Better Than You Are

Better Than You Are

If you love only those who love you, what reward is there for that? Even corrupt tax collectors do that much. If you are kind only to your friends, how are you different from anyone else? Even pagans do that. But you are to be perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.

Matthew 5:46

As an author, James Michener made his mark in the literary world by producing massive historical novels such as his Pulitzer Prize–winning Tales of the South Pacific. Ironically, Michener’s style has drawn its strength and beauty from characters fleshed out with extensive genealogy and deep cultural roots, yet Michener himself is a man without a birth certificate. Abandoned as an infant, raised as a foster son in the Michener family headed by a widowed woman, James never knew his biological parents.

Despite his generous spirit and kind nature, Michener’s accomplishments raised the ire of one of his adoptive family members who wrote hate-filled, hurtful notes to James whenever his name gained fame. Even after Michener’s Pulitzer Prize, this poison-pen writer charged him with besmirching the good Michener name—which he said, “You have no right to use.” But the phrase this anonymous hate monger thrust the most deeply under Michener’s skin was, “Who do you think you are, trying to be better than you are?”

Michener says that the words of that note were “burned into my soul.” But Michener turned the negative power of that question into a life challenge. Michener admitted to missing the nasty letters when his relative presumably died: “He was right in all his accusations.” Michener confessed, “I have spent my life trying to be better than I was, and I am a brother to all who share the same aspiration.”^a

How about you? Are you trying to be better than you are? If so, it will be because you are aspiring to be the person God calls you to be. To be better than you are means choosing to love one another even when one of you becomes an uninvited critic. To be better than you are means choosing to become more Christlike. It means having more compassion, more grace, more forgiveness than you feel you are capable of.

Jesus asks a pointed question concerning this issue in the Sermon on the Mount, which is what today’s verse is drawn from. We are to “be perfect” in love toward others—all others. How is this possible? Especially when not all others will be perfect in love toward us? Of course, we all struggle and stumble on our path to imitating the Father, but in the process we become better than we are.

To become like Christ is the only thing in the whole world worth caring for, the thing before which every ambition of man is folly, and all lower achievement vain.

—Henry Drummond

^a 65