Jesus: The Loving God

We are continuing this week with our sermon series “All About Jesus.” We are looking at the impact that Jesus had on the Jewish people and the Gentiles during his life and how he should also be impacting us today.

We are having the book “Letters to Marc about Jesus” by Henri Nouwen help us with our understanding of the role that Jesus can play in our lives. You can find each of our previous sermons from this series on our You Tube channel

This week we are focusing on “Jesus: The Loving God.” Our scripture comes from Luke 6:27-36.

27 “But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, 28 bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. 29 If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also. If someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them. 30 Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. 31 Do to others as you would have them do to you.

32 “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. 33 And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. 34 And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full. 35 But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. 36 Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

Let us pray…

One of if the most famous scripture in all of the Bible is a reminder to us about the love of God. It tells us that “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that who so ever believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.”

This series has shown us over and over again that Jesus is a loving God. We can discover his love for us by him coming down to earth and offering us that example of how to live a life connected to God through the Holy Spirit.

We can view it through the lens of the compassion that he has for us because he has lived as we have lived. We can of course see the love of Jesus for us through him setting us free through dying on the cross for us.

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But we would be missing an important aspect of who Jesus is and his impact on us if we didn’t at some point just look to him as our loving God. Jesus wants us to love everyone and showed us that through his life.

One of his greatest examples of this would be on the cross as he prays to his Father to forgive those that have arrested him, beaten him, and crucified him. He tells us why, it is because they do not know what they are doing.

In the book we are using as the basis for this series “Letters to Marc,” Henri Nouwen explains it this way, he says that

“Jesus shows us that true love, the love that comes from God, makes no distinction between friends and foes, between people who are for us and people who are against us, people who do us a favor and people who do us ill. God makes no such distinction. He loves all human beings, good or bad, with the same unconditional love.”

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This offers us a high expectation for us to meet. We are to not judge our love for someone by our relationship with them. We are to judge them by the fact that they are a beloved child of God. The difference is that some have accepted God’s love and care for them and some are still in the process of discovering the love that God has for them.

Verses 27 and 28clearly lay this out for us. As Jesus usually does, he raises the bar to a level that his disciples and us would not expect. It says that we are to “love our enemies.” In case you were wondering the word “love” is the same word in scripture from John 3:16 that was recited earlier.

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There are numerous words for “love” within scripture.  The writers chose the same word to express the love that God has for us as they do for the love that we are to choose to offer to our enemies. This should point out to us that we are to love even our enemies in the same way that God loves us.

Nouwen calls these words “love your enemies” to be “the most radical words” in the scriptures.  He goes on to say that it is “in these words we have the clearest expression of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus.”

Luke explains what these words should mean for us. We should “do good to those who hate us. We should bless those who curse us. We are to pray for those who mistreat us” We are to flip the attitude that people have towards us and treat them in the opposite way.

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First, we are to do good to those who hate us. This is Luke saying that we are to be “gooder” than someone else. Romans chapter 12 says it this way, “do not repay evil for evil.” Let’s admit it, this is easier said than done.

We are to hold our tongue and not say what we want to say. We are to choose not to react as the world would desire for us to do. We are to decide that we are going to be the person that God desires for us to be even under the most challenging of circumstances.

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We are to bless those who curse us. This returns us back to the Beatitudes that we looked at a few weeks ago. No matter what we do we are able to receive a blessing from God.  No matter what someone says to you we are to attempt to be a blessing to them.

This is why I like to point out that being a follower of Jesus is hard. We are called to act and react the opposite way of what our human intuition would desire for us to do. We are to bless those around us even if we may feel that they are undeserving of being blessed.

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We are to pray for those who mistreat us. Proverbs 20:22 tells us that when evil is done to us, we are to “wait for the Lord.” We are to go to God and ask for his intervention. We are to ask what if anything we are to do based off of what was done to us.

Here’s the thing, it doesn’t even have to be a nice prayer. I always go back to David in Psalm 58 when he asks God to do the following to his enemies.

“6 Break the teeth in their mouths, 7 Let them vanish like water that flows away; 8 May they be like a slug that melts away as it moves along.”

We are to turn our pain and hurt over to God. We are to ask for God to step in because we are not going to react in a positive way if we act as we desire. We can ask God to do what we want done but then we also have to turn it over to God.

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When we choose to show love to those that we believe possibly don’t deserve our love we may be showing them what the love of Christ looks like for the first time. We may be opening up to them a new understanding of how through the love of Jesus we can show love to all people.

We not only should look at showing love to others who don’t deserve it because Jesus said it and did it, but we also should be choosing to love those that don’t deserve it because God first loved us.

We have spoken of this before it is called grace. It is God choosing to love us despite our faults not because of anything that we have done for him but only because of his love for humanity.

