and His authority over the nations.

We must know this to understand what we mean when we say that right now we are children of God. We saw that the seed that conceived us again, the second time, that seed came from God. God is our Father.

But we have to understand this truth in a certain way. God gives us this picture of the conception and of the birthing. We have been conceived, we have not yet been birthed, we have not yet come out of the womb. We are in the process of development. And the life that is in us is the life that comes out of God.

We understand that the seed of the father contains all the genes of the father and that the seed of the mother contains all the genes of the mother, and that as they combine, they form a new life, putting emphasis on certain genes of each. And each child is different. Each child, though they have the same mother and father - it is surprising how different two children born into the world from the same parents can be from one another. And yet, they are also very similar because they share the same parents.

And so each child draws on the genetic traits of its parents. The genes of the father are in that child. So it is with us. And in the seed that birthed us the second time are the genes of the Father, the genes of God. So we see ourselves in this way. We are in a dark place. We are in a place of development. We do not see clearly. John said that we do not see what we shall be. We are not birthed yet into the light of day. We are in the place of development.

Then he says that those who have this hope in them purify themselves just as He is pure. We have not been there yet. [Though the time of His appearing is right now upon us.] We are children of God. We have the right, John says in his gospel, we have the right to become children of God. We have the right to be fully developed as sons in the womb of the church and we have the right to come forth in the full light of day as sons in the triumph of Jesus Christ inside of us.

But right now we are in the place of development. This is critical. When we understand that we are born again by the seed of God, we understand that we are going in a certain direction. But we must understand what that development is.

Paul says in 2 Corinthians 3 that we are being transformed into the image of Christ – He says in Romans 12 that we are being transformed by the renewing of our minds. This is a development in this in-between place. And so we understand as believers, walking through our life in this world, the birthing is the goal. We set our focus on the goal. We press toward the goal of the believer, that birthing into the full light of day as a child of God, as a son of God, just like Jesus. We don't really know what we shall be, we don't see it clearly, but we know that we shall be just like Him. Why? Because God determined we would be like Him from the very beginning.

That is our goal, that moment of birthing when we are just like Jesus, just like our Father. That is what we are pressing toward.

But in our life right now, it is the process of development that is our greatest concern.

When we understand these two words, gennao and tikto, conceived and birthed, and when we understand that we are in between these two words, in between the gennao when we were born again, and the tikto when we stand in the full light of day, revealed to all creation as those who are just like Jesus, conformed to the image of His Son. In between these two words stands most of the New Testament.

This is how we must view the New Testament. Most of the New Testament regards our development between the conception and the birthing. It speaks to our development as a child in the womb of the church.

"And He Himself gave some to be apostles . . . till we all come to the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ." Ephesians 4:11

And so God gives us here the measurement by which we are measured. Everyone of us is measured by this measurement. The measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. This is our measurement. We are not measured by any other standard. The stature of the fullness of Christ. The fullness of Christ. Just like Jesus. There is no other standard we look too. We have no other goal. That is our goal, our focus.

Verse 14: "that we should no longer be children . . . but, speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into Him who is the head – Christ."

This is speaking of our present place in the womb of the church. We are growing up in all things into Him. Being conformed to His image.

Verse 16: "From whom the whole body joined and knit together by what every joint supplies, according to the effective working by which every part does its share, causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself in love."

This is a corporate growth. We are talking about the body of Christ. We are being developed in the same way that, from the moment of conception, the development of a child takes place in the womb. Week by week, step by step, until that child is fully formed and comes out into the world to be seen by all as the son of the father and the son of the mother.

So we are going through a very similar process, developing step by step, not just as individuals, but as members of the body of Christ. Both/and. This is a process each of us individually is going through, as an individual believer, and it is the process that we together as a body of believers are going through as we build one another up in love.

It is a process of development. Being transformed from glory to glory as we keep our eyes on the measurement, the goal, that is the stature of all the fullness of Christ.

Now, I want to look a little more closely at how we are being made like Jesus. There are many approaches to this process. The Spirit of God in the New Covenant uses many illustrations and metaphors in the Bible, both Old Testament and New Testament, to teach us of this process. And all of these illustrations ought to be taught to the church of Jesus Christ over and over. We need to understand! This process we are going through right now is so important to God that He has given us innumerable ways to look at it and understand it.

Later in this series, I will look at the role of the body. Paul describes it in Romans and 2 Corinthians, the role of our physical, mortal bodies, that is critical and central to this process.

But right now, I want to look at the "just as" verses. There are quite a number, over a dozen "just as" verses. They are very intriguing. I would like to look at just a few of them.

"Therefore you shall be perfect just as your Father in heaven is perfect." Matthew 5:48

This is the first of the "just as" verses in the New Testament. Now, this word in the Greek that is translated "just as" has a specific meaning. It means "just as." Or we could say, "just exactly as." That's what it means. It means what it says. "Just as" your Father in heaven is perfect.

