On Loving Enemies

MATTHEW 5:43–48 — SONS OF THE FATHER WHO LOVED HIS ENEMIES

SERMON IN A SENTENCE: We don't love our enemies to become sons of God — we love them because we already are: sons of a Father who loved us while we were still His enemies, and the perfection He commands at the summit is the perfection Christ already provided at the cross.

SPINE: 5:20 posed the riddle (righteousness that exceeds) → six antitheses raised every bar → 5:43–47 names what the greater righteousness is made of (enemy-love, the family resemblance) → 5:48 is the summit no one survives → Christ kept it, as our righteousness, while His enemies killed Him → the answered prayers (centurion, Paul) prove enemy-prayer goes to a Father who hears → already/not-yet send-off with one name and one verb: pray.

OPENING — IN THE ROOM (~4 min)

▸ Well, we made it. Six weeks — anger, lust, divorce, oaths, retaliation — today the summit. Verse 48 is the highest demand in the entire Sermon. Maybe in all of Scripture.

▸ Before we read: remember where the climb started. The riddle of 5:20 — unless your righteousness exceeds the scribes and Pharisees. That riddle has hung over every week. Six times: "you have heard it said... but I say to you" — and every time the standard went UP. Hands to heart.

▸ This morning Jesus answers the riddle. He tells us what the greater righteousness is actually made of.

[Stand — read Matthew 5:43–48, ESV]

✦ "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..."

[Seat them — pray]

TRANSITION: Six antitheses, and Jesus saved the most brazen scribal distortion for last — because this time they didn't just shrink the law. They edited it.

MOVEMENT 1 — THE COMMAND THAT OFFENDS (vv. 43–44) (~9 min)

▸ "You have heard that it was said" — by now you know: not Moses, the scribes' handling of Moses. And this is the most brazen of all six.

▸ Go find "hate your enemy" in your Old Testament. You can't. It was never there.

▸ What IS there:

Leviticus 19:18 — "love your neighbor as yourself." The scribes made two cuts: ▸ Cut one — "as yourself." Because that's the standard, and the standard is unbearable. You know how you love yourself: feed, defend, excuse, forgive. Love your neighbor like THAT? Cut it. ▸ Cut two — narrowed "neighbor" to my people, my kind, the ones who love me back. And out of the leftovers they grew a permission: hate your enemy.

▸ "They shrank the command and grew a permission." That's what we do with the law of God — six weeks running. I haven't murdered (while I nurse the anger). I haven't committed adultery (while I feed the lust). I love my neighbor (while I keep a private list of who doesn't count).

▸ The Leviticus 19 jewel: the chapter they mutilated OPENS with the standard they ignored — v.2, "You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy." Same chapter. In this one antithesis Jesus restores BOTH — love-your-neighbor back to full size (v.44), be-holy back to full height (v.48). The scribes tore Leviticus 19 in half. Jesus hands it back whole.

▸ "But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." Two things so we don't dodge it:

▸ One — love here is a verb. (Sproul.) Not manufactured affection — action aimed at their good. Bless. Do good. Pray. And that's the mercy of our God: the verb is possible TODAY. You can pray this afternoon; you can't conjure a feeling on command. The feeling follows the verb. It’s impossible be genuinely praying for someone and keep hating them — one of them is going to cease.

▸ Two — Jesus assumes you HAVE enemies. Not "if." Last week: someone will strike, sue, conscript you. This week: persecutors. No category biblical for a Christianity so agreeable nobody opposes it (Beatitudes — blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you). The question was never whether. It's what kind of person you'll be when.

▸ The world's answer: payback, two kinds. Revenge (you hurt me, I hurt you) and recompense (you scratch my back, I scratch yours). And the second one FEELS righteous — it's just bookkeeping. Everybody's even.

TRANSITION: Jesus is about to ask one devastating question about that whole system. But first He tells us WHY His people love differently — and the reason is not a rule. The reason is a resemblance.

MOVEMENT 2 — THE FAMILY RESEMBLANCE (v. 45) (~10 min)

▸ "...so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven." Slow down — this phrase is where this text becomes gospel or becomes poison.

▸ The poison reading: "so that" = wages. Love enemies → earn sonship. If that's it, everything we've said for six weeks collapses and the Sermon really is a ladder — and nobody's reaching the top.

