Love Your Enemies
Notes
Transcript
Haiti
How much does a pirate pay for corn? A Bucaneer
Found a place called Math Garden, the tree had square roots
Have you ever had to share news that you knew would be hard for people to receive and you didn’t know how you would do it?
For me, part of the way my brain works in this situation is it plays out the entirety of the conversation before it happens in my head, then I will change the delivery and it changes the response and this is the world my brain often lives in. I’m sure some of you have similar habits when it comes to things like this, but you may have had to deliver something tough so you plan it. This morning is a moment like that for me, because the one thing about preaching this way, just straight through the text you are looking over, and we have been preaching straight through the sermon on the mount, but what happens when you do it this way, is you get to preach on stuff that you normally wouldn’t attempt. So when we come to this message its a little hard, because this is stuff people don’t want to deal with, we don’t want to live a life this way, so it causes a little stress but I know God wants us to follow his word and this is what we are going to look at this morning. So, this morning we will Finish chapter 5.
What Jesus is going to talk about today is really pretty interesting, because remember, last week he told us if someone hits one cheek then we are supposed to give them the other to hit as well; if someone tells you to walk one mile, go ahead and walk two. So, basically what he is telling us is we are not supposed to retaliate and we are supposed to kind of absorb all of this evil. What we really saw last week was all negative things from Jesus, and what I mean by that is it was all things we aren’t supposed to do, as opposed to the things we ARE supposed to do.
Which if we are being truthful, is how so many of us were raised in the church, we were given a list of all the things we weren’t supposed to do to be a good Christian. You can’t cuss, you can’t watch rated R moves, you can’t do all kinds of things if you want to be a good Christian person.
Here is what we have been talking about as we have been in this series, and really throughout the gospels, church, and really the Christian life itself shouldn’t be about sin management and the things you can’t do. What the gospels teach is life with Jesus should be about the fuller life; the things you can do - the life we should be living. So, Jesus teaches us things like what does it mean to be truly human in this world; with your money, your job, your life. This is the vision Jesus brings, what it is like to live as a part of His Kingdom in this world and we see the goal of all of that in verse 48.
48 “Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
I hope that kind of stuns us and makes us feel some sort of way, because what we just heard is Jesus goal for our life is for us to be perfect, but in the capital C Church we have a mediocre goal of things. Somewhere along the line, in the church we have settled for mediocrity. For instance, if you were to see some church had produce a movie you would probably expect it to not be that good because a church made it. Now, you may think there is going to be a good story you could learn from, but you probably don’t think its going to be as good as big production movies. Maybe you don’t do that but the truth is some of us expect if we are going to live this Christian life we won’t be living a life as good as other people, we kind of expect our lifes to be less, because we think we are missing out on all the fun stuff other people get to do that we don’t. So, we just accept life to be just good enough, and we don’t strive for more.
Yet, that is not what Jesus is saying here, he isn’t saying in life we should settle for just good enough, he is saying he wants our lives goal to be perfection. Our goal should be living a life of excellence in everything we do whether it be business, or school, or whatever we do, we shouldn’t strive for settling and nothing better in life. Jesus didn’t call you to live in mediocrity, he called you to move from mediocrity toward perfection. That is the goal of life, to live this life of perfection, He wants you to look more like God, not settle for good enough.
So Jesus is telling us here, let’s do our best, quit settling.
Why are you here this morning? Why are any of us here? Not just so I can have a job, but every single moment of every single day there are people we know and love, and people who other people know and love who are dying and going to hell because they don’t know Jesus.
This church exists to connect people to Jesus, to equip them to grow in Jesus, and teach them to serve like Jesus, and there are people all over this town who don’t know Jesus. The people you work with, the people who you see in Save a Lot, the people you run into at McDonald’s, just people all over the place; they don’t know Jesus as savior and if they die, they would end up in the depths of Hell, and none of that is what Jesus wants. Look at what he says here.
43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’
Listen, the first half of that statement is hard enough; love your neighbor? Man that is hard, because there are a lot of us, we don’t know the names of our neighbor; we don’t know the names of the people we work with; some of us probably don’t even know the names of the people at the other end of the row.
