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I came across a book recently that was a word usage guide for older people delivering speeches to a modern generation. Over time, words tend to change meanings in any language and each new generation alters the meaning of a word slightly so that older books and phrases tend to be easily misunderstood. It was an interesting book. In my parent’s generation if something was cool, it was colder than room temperature or had been in the icebox. In my generation, we didn’t know what an icebox was and “cool” came to mean “in” or “catchy” or “neat” or “trendy.” I used to have the hardest time explaining to my dad how something could be “cool” and “hot” at the same time. He never grasped it. Nor did he ever figure out how if something were “cool” and “hot” that I still wasn’t referring to the temperature of it! Those words had changed meanings slightly. By the way, I didn’t buy the book because I’m still young. I’m still “cool” and know all the “hot” lingo.

Just a few decades ago, anything that was upbeat, uplifting, and cheery was termed “gay.” Today, probably few people here would want to go to a “gay” celebration because it would be vastly different than such an occasion twenty years ago. Words tend to change meaning over time. Sometimes drastically. It used to be that being “fat” meant that you had been hitting the buffets a little too much. But nowadays you can be thin and “phat” at the same time. That is, you are phat if you are “cool” and “hot!” I love it. I think such terms are “sweet.” Sorry, I’ve been hanging around young people too much the last few days!

For all of you that I have already lost, just be ‘cool’ and I’ll get back to the Bible. The point is that when we read the King James Version Bible, we sometimes run into words that cause confusion because we are reading English writing that is over 200 years old. Occasionally such a misunderstanding can have a serious impact on our spiritual understanding.

I bring all this up because there is no greater word change that has a greater spiritual impact than the English word “perfect” in the KJV. Today, we would say that “nobody’s perfect.” We would also be right in saying “that nobody will be perfect on their own in their earthly body.” And those statements are absolutely correct, because today “perfect” means “without fault, spotless, and without failure.” That’s the way we use it in this 21^st Century era.

That’s why it may be somewhat startling to read the commandment in our text of Jesus in Matthew:

We are commanded to be “perfect!” And to do so as God is perfect! If you think of perfection as we modernly think of perfection then there is not one of us who can be saved because none of us will ever be able to live up to this commandment and not fail. But that’s not what Jesus was saying. The word for “perfect” in the original languages -- both Hebrew and Greek -- means “to be complete; to be finished or mature; to grow toward what we should be as God would have us to do; to not stay a newborn babe in Christ.” A good modern way to define the Greek word here in this scripture might be to say “grow up.” Don’t stay a child spiritually, forever. Move beyond some of the basic issues. Learn to walk and feed yourself. We can understand it and obey this commandment in those terms. God’s not looking for us to never fail, but rather for us to mature in some areas. Most of you here have learned to walk and feed yourself. Every once in a while you still fall. Every once in a while you still get choked on a piece of food. If you slip and trip during the day, you don’t scream “I can’t walk” and go back to crawling. No, because you’ve grown beyond that. You know how to walk now. You just get back up and dust yourself off, let your broken bones heal, and keep going.

It’s the same way in living for God. We are demanded of God to be “perfect.” That simply means that we are to grow up to be mature in some things in God. Are you ever going to live where you never sin again in this life? No. But we are expected to grow beyond willful sinning all the time. Saying that you are going to keep sinning in an area that you know is wrong just because you’ll never be without a failure is like a kid saying “I don’t want to learn to walk because I’ll trip every once in a while.” If you want to please God, you’ve got to grow beyond some basic things. You’ve got to get some things that cause you to break the commandments of God’s Word out of your life and allow Him to change your desires. You may have to change some habits. You may have to change some friends and hangouts. You may have to change some entertainment choices. That’s normal and needed, because we must be “perfect.” We must grow up spiritually. We must move beyond just trying to stay saved from Sunday to Sunday to being the body of Christ and allowing Him to work through us! There is a scripture that we quote but don’t always completely grasp all that it’s saying:

That scripture is saying that you’re not going to live ungodly and sinful and be saved. But it’s also saying more than that. If the righteous scarcely be saved, then where does that leave the ungodly and the sinner? In other words if those who are saved are barely squeaking by and struggling to be over comers in everyday life, then who is going to win the lost and show them the truth!? If your walk with God never gets beyond just barely making it and “baby level” Christianity, then who is going to pray others through and lead them and teach them? The church is supposed to be a family but a family has to have someone mature in it to help the younger ones along. Some of us need to “grow up” and stop playing around with sin and walking the line where one fall can take us over the salvation brink. You can walk right on the edge of a cliff and maybe be safe, but if you trip, that fall’s going to likely be disastrous. But if you get several feet off of the edge and walk there, then a fall might simply cause you a temporary pause. Christians who never make the complete life commitment to this thing and allow God to work on the weights and habits in their life are living right on the edge. They are crawling when they should be walking. It’s time to be perfect. It’s time to live far enough away from the line that when you slip, you don’t lose out with God! And even when you are “down” you are still in a position to help someone away from the edge! It’s time to grow up! It’s time to be perfect in the sense that God meant it! We are commanded to be perfect!