Now, through my years as a Christian, I have heard plenty of argument and teaching as to why this verse does not mean what it says.

But let me point out something to you. God does not give us His words in the New Covenant to debate, to analyze, to rationalize, or to define one way or the other. He gives us His words in the New Testament for one purpose and one purpose only and that is to believe them, that they might find a lodging place inside of our faith, so that the Word God speaks can bring forth the life that is in it inside of us.

It is not my place to fit this verse into acceptable doctrine. It is my place only to believe it. If I am not here to believe what God says, then I have no place doing anything at all with it. If I cannot believe it, then it is not for me. If I cannot believe what God says, then God did not speak it to me. The only thing we can say, when God speaks a word like this, is to say with Mary, "I am Your servant, let it be to me according to Your Word."

God did not speak this word so that people who would not receive it in faith and believe it, no matter how impossible it might sound, He did not speak this word so that people who do not believe it can then explain why it doesn't mean what it says.

No, He spoke it so that we would believe it.

The word, being received by faith, a word coming out of the very bosom of God into our spirits, that we might receive it by faith, that the power and the life that is inside that word would be able to work in our lives and bring forth the life that is in it.

Our part is to believe. The power is inside the word. The responsibility of fulfillment is inside the word. The word itself has plenty of power inside it to fulfill itself in our lives. What we do is believe.

Now these words that Jesus spoke here in Mathew 5:48 are spoken to us as a commandment from God. This is one of the commandments of the New Covenant. Whatever we understand it to mean, it is a commandment directed to us. Now we need to understand what the commandments of the New Covenant are for, versus this thing that has carried over to us from Adam, the mindset of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

We spoke earlier of a principle of God, that when God creates something, when God brings forth the desire of His heart, His purpose, His plan, He looks at the end. He sees what He has already accomplished; He looks at the finished product; and then with His eyes fixed on that finished product, He calls it into existence. He calls those things that be not as thought they are. And all the way through the process of creation, God has His eyes fixed entirely on the final goal.

That is what He sees.

Of course, what I have just described to you is trying to fit God into the realm of time, because that is how we think. But God doesn't fit into the realm of time. With God, everything is right now. Everything that was to us is right now with God. Everything that will be to us is right now with God. And so our completed state, who and what we are when God is finished with us, is present right now with God. And when God relates with us, He relates on the basis of our finished state which is right now present with God.

And we know that, although we don't know exactly what we look like, John says that we will be just like Jesus because the goal is to be conformed to the image of Jesus Christ. When God sees me, He sees me fully developed, standing before Him, conformed to the image of His Son. That is who I am.

And then God speaks that word into time and into the earth. The question is, will I believe what He says? Will the Word that God speaks find its resting place inside of faith inside of me?

So when God says "You shall be perfect" --- whatever it means, it means Jesus, and it means me being conformed to His image.

Now there is a principle in the gospel, a principle concerning faith. It is not performance. We will never see the fulfillment of what Jesus says by gritting our teeth and doing it. There is a process by which these things are fulfilled in our lives, and if we fail to go through the steps of that process we will never see the Word God speaks fulfilled in us.

The first step of that process is to hear and to believe. But then we go to the next step which is in Romans 10.

"What does it say? 'The word is near you, even in your mouth and in your heart' (that is, the word of faith which we preach): that if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved" – [you will be conformed to the image of Jesus Christ. Every time we see the word saved, we see it pointing directly to the fulfillment of God's purpose in our lives.] "For with the heart one believes to righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made to salvation."

Understand that, as Jesus spoke in the parable of the sower, the birds, the devil, come and snatch the word away so that those who receive it don't even know what it means, so, if you define this word "to salvation" as meaning "go to heaven when I die," then understand that Satan has just snatched the word God speaks out of your earth and you can never bring forth its fruit. That is why I say that the greatest doctrine of devils ever given to the church is the teaching that salvation means "going to heaven."

We believe in our hearts what God says, and then we speak with our mouths and by speaking that word with our mouth we are saved, we are conformed to the image of Jesus Christ. God spoke it, I believe it. I speak it. I speak what God says. This is part of how we are being transformed. We are transformed by the renewing of our mind, by changing the way we think. And we change the way we think by the words of our mouth. The word is near you, the word of faith which we speak in our mouth and in our heart.

Jesus said "Be perfect" -- I look at my finished state. That is who I am. And I confess with my mouth, "I am perfect, just as my Father in heaven is perfect." And so I see myself as God sees me. And I see the obedience of that word working itself out in my life. I am not going to accomplish obedience to this word by grit, by performance, by buckling down and trying to fulfill it. I will see its fulfillment in my life by believing it, by confessing it, and by believing that the Spirit of Christ in me is always accomplishing the power and the life of that word inside of me.