I love the story of the guy who was going through his church planter assessment. He is laying out these amazing plans for the church, how they are going to teach the gospel, how they are going to work on discipleship, all of this amazing stuff, and in the middle of it they say, “Hey, tell us, what are the names of your neighbors?” And he was like, “Uh, I have no idea,” and he jokes they still approved him because of how his wife knew people. See, they wanted to know if he was really going to do what needed to be done to reach the lost, was he the type of person who was already doing the work of Jesus.
He says love your neighbor, and this is some of what small groups are all about when people have small victories we get to celebrate together, when people have struggles or hard times we get to support one another. So Jesus is says, you have heard it said you are supposed to love your neighbor, do that, with passion and excellence.
I have never been, but people will tell you that Disney provides the greatest guest experiences in the world. Disney has a lot of books about how they are to serve their people and in those books they talk about how they want their people to serve with excellence. These books talk about that philosophy and say these people who are coming on vacation, they don’t come to serve the staff; Instead, the staff exists to serve its guests. They make sure the people working for them understand their whole purpose is to make those guest feel amazing. You want to know the remarkable thing? People will go to Disney and spend a ton of money, thousands upon thousands of dollars but when they leave, they don’t most of them, talk about all the money they spent. Instead, they talk about the stories of the people they met, the things they experienced the fun that was had, the way their lives were changed. There are all kinds of similar stories of people who went and their kid was so excited they forgot to go to the bathroom, but there is no time to go back to the hotel and these people at Disney come together and get them some clothes, find them a place to change, and do it all for free.
And Jesus is telling us, man this is how we love our neighbor, we serve them like this with this kind of excellence, in a way where we realize our whole method is to love and serve our neighbor. Look at what Jesus tells us about it.
47 “If you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?
Jesus tells us the whole way of living, loving our neighbors, it should reshape the way we are living and what we are doing. He is telling us it should go above and beyond what everyone else would expect and think. He says we should always be better than the gentiles, do more than anyone would expect.=
In CS lewis the weight of glory he says , “The Load, or weight, or burden of my neighbors glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken…. It is in light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. They are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal… but it is immortals who we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit… Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.”
We literally live to serve our neighbor, we were created for community, to be with one another; to bear one another’s burdens, and this is what Jesus is pointing to when he says we need to love our neighbors “you have heard it said love your neighbor and hate your enemies,” but what is fascinating is the Bible doesn’t actually say this. The Bible does tell us to love our neighbors as ourselves in Leviticus 19:18, but hate your enemies? Nope. not there at all, this is just what the scribes had added to the word of God. Look at the next verse.
44 “But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,
Okay, the pharisees and the scribes say love your neighbor and hate your enemies, but I SAY love your enemies, you know, the person you hate, the person who slighted you, the person who has talked trash about you, the person who talked bad about you on social media, the person who started the rumor about you at work, the person who when you hear, “love your enemies,” immediately comes to mind and gives you the greatest ick; that person - love them. This is so much different than telling us what NOT to do. There is something about turning the other cheek, but turning the other cheek and loving them is something completely different.
So, Jesus tells us to love our enemies and our natural pushback to that directive would always be, okay, but what does that mean, what does he mean when he says, “love?”
We have this idea in this culture and it is kind of what we teach our kids that love is having all these feelings and butterflies in our stomach and its this just feeling of euphoria and you can feel it. That’s not what he is talking about here, that is the greek word eros which refers to this romantic love and that is not what is used here in this context.
Instead, he is talking about this agape love which is a covenant type of love and the best illustration of that in our culture would probably be marriage. Some of you may know, sometimes in marriage it really can be loving your enemy, or maybe you wouldn’t take it that far, but you’d say it was marrying someone you didn’t particularly like on that day.