And let me say that you are going to fall. Therefore, you need to get off the fence line. You are going to make mistakes so get off the edge and dive into this thing. Get so far away from the world that a mess up doesn’t take you over the edge! Get away from the weights that drug you down last year so far that if someone were to grab you and throw you, they couldn’t get you over the edge. Get so far away that a storm can’t blow you off!

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Be perfect as God is perfect! That’s the command. So what exactly does that mean? What are some practical ways that we can change our life to fulfill that scripture? I could go many different directions right here, but the best way to obey this command is through perfecting our emotions. If Christians would perfect their emotions, we wouldn’t have saints that never failed, but we would have Christians who made it living for God and fulfilled the will of God in their lives, and so for the remainder of this message let me talk to you about your emotions.

You and I are emotional creatures. Our personalities are different but our emotions are the same. Everybody is emotional. We are that way because we were created in God’s image. And God’s an emotional God. Look at somebody and say “we serve an emotional God.” Now look at them and say “you are too emotional!”

So what it mean to be perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect? Whatever it means, it’s not to lose your emotions because our God is very emotional. God is our example, but some people think that the Bible wants them to lose all personality and emotional response and live as robots. Nothing is further from the truth. God, our perfect example has personality, that’s where our personalities came from. And God, our perfect example is a very emotional being. Let me give you some examples in the scriptures:

God is a jealous God. Maybe it sounds funny, but God went as far as to say that one of His names is “Jealous!”

God was jealous of His creation’s worship and adoration. He doesn’t want you to give yourselves to any other deity or god. He doesn’t want you to be more passionate about the things of this world than His kingdom! He’s a jealous God! I don’t think God is pleased when men and women replace Spirit-filled worship with idolatry. I don’t think that He smiles when people will spend thousands of dollars to go to a stadium and scream their head off for some thug dribbling a basketball and then come to church on Sunday and put a couple of George Washington’s in the offering plate and sit there like a bump on a dill pickle while the Spirit of God tries to do something great in their lives! I don’t think God is happy when people will sell out for 40 years to living for the devil with total devotion and yet can’t sell out to God enough to regularly attend worship services. I don’t think God is content when His people can play video games or read the latest novel or watch television for hours and grumble if a sermon is over 45 minutes or can only read their Bible for two minutes! If you can talk to a total stranger on the street for an hour about nothing and can’t talk to the One who made you and knows everything about your life for 15 minutes a day, then I don’t think God takes that in stride! He’s a mighty God. His name is jealous! He created you to have a personal relationship with Him. He takes it personal when you can’t “fit Him into your schedule.” God is jealous!

God gets happy sometimes. This is scripture also. Jesus said:

Another scripture says that the “angels behold the face of God” in heaven. In the portrait of heaven in Revelation 4 and 5 we find that the throne of God is in the center of everything and all of the angelic host faces Him. So why would the angels get joy when a sinner repents, because they are responding to what they are seeing on the throne of Glory! God gets happy when one person turns to Him and begins to approach Him with the intention of making things right!

We need to maybe alter the mentality of what is a “great service” to match that of God’s. Some judge whether or not we had a good service by how many people we had there. God judges it by how many repented and sought Him. If we have a thousand people and nobody seeks God and is changed, then that service was a failure. God doesn’t get excited about choirs or good praise choruses or good sermons or warm fuzzy feelings -- unless those things lead to someone getting down to business and getting real with Him! Someone coming to Him is what makes Him happy! Evangelists and pastors and some saints rejoice over the “hundreds” but God rejoices over the “one!”

God sometimes gets sad. It sounds crazy but God does get saddened by certain things. One of the chief things is unbelief when people harden their hearts and refuse to believe that He can actually do what He says that He can do. The scripture says:

In another place, we find that Lazarus was dead and had been in the tomb for four days and at the tomb the Bible says in it’s shortest verse:

But go back and read the story. He wasn’t weeping at the loss of a friend because He was about to raise Him up! Jesus wept because of the unbelief of those who were supposed to be His followers. A lack of faith is the greatest saddening agent of God.

