The Promise of Perfection
It is so important to realize that those famous words at the last part of the fifth
chapter of Matthew, "Be you therefore perfect even as your father in heaven is
perfect," are a promise and not an imperative. It is so important because in the
Greek there, the future and the imperative are spelled the same way. If you hear it
as, "you've got to be perfect in order to earn God's favor," you have missed the
point altogether. Hear it [instead] as the promise of what God's grace wants to
make of you eventually, hear Jesus saying, "If you will let the grace of God into
your life and keep acknowledging that you need that and that you want to grow,
then I promise you perfection, full-grownness, completeness." That is where God is
going to take every one of us, because the goal God had in creating us was that
we would share God's kind of joy and come to the fullness of the measure of the
stature of Christ. It is promise and not demand that is the essence of the
gospel.
--from the sermon " Never Never Never Give Up"
by the Rev. Dr. John R. Claypool

Read the sermon in its entirety.