Listen, you hear it all the time when you are doing marriage counseling. People will come in and they will tell you, I don’t have those kind of feelings anymore when I am around them. Those feelings just died, and people will say things like, “Look, I married him, and he had these issues but I was sure he would change, that I could change Him,” and for the most part that is a horrible idea, because it is just who the person is. Sure we can change but thats a bad way to go in, but we are called to love.
So, Jesus tells us you have to learn to love the enemy, and listen, that does not mean you tell them you are loving them even though they are the enemy; thats not love. Agape is calculated love, it isn’t always feelings and butterflies.
Love your enemies, don’t just like them, don’t just put up with them, love them, go out of your way for them. And here is why:
45 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.
46 “For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?
47 “If you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?
Here is what he is saying, do something you wouldn’t naturally do. We are born into a state where you love being with people who are just like you; they think like you, like the same shows as you; vote like you; listen to the same music as you - its just the way we are. No time is it more evident than when our kids are sleeping that we love people who are just like us. Just follow me for a second. When your kid is awake, they are great, but they sometimes have little attitudes and are defiant and even sometimes kind of gross. But when they are sleeping all of that goes away and they are sleeping they are so precious and they look like us, and its when we think our kids are the cutest. Its easy to love our own kids because we are kind of narcissistic when it comes to them.
Listen, for most of us we spend our entire weeks hanging out with people just like us. We go to sporting events where we cheer for the same team, we go out to dinner some weeks with other couples who have kids who share the same ages and we get along with and we just surround ourselves with people who for the most part we are similar too. And when we surround ourselves with people like ourselves all the time, Jesus says Congratulations, you are just like a tax collector. And everyone hated the tax collectors, the Jews hated them because they were working for the Roman government, and the romans hated them because they were Jews. The tax collecters would make the Jews pay $20 when all the Roman government required was $15 and theyd pocket teh difference. They just wanted to make themselves rich. Kind of like politicians, I joke, I joke.
I was trying to think of how to compare the way people hated the tax collectors to something in our society, and I thought maybe the closest example would be ISIS, those guys love each other, they have no enemy among themselves but society hates them. And Jesus says, look, its easy to love and be with people that are just like you, but vs 47 says WHAT MORE are you doing than the others. We have to do more; there is no reward for loving people who are easy to love.
I want you to take a moment right now and think about the person that wronged you, that you harbor hatred for in your heart. Think about it for a second what reward is there if we act like everyone else with the people who are our enemies; there is something more that needs to happen - loving your enemy is a very hard thing.
Want to talk about practical life and what you can do today?
Maybe what you do is you call up the person that hurt you ten or fifteen years ago. You call them up and let them know Jesus spoke to you today, and you forgive them. Let it free you, because it may bring reconciliation. What if this Sunday was different and thats what you did and you just LOVE THEM, don’t like them. IM not talking about your feelings, but our willingness to lay down your life for them. Because if we do this.
45 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.
When God did this for you, he didn’t come and die for you because you were such a nice person. Romans 5 tells us he loved us and came and died for us when we were his enemy. There are many days we wake up and choose ourselves over God, and he gives us breath even when he should snuff us all out, because we choose ourselves over him every day.
This is what St. Augustine called the problem of good; we put God on trial for the problem of evil, how could God exist if there is so much evil in the world, etc. Augustine says, what about the problem of good. What about how the sun comes out each day, the fact that you have clothes, the beautiful art he has allowed some of us to create, and all this amazing stuff. What about that, why is it like this, Augustine says, we have no reason to believe as awful of the world is that God isn’t holding back 99.9 of how bad it could really be. You see he is saying, the other side of the argument is not why is god allowing evil, but why does he not just unleash all the bad in there really could be when we were his enemies.
So, when we love our enemies we can show the world how we can be like God and the world looks at you and says how is that possible for those two to get along, what is different about you. Loving your enemy makes you look more like God than you can ever look.
And we love our enemies so people can connect with Jesus; so they can be sons of the father.
Jesus doesn’t ask you to do anything he doesnt do himself.
SO this morning, maybe you dont know Jesus…
Maybe you have been holding bitterness and hatred for an “enemy”
Maybe you just need prayer…