This love begins even before you acknowledge Jesus as your Lord and Savior. We call this prevenient grace. It is the grace that God is constantly bombarding us with in order to attempt to woo us towards a relationship with him.

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God loves those that may at this point even hate him to the point that he is trying to lead them into an understanding of his love for them. God does not give up on this endeavor. He is constantly attempting to get those that are far away from a relationship with him to choose to follow him.

He will sometimes choose to use us to help him accomplish this goal. He will sometimes put us into situations that will allow us to show those around us what the love of God feels like. This can help lead others to desire that they will want that love all the time and be willing to turn their life over to the one who first loved them.

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God also shows his love for us from the moment that we are willing to give our life over to him. We spoke earlier from the Gospel of John how God so loved the world that he gave his only son to die on a cross so that we would be able to have our sins forgiven and live with God forever.

We call that Justifying Grace or saving grace. God shows his love for us by freeing us from the power of sin by forgiving our sins. This is the moment that can change our lives forever. This love should move us from living for ourselves to focusing on living for God and those around us.

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The third type of grace offered to us by God is sanctifying grace. This grace is God loving us so much that he wants us to become as close to him as possible. He leads us towards ways to become closer to him. He connects with us through the Holy Spirit in order for us to speak to him and learn how to be more like him each and every day.

We become closer to God when we are willing to be connected to God. We should choose to spend time praying or connecting to God and reading the word of God. It is through reading scripture and listening to God that we can grow in our connection to him.

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The undeserved, unearned love that God gives to us is one of the reasons why that we should choose to love those around us. Jesus actually reminds us twice in today’s scripture to love our enemies. He probably does that to emphasize that yes, he did say that and he means it.

What we have to remember is the enemy for the people Jesus is speaking to our those that rule their lives. The Romans held them captive. They may be free to move around but they are not a free people. They were an oppressed people awaiting for their Messiah to come and free them.

The person that some believe to be this Messiah is now telling them to love those that are oppressing them. Some believe that this may be our greatest and our most difficult calling.  Serve your enemy as you would want to be served. Show Christ’s love even if you know it won’t be reciprocated.

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Verse 33 tells us that “if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that.” It is when you are willing to help those that can’t or aren’t willing to help you that you are truly showing Christ’s love to those around you.

Nouwen says that if you really want to show love to all people pray for your enemy. Ask God to help your enemy. Pray for your enemy to be blessed. Nouwen says that when you ask God to bless your enemy that is a sign that you are right with God.

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Our first scripture reading tells us that we are “God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved” and that we need to clothe ourselves with some traits. When we follow through with this and use these traits for all people we are showing love to all people.

The traitsthat we should strive to live out individually and as a church are compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Clothing ourselves with these traits says to me that these traits should be able to be seen by those around us.

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When we have compassion we are showing the love of God to those around us. As I said a few weeks ago when we looked at Jesus as a Compassionate God, compassion is empathy in action. It is us seeing a situation and desiring to help. It is us being willing to ask a person if they want help and then following through with the action of compassion.

We find numerous times in scripture Jesus acting because of the compassion he had for someone or for a group of people. We are to be people of compassion showing the love of God to those that need it the most.

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Kindness is choosing to be nice. It is making the decision that we are not going to return “evil for evil.” I often go back to a quote from Brene Brown who defines herself as a “researcher. Storyteller, and courage-builder.

She states “life is better when I assume that people are doing their best. It keeps me out of judgment.” It is much easier for us to show kindness for others when we have decided that under their life circumstances, they are making the best decision they can. They are treating us and others the best they can.

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The next trait mentioned is humility and I am the best at doing this. It is when we don’t consider ourselves above or better than someone else. This is when we can truly connect and show the love of God to those around us.

Humility matters because we can get into trouble and believe that they need us because we are better than them. We need to be humble and believe that under different circumstances in our lives we could be them.

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We are to choose to be gentle. Jesus lived a life of being gentle with most people. You could argue that it was only the religious elites who weren’t always gentle with them. He was gentle to those that were facing mistreatment or who needed love.

There are some people that may be a challenge to us. We may want to lash out or say something that we will regret. We are instead to choose to be kind. We are to choose to have Jesus be our example on how we treat those we meet.

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Not only are we supposed to be gentle, but we are supposed to be patient. We need to understand that people might not desire to listen to us or get to know us right away. When we are gentle it will hopefully allow us to eventually have the chance to speak to those we meet about Jesus.

It is through being gentle and patient that we can first get to know the needs of those around us so that we can become who they desire to be. We are able to be the church that God desires for us to be when we are willing to spend time with those in our community.

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Jesus is a loving God. He spent his time on earth helping us to also discover how God desires for us to love those around us. Let us be willing as individuals and as a church to share the love of Christ with each other and those that God places before us.

Let us pray…