This is how the word God speaks to us is fulfilled in our lives.

"But since we have the same spirit of faith, according to what is written, 'I believed and therefore I spoke,' we also believe and therefore speak." 2 Corinthians 4:13

We confess with our mouth the Lord Jesus; we speak what we believe.

Verse 14: "Knowing that He who raised up the Lord Jesus will also raise us up with Jesus, and will present us with you."

We believe, and therefore we speak because we know that the purpose of God in our lives will be fulfilled as we believe.

And so we are perfect just as our Father in heaven is perfect. This is who we are, this is who Christ is in us.

What does it mean to be perfect in this context? Many teachers of the word say that it means to be mature. I have no problem with that. Because the operative word here is neither "perfect" nor "mature." The operative word here is "just as." Whatever it means, it's just like the Father. If it means a maturity, that is a good way to see it. The Father is mature, that means He is what He is and He does what He is and every part of Him is in full agreement with who and what He is.

And so a believer who is mature, according to the New Testament, is one out of whose belly flow rivers of living water, he is one who contains all the fullness of God, a mature believer is one who defeats the accuser of the brethren and casts him down out of the heavens. One who is mature is just like Jesus, conformed to the measure of the stature of all the fullness of Christ.

But the context of this verse in Matthew 5 is the sermon on the mount. And Jesus says in verse 43, "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor' and hate your enemy. But I say to you, love your enemies. . . be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect."

When it says, "Be just like your Father." Be just like your Father. Be just exactly like your Father, loving your enemies. The context here is the context of loving your enemies.

And so we do find this word "perfect" all the way through the New Testament always associated with love. Love is the bond of perfection. We are made perfect in love. To be like God is to love.

Many Christians shy away from this thought of being like God even though we are commanded to be like God, because of a passage in the Old Testament that talks about Lucifer.

Many Christans believe that Lucifer fell because he wanted to be like God. That is not what the Bible says. Isaiah did not say that Lucifer wanted to be like God. If Lucifer had wanted to be like God, God would have been pleased. If Lucifer had come to Him and said, "God, I admire You, You are awesome and glorious. I would like to learn Your ways. I would like to be like You. I would like to love as You love. I would like to show mercy in the way that You show mercy. I would like to be kind in the way that You are kind." God would have been thrilled. God would have said, "Let me help you."

The Bible does not say that Lucifer wanted to be like God. Isaiah says that Lucifer said in his heart, "I will be like God." There is a big difference there. First of all it starts with the word "I." He did not go to the Father and say "Show me." But more than that, Lucifer had a conception in his mind of what it meant to be like God. And Lucifer did not want to be like God , he wanted to be like what he imagined God to be.

And that is the human problem with this word "perfect," or fully mature, either way. We have this conception of God that is Satanic. We have a Satanic view of God. We see God as the controller, as the one in power, as the one who can do whatever He wants. As the one who always gets His way. And so in movies about someone who comes as God, it is someone who by the flash of his hands makes things happen according to his present desires and lusts and wants. And this is a Satanic view of what it means to be like God.

This is not our Father.

Jesus said, "Come unto me all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest . . . for I am meek and lowly of heart."

To be like God is to be meek and lowly of heart. God does not think of Himself more highly than He ought to think. Now, you imagine, but God is the tops, of course He can think of Himself as He wishes. No, God is lowly of heart. God never brags about Himself. He brags about His Son, but He never brags about Himself.

God does not control, neither can He do anything that He wants. God cannot do anything He 'wants.' God is bound by His own word. And God does not control or manipulate. Why is there evil in the universe? Because God does not control or manipulate. God does not force anyone to do what He wants them to do. Everyone is free from God.

Not so with Satan. Satan binds people with chains and turns them into slaves. With God everyone is always free. God only accepts service that comes out of love. God is not impressed with performance.

And so this maturity, this being perfect like God, is rooted in love, in tenderness, in kindness.

We have the idea that, if we spend too much time on verse 48, we will get self-centered and self-focused, that we will become concerned about our own perfection and that this will become proudfulness for us. This thought is amazing to me, and again, it is because we have a Satanic definition of God. You cannot be like God and be proud. Being like God and pride are as far apart as day is from night, east is from west. There is no relationship between the two.

One who is like God is one who is like Jesus because Jesus shows us what God is like. To be like God, to be perfect as God is perfect, that is to love, even our enemies, is to be the kind of person that is always thinking about other people. Always seeking to bless, always seeking to lift up, always seeking to encourage. Always seeking to meet other people's needs, whatever those needs might be. In gentleness, in kindness, with a lowly heart, not thinking themselves to be anything of themselves and yet resting in the certainty of who they are in Christ.

This is one who is like God. And this is just the beginning of the "just as" verses.

Be just like the Father. Be just like the Father.

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