God loves some things. In particular, God loves certain actions and attitudes. The Bible says that:

That word “righteous” means someone who is in right standing with God, obeying His Word. Some other things that God loves might surprise you. Paul said:

God loves a “cheerful giver.” God doesn’t want His people to give grudgingly or with the attitude that they “have to.” God gave cheerfully. We just completed the Christmas season where we read about the angels shouting about “joy to the world” because of the birth of that baby! That baby was being born to die. That baby was being born with the cross in his future and yet God was happy about it! God came to give the ultimate sacrifice and did so cheerfully! He was excited to come and die for the chance that we might serve Him. That’s why it aggravates God for people who have been given everything that they have by Him anyway to grumble about their sacrifice of time, offerings, money, praise, faithfulness, or whatever. Your sacrifice is very little compared to His! Give what you have cheerfully! You are not doing God a favor, but you are returning to Him the praise and offerings that He is worthy of! And God loves cheerful givers because they are the people most like Him!

God hates some things. If God loves some things, then He must hate some things! there are a lot of things that God hates. They are listed as “abominations” unto Him. An abomination means something that God despises! There are more things in the Bible that are listed as things that God hates than there are things listed that God loves. Listen to some of these things:

God spoke out against sexual promiscuity when He said:

The Nicolaitans practiced wife swapping. They were involved in intimacy outside of the marriage vows, before and after. And God spoke against it and said “I hate it.” We don’t have time to list the abominations that God hates, but they are such things as prostitution, human sacrifice, marital affairs, and yes, homosexuality. In fact, God said that He not only hates homosexuality but that it was an abomination unto Him for men and women to dress alike and not have distinctive garments. God wants male and female to dress and act and talk like their respective genders. He wants them to be distinctively different. Men need to be masculine. Women need to be feminine. You are not born that way, but it’s a submission issue to God’s Word and Spirit. Go read Romans 1 sometime and you’ll find out that homosexuality is just a grown up spirit of rebellion. It’s a spiritual issue and not a genetic one! When men dress like women and women dress like men and act like each other, it’s the by product of rebellion against the word and the will of God. That’s why our society is pushing the unisex, homosexual agenda because the majority of our society is in direct rebellion to the way that God’s Word has commanded them to live!

Which brings us to our next trait of God:

God gets mad some times. Maybe this is a surprise to you, but God gets ticked sometimes. He got angry when His people became a bunch of complainers and whiners:

God got mad again when His people refused to stand up against the enemies in the Promised Land and enter into and fight for the promises that God had given them:

Don’t get me wrong, God doesn’t fly off the handle all the time. The scripture says:

Thank God for His mercy! But He does get angry at times, even though most preachers won’t preach about it! And lest you think that God only got angry back in the Old Testament, let me read you a scripture from the New:

I can tell you one thing! This bald preacher doesn’t want God mad at him! I don’t want God angry with me! Heaven will be great because it will be the pure love of God for eternity without His judgment. But Hell will be horrible because it will be the anger of God for eternity without His mercy! God will be in hell -- there’s no place that you can go to escape His presence, but it will be a side of God that you don’t want to see! And let me say this: when we study prophecy, you will find that God hath “not appointed us to wrath.” We may have to endure some things, but if you are Spirit-filled and washed in the blood of Jesus Christ, you will go in the rapture of the church and miss the wrath of God! And you’ll miss it both on earth and in eternity! I want God to like me! I don’t want to do anything that would cause God to be angry! I don’t want our church to be as the temple in Jerusalem which lacked prayer and became a big society center and not a place of true worship, because the Bible says that when Jesus visited that church, He removed His belt, braided it into a whip, and furiously drove them out! Jesus is coming back again, and you don’t want to be on that side of the table when He comes! That’s why God has sent you a preacher to prod you and try to get you to change some things. Don’t get mad at the preacher, because he’s just trying to get you on the right side of the tables for Jesus’ second coming!

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Look at someone and say “God is an emotional God!” And some of you are wondering what the point is and here it is: God is emotional. He gets angry, happy, mad, sad, jealous, you name it and He does it. But God is perfect and sinless. He is the spotless Lamb. He makes no mistakes and so if that is true then it must also be true that to be emotional in itself is not a sin. It’s not a sin to love and be happy. Because God does those things and He’s perfect. If that’s true then it’s not a sin to be mad or angry. It’s not necessarily a sin to be jealous. Have I got your attention yet? Those things in themselves, those emotions are not necessarily bad and here’s the key: emotions are only negative when they are used wrongly.