▸ The proof it's not — from this very chapter. Verse 9: "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God." Same title. Same chapter. Jesus declared who the sons are BEFORE a single command was given. Beatitudes = whose is the kingdom. Sonship was declared in verse 9 as a blessing, not dangled in verse 45 as a wage.

▸ So v.45 isn't how you get into the family — it's how the family resemblance SHOWS.

[Story: your boys resembling you — "now we know whose boy that is." The resemblance doesn't create the sonship. The sonship produces the resemblance.]

▸ And what is the Father like? "He makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust." Sit in the strangeness: this morning the sun came up on every praying grandmother AND every man who blasphemed God before breakfast. On purpose. Every day.

▸ Common grace (Calvin's category). Not saving grace — grace that saves no one but sustains everyone.

▸ Sproul's three loves of God — does God love everybody or not? Scripture speaks of His love more than one way: ▸ Benevolent — His good will toward all He made, even fallen. ▸ Beneficent — He doesn't just wish well, He DOES good. Sun, rain, harvest, breath. The staggering asymmetry: we curse Him daily; He answers by keeping our hearts beating. Every wicked man alive is living on the love of God and calling it luck.▸ Complacency — old word for delight. The love the Father has for His beloved Son. NOT spread across creation — it rests on Christ. And the gospel in one line: that love is extended to everyone who is IN Jesus. Not because we're delightful — because we're in the Beloved.

▸ THE DISTINCTION — do not blur this: The pattern we imitate is common grace (sun and rain, love for those who remain enemies). The power underneath is saving grace — because we weren't neutral observers.

✦ Romans 5:10 — "while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son."

▸ We weren't the just under the rain. We WERE the unjust. And God didn't stop at sending His enemies rain — He sent His enemies His Son.

▸ The order is everything (same order as the mercy Beatitude — we love because He first loved us). Not commanded to love enemies to become a son. Freed to love enemies because the Father already made you one — while you were still His enemy. Enemy-love isn't the entrance exam. It's the family birthmark.

TRANSITION: And if this love is the family resemblance — then a love that never exceeds the world's love raises a very uncomfortable question about the family tree. Which is exactly the question Jesus asks next.

MOVEMENT 3 — WHAT MORE ARE YOU DOING? (vv. 46–47) (~7 min)

▸ Jesus takes the whole reciprocity system and doesn't call it evil — He calls it unremarkable. Even the tax collectors do that. (Remember who's listening: the tax collector was the BOTTOM — the collaborator.) Even Gentiles greet their own. The mafia loves its own. Every gang that ever existed ran on insider loyalty. Reciprocal love isn't righteousness. It's arithmetic.

▸ The word the passage turns on: "what MORE are you doing than others?" Same word-family as v.20 — "exceeds." There's the loop, closed. The greater righteousness isn't more rule-keeping (the Pharisees maxed that out). It's a love that overflows the banks of reciprocity — a more that can't be explained by what anyone did for you first.

▸ The old writers: evil for good is devilish; good for good is merely human; good for evil belongs to God alone.

▸ Your enemy is not the obstacle to your witness — your enemy is the OCCASION of it. Everything else about your love has a natural explanation. That one doesn't.

▸ Guardrail (don't cut): loving your enemy ≠ pretending he isn't one. Jesus calls him an enemy. No lying about evil, no excusing it, no placing yourself back under it. Spurgeon: we "are to be as the anvil when bad men are the hammers" — and an anvil is not a doormat; it's the strongest thing in the shop. (Meekness — strength under the bridle.) This love renounces revenge — not truth, not justice, not protection. Vengeance is God's; what you want for them is the mercy that found you.

TRANSITION: So — the command is love at full size. The reason is sonship already given. The measure is more. And then Jesus takes one more step, and the air runs out.

MOVEMENT 4 — THE SUMMIT (v. 48) (~12 min)

▸ "You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect." The highest sentence in the Sermon. Maybe ever spoken to human beings.

