Love Your Enemies

We have been walking through Jesus’ most famous sermon, the sermon on the mount. Over the last several weeks we have examined his interpretation of select Jewish laws. His purpose in this section of the sermon was to show how his audience has been led to an improper understanding or intent of the law of God. There is a repeated phrase, “You have heard that it was said…but I say to you.” We arrive now at the final of these subjects, and the final is the most difficult.

I believe the order in which these laws were presented and addressed is intentional. This final charge to love one’s enemies comes right after the charge to adopt an attitude of non-retaliation. There is a purpose in him doing so, and I believe it drives home the final point as the transition from being to doing takes place. Chapter 5 is heavily focused on who the Christian is and then transitions to what the Christian does. There are numerous being verbs. Even in the challenges to interpreting the law, there is an understanding of who one is that drives him to behave in a particular fashion that makes him stand out from the rest of the world.

Let us take a look at this last section together:

Matthew 5:43–48 NASB95

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ “But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. “For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? “If you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? “Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

The command to love your neighbor is nothing new for Jesus’ audience. This command can be found in Lev. 19:18, and in context the command prohibits taking vengeance against someone or bearing grudges. Rather, they are to love their neighbor as themselves. When Jesus was asked which was the greatest commandment, he cited Deut. 6:5:

Deuteronomy 6:5 NASB95

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.

Then he said the second is like it and quoted the final part of Lev. 19:18, “you shall love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus places as high priority love for God and love for others as, or in the same way as you love yourself. There is no command anywhere in scripture that says to hate your enemy. This came from the tradition of Jewish teachers, not from the law of God. Remember, this is what Jesus was contesting. The Pharisees elevated their traditions above the law of God. They also seemed to shoot for the bare minimum. They will love their neighbor, but God didn’t say anything about their enemies. Therefore, loving your enemy was not an obligation. But Jesus is here telling us that we are supposed to love them and pray for them!

Can you believe it? We have to love our enemies too? And pray for them? Do you have any idea what they have done to me?! Then the next two words that begin verse 45 are “so that.” These two words are a purpose statement. In other words, we love and pray for our enemies for a purpose. That purpose is: we may be sons and daughters of our Father who is in heaven. This is perhaps an incomplete translation of the original Greek text. At a glance, it may look like doing these things helps us become sons or daughters of our Father in heaven. The better way of reading this would be that we show ourselves to be sons and daughters of our Father in heaven. The New Living Translation helps us see this:

Matthew 5:45 (NLT)

In that way, you will be acting as true children of your Father in heaven...

The point here is that loving your enemies shows that you are children of God. Therefore,

We make Christ tangible when we love our enemies.

Love is better expressed than spoken. We have talked about this before. You can say you love someone all you want to, but it is not until you demonstrate what you say through action that those words make any difference. Everyone has some idea of what it means to love others, and it all revolves around things done for the good of the other person. We are called not only to love one another in Christian community, but to go the extra mile and love our enemies as well. In so doing, we will demonstrate the love of Christ in a way that is tangible. You can tell your enemies Jesus loves them all you want to, but Jesus wants you to do more than that. He wants you to love them as you love yourself.

You might say, “But Jesse you don’t know what this person has done to me. You don’t know how that person has mistreated me. You don’t know how hard it is to love that person.” You are right. I don’t. But God does. You are incapable of loving your enemy the way Jesus wants you to without his help and his power. But the expectation is that you do it.

You might be asking yourself why. I know Jesus is telling us to do this, but why? The answer comes in the second part of verse 45:

Matthew 5:45 (NASB95)

...for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.

Every day the sun rises over the house of the evil and the righteous alike. When it rained this past week, it rained on your house and the house of that person you are thinking about alike. What is Jesus saying here? The grace and the mercy you receive is bestowed on all people, not just you. Could you imagine what it would look like if the rain fell just on the Christians’ properties? Could you imagine if the sun rose tomorrow and only the Christians received its benefits? The evil person wouldn’t last very long. Many might come to God not because of his love, but because of what he can provide. Yet, this is how we treat love isn’t it? We are usually willing to love someone so long as there is something in it for us. That’s not love. That’s selfishness.

Look again at what he says next:

Matthew 5:46–47 NASB95

“For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? “If you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?

If we love only those who love us back, how are we any different than the rest of the world? Tax collectors and Gentiles were the two most hated groups of people in Israel. These are some stern words from Jesus. If you don’t love your enemy, you are no better than the people you claim to detest. Why? Because they don’t do it either.

Why do we love our enemies and pray for them? Because Jesus did.

Before we were God’s children, we were his enemies.

The Bible tells us that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. The wages of that sin is death. We are owed eternal separation from God for the crimes we committed against him. There is no amount of good we can do to undo what we have done against a holy and perfect God.

Romans 5:6–10 NASB95

For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will hardly die for a righteous man; though perhaps for the good man someone would dare even to die. But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God through Him. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.

You and I did not exist yet, but God knew we would sin. It is in our nature to do so. We were born with it. When God provided Christ as the substitute for our sin, he knew we would need rescue. We have gone from enemies to children.

Ephesians 2:1–7 NASB95

And you were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest. But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.

We all walked in sin until God showed his love for us by making us alive in Christ. He did so by providing his son to be the substitution for us on a cross, all so he could put love on display. We were his enemies, but now his children.

Colossians 1:21–22 NASB95

And although you were formerly alienated and hostile in mind, engaged in evil deeds, yet He has now reconciled you in His fleshly body through death, in order to present you before Him holy and blameless and beyond reproach—

We were alienated, but now reconciled in order to be presented as holy and blameless! The final verse in our passage today is a call to perfection as God is perfect. This is unachievable on our own. Instead, we must first recognize that this is our position before God on account of the work Jesus Christ has done on the cross. Second, we must allow him to work this out in our lives as we surrender to his authority and obey his commandments.

We are to love our enemies and pray for them. We do this understanding this is what Christ did for us. We were enemies of God, yet Christ died for us so we might be reconciled to God. This leaves the question of how. How do we do this? I want to close with a story.

Louis Zamperini was an Olympic athlete and World War II veteran turned evangelist after coming to faith in Christ during a Billy Graham crusade. In his early life, he got into a lot of trouble. He was a great athlete, but then World War II came and he enlisted into the Air Force. During his service, his aircraft went down and he became a prisoner of war at a Japanese prisoner of war camp. He was severely beaten and mistreated for about two years until the end of the war. After coming to faith years later, he had the opportunity to visit Japan including the prison where many of his captors were being held as war prisoners. He forgave them all, and it is reported that some came to faith in Christ as a result.

This is the heart of Jesus. We spat in God’s face and he gave us mercy. Where we deserve the wrath and judgment of Almighty God, he loved us so much that he would send his son to pay the penalty of our crimes toward him. When we get this and we understand how Christ bought our pardon, we begin to find the strength to turn the other cheek, to go the extra mile, to love our enemies. We all have people in our lives we probably wish would just go away. But what if God has this person in your life because you are the only Jesus they they can see? That changes how we think about them, how we talk about them, and how we interact with them.

How can you make Christ tangible to that person?