Love can be a good thing. Love can also be a bad thing. It depends on what you love what your emotion is directed towards. John wrote to the church and said:

John wrote about “perfect love!” Our problems does not come from being too emotional or not enough emotional. It doesn’t come from having emotions in the first place because emotions are not bad things in themselves. Our problem is that our emotions are not perfect. That is we have been born again of the water and the Spirit and yet we have not allowed our use of the God-given emotions within us to grow up and be applied toward the right things. We love, but some of us love the wrong things. Furthermore, we hate, but some of us hate the wrong things. David wrote in our text that:

David did not sin in his hatred because he had “perfect hatred.” He had learn to hate the ways of living that were against the will of God. That’s why Solomon said:

And so I’m preaching to you that God gave you the ability to hate and love because He wanted you to learn to love the things that He loves and hate the things that He hates! We need perfect love. We need perfect hatred. Instead of loving sin and the ways of the world and hating church, and the Word of God, and the kingdom of God we need for our emotions to become perfect and flip on those things! Do you know how to make it living for God? You get perfect love! Love is a choice. You choose what you love. Lust is simply what we call imperfect love. It’s choosing to love something or somebody for the wrong motives or the wrong reasons. But somebody get perfect love in your life this year! I’m going to love the Word of God. I’m going to love Jesus Christ. I’m going to love people who please God. I’m going to love obedience and submission. I’m going to choose to love the things that God loves! I’m going to love prayer. I’m going to be glad when they said unto me “let us go into the house of the Lord.” I’m going to be glad when it’s time to worship! I’m going to rejoice when I’m counted worthy to be persecuted for His name’s sake!

Do you want to know the secret to living for God successfully? It’s getting a perfect hatred. A hatred for sin and what it does to your walk with God and others. A hatred for the lusts of the flesh and the pride of life that distracts you from your true purpose. A hatred for the paths that lead to unrighteousness and spiritual ruin. You need to get a hatred for the things that cause you to fall into the same pit again and again and again. Rather than inviting the devil into your house, you ought to get a hatred for the things that he is trying to slip in and stand and fight.

In the world you got angry and when you finally got angry enough it caused you to “do something about it.” You got out of character. You stepped out of your personality for a little while. You did things that you never dreamed that you would, when you got mad enough! To my knowledge, I have punched three people in my life. I’m not a physical bruiser by nature but one day when I was about eight, I’d had enough from a bully twice my size and I turned and with everything in my bony little frame I turned his nose into a strawberry pancake. I was looking for a 2x4 when to my astonishment he ran out of the barn crying and went home! I never had another problem with him after I got mad enough to get past my fear of failure and stand up for what was right.

I’m not advocating settling your disagreements with fists. But I’m preaching to some of you whom the devil is messing with over and over and over again because he knows that you aren’t really going to do anything about it! He knows that he can bully you into not worshipping and not praying. He knows that all it takes is a few bad days to get you distracted from winning souls. He knows that it’s just not in your personality to be all that you should be in God and stand up and received the anointing that God has for you. After all your mother didn’t. Your daddy didn’t. And the devil is convinced that you ain’t gonna do anything great for God either, and that’s why he messes with you. But I’ve got a word for you from God and it says:

God gave you the ability to be angry, not because He wanted you to punch somebody’s lights out but because He wanted you to be angry enough to stand up to the lies of Satan and get out of character and out of your personality and out of your spiritual level and mediocre commitment and face your giant with faith in God and His power! Somebody needs to get mad enough at the devil to live for God with everything in you! You need a perfect hatred!

And at the same time you need to get happy in God! And get a perfect joy and win somebody to God! If you really want to know what true joy is, then win somebody to Christ. Lead somebody to repentance. Teach somebody a Bible Study on the importance of Jesus’ name baptism. Pray somebody through to the Baptism of the Holy Ghost! Then you’ll find out the highest level of joy possible, because you are getting excited about the things that God gets excited about! God gets excited about “one sinner who repents.” You don’t have to be a brain surgeon to figure out that if everybody this year were to win ONE person to God, that our church would double this year. We could have 200 on Sunday mornings! But let me tell you what else would happen. If everyone would just win one soul this year, we’d have the happiest church in Texas, because we would have perfect joy! We would be mature enough to be happy over the things that God gets happy over!

And a little bit of Godly jealousy wouldn’t hurt either. If ever the church needed perfect jealousy, it’s today. Don’t get jealous of other people and what they have or don’t have. But DO get jealous of your time with God. DO get jealous of your consecration and daily walk with God. Guard your relationship and time and worship jealously against the cares of life that want to steal it from you! We don’t need to lose our emotions, we just need to perfect them! God gave them for a reason, but this needs to be the year that we get them directed to the right things and for the right causes!

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I need my emotions perfected. My emotions and objects of my affections need to grow up. I’ve been born again! I want to love, hate, desire, destroy, and build up as God does!

Open your Bibles to one final passage of scripture. Psalms 101 is the “perfect” psalm and it needs to be our prayer tonight. David said:

Let me read it to you in the Today’s English Version. David said:

That’s the prayer of someone who wanted emotional perfection before God. Let’s join David and ask God to help us become as He is in every area of our life. Let’s ask God to perfect our emotions! Prayer is the key to perfect emotions.