▸ What "perfect" means — both what it includes and what it is: ▸ Teleios — complete, whole, reached its end. In context, off five verses about love, Stott is right: the perfection is first of all the perfection of LOVE — all-embracing, nobody left out, enemies included. (Luke's parallel: "be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.") Jesus isn't changing the subject in v.48. ▸ But don't shrink the verse. Some say "Jesus can't mean perfect — He knows nobody's perfect." Sproul answers flat: He meant what He said. Leviticus 19:2 at full height. The standard is the Father Himself — not graded on a curve, not adjusted for human limitation.

▸ Sproul's line I can't shake: when we can't reach the standard, we don't reach higher — we lower the standard. Adjust the bar to our performance, clear it, call ourselves good. Every religion of self-salvation works this way. That's what the scribes did to Leviticus 19 — that's what we've watched for six straight weeks: God's standard, lowered to survivable height.

▸ And in six antitheses Jesus walked down the row putting every bar back where His Father set it. Anger is murder. Lust is adultery. Your word is your oath. Your enemy is your neighbor. Summary over all of it: perfect.

▸ The mirror at full height. Six weeks ago: the closer you get, the more you see. This morning we're pressed against the glass. Nobody in this room survives verse 48. If it's a ladder, it has no rungs. If it's a bar, no one has ever cleared it —

▸ — no one, except One. [Beat.]

▸ The mirror was never the end. The law is a schoolmaster, and it's been walking us somewhere for six weeks. You read v.48 and everything in you says I can't. And Jesus says: "I did. And I did it for you."

▸ Look at Him. The Sermon isn't just His teaching — it's His portrait. Who is the poor in spirit, the meek, the pure in heart, the peacemaker? Who loved His enemies — not from a mountainside, but from a cross? Isaiah, seven hundred years early: I gave my back to those who strike. They spat; He held His peace. They drove the nails and He was praying — for THEM.

✦ "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."

▸ The prayer was a real petition, not a performance. Not modeling a sentiment — asking His Father for something, in real agony, to a God who hears.

▸ Marvel with me: when we pray, we pray to a God who is ABLE to answer.

▸ Answer one — the foot of the cross. Matthew 27:54 — the centurion, the man overseeing the execution detail. The earth shakes, and out of HIS mouth, before the body is down: ✦ "Truly this was the Son of God." The first confession after the cross isn't from a disciple — the disciples ran. It's from one of the very men Jesus was just praying for.

▸ [Honest caveat — load-bearing, don't cut]: "Now let me be honest with you — we don't know for sure whether those men put their faith in Jesus. There's some tradition, at least about the centurion, that says he did. But we won't know until we get to Glory. What we DO know is what Scripture shows us: the man holding the hammer, confessing the Son of God while the prayer for his forgiveness was still hanging in the air."

▸ Answer two — and this one we know. Stephen, dying under the stones, prays like his Lord: ✦ "Lord, do not hold this sin against them." And standing there holding the coats — Saul. Breathing threats and murder. The church's worst enemy.

▸ You know what God did with that man. Damascus road. Dirt. The church's fiercest persecutor becomes her greatest apostle. And LISTEN to how Paul explains why — ✦ 1 Timothy 1:13: "formerly I was a blasphemer, persecutor, and insolent opponent... I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief."

▸ "He knew not what he did." Do you hear it? The mercy Jesus asked for His enemies from the cross is the mercy that hunted Saul down. Stephen prays for his killers — one of the men standing in approval becomes the apostle Paul. That's not coincidence, brother. That's a Father who hears His children pray for their enemies — and answers.

▸ So when I tell you to pray for that person — the name in your mind this morning — understand what I'm telling you to do. Not a coping technique. Not so you'll feel better (though you will). [Anti-genie guardrail — keep]: And prayer is not a machine — request in, result out. God is not a genie, and your enemy is not a wish. But you petition the same Father who heard His Son over the men killing Him, heard Stephen over the men stoning him, and answered with a centurion's confession and an apostle's conversion. He turns Sauls into Pauls. The most powerful thing you can do to the person who wronged you — because the God you're praying to might just save him.

▸ What grace is: NOT God lowering the standard (Sproul, emphatic — He'd be denying His own holiness, and He will not). The standard stands at full height forever — grace is that God gave us a Savior who met it. The only man who ever kept verse 48 was keeping it at the very moment His enemies were killing Him — keeping it AS our righteousness. His obedience, credited. Our record, carried. God doesn't grade on a curve. He grades on a cross.

