If we kept a list of all that Jesus lays out in Matthew 5 about God’s perfect way, none of us could ever check off each element to perfection. Even if we wanted to, when we hear Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, we see our real condition: We are imperfect. In other words, we fail to fulfill the desires God has for us. When Jesus shows us His perfect law—what it looks like to live without sin, without doing anything bad—we see that we are all sinners.

The crowd Jesus was speaking to was made up of all different kinds of people; some thought they were pretty perfect in God’s eyes, others were ashamed and knew that they weren’t, and others may not have thought too much about how God saw them at all. Here Jesus lays out the purpose of the perfect law of the Old Testament (think of the Ten Commandments): to show us that God the Father is perfect, that we are not, and yet that we can have hope.

That seems funny . . . hope? Yes, hope. Jesus says, “Don’t misunderstand why I have come. I did not come to abolish [destroy] the law of Moses or the writings of the prophets [the Old Testament]. No, I came to accomplish their purpose” (Matthew 5:17). Jesus was stating that He could keep the law, and through Him, imperfect people could be forgiven of their sin and seen as perfect again by their heavenly Father. We can have hope when we believe in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of our faults! He came to save us from a checklist we couldn’t keep.