“Be you perfect, even as I am perfect.”
God-knowing creatures have only one supreme ambition, just one consuming desire, and that is to become, as they are in their spheres, like him as he is in his Paradise perfection of personality and in his universal sphere of righteous supremacy. From the Universal Father who inhabits eternity there has gone forth the supreme mandate, “Be you perfect, even as I am perfect.” In love and mercy the messengers of Paradise have carried this divine exhortation down through the ages and out through the universes, even to such lowly animal-origin creatures as the human races of Urantia. [Paper 1:0.3, page 21.3]
When I read this paragraph for the first time, many emotions and doubts filled my mind. There are so many truths in this text that it’s difficult to choose which to focus on.
One thing that gets our attention is the perfection of God. When we think about God, his perfection, and our desire to fulfill his command to be perfect as he is, we can become confused.
A first thought would be the mistaken idea that reaching the perfection of God is the same thing as “becoming a God.” Of course, it is a mistaken idea since God is much more than a perfect being. His perfection could perhaps be summed up as his unity and balance, the unity of the physical, mental and spiritual energies divinely coordinated by personality. Yes, this is something we can achieve if we wish. Yet God IS, not only the unity of these energies, but he is the source of them. We can achieve balance and unity of our physical, mental and spiritual energies but we will never become the source of those energies. Yes, we can be perfect as he IS in our spheres of action, but we would never “be God.”
Another aspect may be our understanding of what the perfection of God is. We can formulate various hypotheses or ideas about this, including features of perfection that are far beyond our comprehension. No matter how good our idea is about our Father’s perfection, it will still be infinitely short of his absolute perfection. We can even formulate misconceptions about our Father’s perfection. These thoughts can bring us a lot of anxiety and they can lead us to wrong choices, or even cause great frustration and discouragement if we believe that this is an impossible goal to be achieved.
But knowing that our Father is good and that he loves us, is just and merciful, we can immediately overcome many of our doubts, such as the fact that our Father would not require from us an unreachable mission. Thus, we can be confident that we can reach this goal.
The teachings state that perfection is achieved when we reach balance of our personality, unifying our physical, mental, and spiritual energies, where physical energy is subordinated to the mental energy and coordinated by the spirit.
This task is undoubtedly a great challenge, which requires effort, dedication, persistence, and faith. This brings us to another aspect mentioned in this paragraph:
“God-knowing creatures have only one supreme ambition, just one consuming desire, and that is to become, as they are in their spheres, like him as he is in his Paradise perfection of personality and in his universal sphere of righteous supremacy.” [emphasis added]
How much ambition and desire does it require to reach this purpose of reaching God and becoming perfect as he is?
We usually set up so many priorities for ourselves and for our own children that we often simply lose sight of the most important priority of our lives. In connection with this theme, it is opportune to recall another paragraph of the teachings brought to us by our Master Jesus, the most perfect, balanced, and unified personality we have ever had on Urantia:
Jesus portrayed the profound surety of the God-knowing mortal when he said: “To a God-knowing kingdom believer, what does it matter if all things earthly crash?” [100:2.7]
It seems that our creature disorientation creates problems when setting priorities and goals; this comes from the single reason which is our relative lack of God-knowing.
How do we get to know God? We just need to seek for him in our hearts and then serve our brothers and sisters. We just need to feel him acting through us.