▸ The riddle of 5:20 — full answer, both halves:▸ First: your righteousness exceeds because it isn't yours. It's HIS, counted to you by faith at repentance. Not exceeding by a little — perfect.▸ Second: the Spirit of the Son is IN you, writing this law on your heart — Jeremiah 31, the new covenant — so enemy-love actually grows. Not to earn the verdict. The verdict is in. Fruit grows because of what the tree IS.

[LANDING POINT IF RUNNING LONG — close here: one breath of already/not-yet, the name, the verb, pray out. Pull forward the "one of them will die" line as the send-off.]

LANDING — ALREADY, NOT YET (~4 min)

▸ Where does that leave us tomorrow, when the person who wronged you is still there and still wrong? Where this series has left us every week: the already and the not yet.

▸ Already — you are a son. Not will be, if you love well enough. ARE. Declared in the Beatitudes, purchased at the cross, sealed by the Spirit. The perfect righteousness of Christ is yours, whole, this morning — before you've loved a single enemy.

▸ Not yet — the resemblance is still developing. You will fail at this. This week, probably. I will too. But failure drives us back to the cross, not away — and the cross sends us back out, because people who've been loved like that cannot keep the arithmetic anymore.

▸ The one thing in your hands: that name. Don't wait until you feel love — you'll wait forever. Start with the verb: pray for them. Genuinely — their good, their repentance, the same mercy that found you when you were the enemy. Every day this week. And remember who you're praying to: the Father who heard His Son, who heard Stephen, who turns Sauls into Pauls. You cannot keep asking that Father to bless someone and keep hating them. One of them will die. And it won't be the prayer.

▸ Six weeks. Anger, lust, covenant-keeping, truth-telling, non-retaliation, love at full height. One greater righteousness — never ours to build. His to give. And He gave it, while we were enemies, so that we could be sons.

✦ "Behold what manner of love the Father has given unto us, that we should be called children of God. And so we are."

[Pray]

VERIFY IN LOGOSLeviticus 19:2 heading the same chapter as 19:18 — the Movement 1 structural claim depends on it. Romans 5:10 ESV wording. Matthew 5:9 and 5:45 "sons" phrases, ESV. Luke 6:36. Isaiah 50:6 (add citation if quoting directly). Luke 23:34 — note ESV textual footnote; decide whether to acknowledge live. Matthew 27:54 ESV wording ("and those who were with him, keeping watch over Jesus"). Acts 7:58–60 — Stephen's prayer exact wording, Saul and the garments. 1 Timothy 1:13 — LOAD-BEARING quote; my "ignorantly in unbelief" leans KJV/NKJV cadence — confirm ESV wording before it goes on screen. 1 John 3:1 — I echoed KJV cadence; confirm translation for the screen. Perisseusē (5:20) / perisson (5:47) word-family link — verify lexically before stating it as tightly as Movement 3 does.

FLAG AS INFERENCE"Grew a permission out of the leftovers" — Stott's reconstruction of rabbinic logic, not a quoted rabbinic source; preach as reconstruction. "Every religion of self-salvation lowers the standard" — your rhetorical generalization, not Sproul's sentence. Beatitudes-as-portrait-of-Christ — homiletical synthesis (Lloyd-Jones et al.), not exegesis of 5:48. 1 Tim 1:13 as echo of Luke 23:34 — framed as marvel ("listen to how Paul explains it"), not quotation or exegesis; Paul never cites the prayer. Stephen's prayer → Saul's conversion — Augustine's providential inference from narrative juxtaposition, not a stated causal claim in Acts; "that's not coincidence" is a faith claim about providence, know the difference if pressed. Centurion tradition (Longinus) — handled by the honest caveat; the caveat is load-bearing.

WATCH-OUT NOTESCommon grace vs. saving grace distinction in Movement 2 ("the pattern... the power") — if compressing live, cut illustrations, never the distinction. Anti-genie guardrail is one sentence doing real work against prosperity-adjacent mishearing — keep it. Sproul's three loves are paraphrased — pull exact sentences from the commentary in Logos if quoting verbatim. "Grades on a cross" — circulating aphorism, contested origin; use unattributed. Spurgeon anvil line is the one verbatim quote (via Stott). If landing early at the marked point, pull the "one of them will die" line forward — it's the send-off the whole sermon aims at.

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