Loving Our Enemies...
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Intro:
Intro:
Good morning and welcome to those who may be just now joining us online. If you have a Bible or a your device to look up scripture, go ahead and open or scroll to the book of Matthew chapter 5. We are going to finish out chapter five and next week, roll into chapter six as we continue our walk through the Sermon on the Mount.
I read Ligon Duncan recount a story about John Lafayette Girardeau, a Presbyterian minister in the South.
“He was a prisoner of war during the War Between the States. When He came back to South Carolina to take up his ministry again after the war, he preached a passionate sermon on this passage...on loving your neighbor. His youngest son heard that sermon and asked his dad questions all the way home, and continued to ask him annoying questions around the dinner table. He kept asking him specifics about how that sermon might apply to his own experience: “Dad, does this mean that I have to love the bully who beats me up at school?” “Yes, son.” “Dad, does this mean that we have to love people who have taken advantage of our family?” “Yes, son.” “Dad, does this mean we have to love Yankees?” “Be quiet, son, and eat your dinner.” It’s hard for all of us to love as God calls us to love. “
Today we come to one of the most challenging and memorable teachings from Jesus. It was shocking to those who heard it first and it remains shocking for those of us who read it now. This morning, Lord willing, my goal is to plumb some of the depths of what the Lord is communicating here and how it must change us as we follow Him.
“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 makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.
For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?
And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?
You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
Let’s pray for this time of worship through the proclamation of the Word.
PRAYER
Before we dive into what Jesus is saying in this passage, I want to first examine what He is not saying in this passage. If we aren’t careful we might get this twisted and so we need to look at what it says in context of the entire Bible as well as the positioning in this particular larger teaching as well. So, what isJesus not saying in this passage?
I. WhatJesus not saying in this passage?
I. WhatJesus not saying in this passage?
A. This passage does not teach a works based salvation.
A. This passage does not teach a works based salvation.
B. They had misunderstood the original command...
B. They had misunderstood the original command...
...and added to it from their assumptions.
Nowhere in the Old Testament will you find a command to hate your enemy juxtaposed with this command to love your neighbor. So where would they have gotten this assumption?
First where they got the love your neighbor part:
You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.
Exalting Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount Love Your Enemies: It Is the Way of Jesus 5:43-48
Charles Quarles points out, “This subtle revision transformed a command about how God’s people are to love into a command on whom they are to love”
Then of course, they added the part about hating your enemy in their teaching. Jesus takes to a corrective measure about what they have been teaching and taught to others.
C. They misunderstood the term “neighbor.”
C. They misunderstood the term “neighbor.”
They thought that the term neighbor was limited to other Israelites only. They taught that Jews were to love other Jews as their neighbor but that everyone else who was not Jewish were to be regarded as enemies. Not only did they believe it was their business to hate their enemies (or non-Jews) but they would have possibly even gone as far as to believe it was their duty and their right to hate their enemies.
In the ancient world there was a strong animosity or hatred between certain people groups. The Jews and Gentiles or non-Jews are the perfect illustration. In the New Testament you had an animosity between the Jews and the Samaritans.
Now, I want to make a statement that really rocked my understanding of the scribes and Pharisees and really this passage as well.
The religious leaders of the day believed they were honoring God by hating others.
Do you see how twisted that is? Now you may say to me, “Pastor, but what about in the Old Testament when God told the Jews to wipe out the other nations in the promised land or when we read imprecatory Psalms like Psalm 69?
Let’s check that out together:
Let their own table before them become a snare; and when they are at peace, let it become a trap.
Let their eyes be darkened, so that they cannot see, and make their loins tremble continually.
Pour out your indignation upon them, and let your burning anger overtake them.
May their camp be a desolation; let no one dwell in their tents.
For they persecute him whom you have struck down, and they recount the pain of those you have wounded.
Add to them punishment upon punishment; may they have no acquittal from you.
Let them be blotted out of the book of the living; let them not be enrolled among the righteous.
One could see where they might have made some assumptions from this. However, you can not simply develop a theology of something from only one passage. You have to look at it all. If you read the entire 69th Psalm, you will see that the main concern of the author in this passage is the honour of God and zeal for the house of the Lord. What we have to understand is that in the Old Testament there was a judicial element to these commands and the things that God was doing. He used Israel to exercise judgement on the pagan nations who had rejected God. Let me caution to you: We have to be careful assigning to God the same actions and motivations that we see in ourselves.
What the religious folks had been doing was taking these judicially minded commands and implied hatred of enemies and then instead of it being at a judicial, national level, they had applied it in their personal, everyday lives and interactions. They hated people and they used this perceived command as a justification for their hate.
I must alert you to another danger: It is very dangerous to take something Scripture and try to justify the thing that your sinful heart just wants to do no matter what. This is common today. We must be vigilant.
What we are needing to look at and what we are seeing in Jesus’s words is the attitude of a Christian toward other people.
II. So what is Jesus saying here?
II. So what is Jesus saying here?
Much as we have seen him do in the last five sections of this larger passage, Jesus is contrasting His teaching with the incomplete teaching of the scribes and Pharisees.
In commentating about how this passage fits into the flow of the Sermon on the Mount, Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones accurately points out that one thing and one thing only makes a person be able to not strike back at the one who strikes him, enables him to turn the other cheek, go the second mile, give his cloak as well as his coat when demanded forcibly from him...
He must be dead to himself
He must be dead to himself
He must be dead to self interest
He must be dead to self interest
He must be dead to concern about self
He must be dead to concern about self
But now, Jesus goes even further than these former passages and says it goes deeper to the point of loving these enemies of yours. It’s not enough to merely no hit them back. No, we must be positive in our attitude towards them. This is the call and command of our King.
When we think of loving our neighbor:
The term neighbor MUST also include our enemies and those who would do evil to us.
The term neighbor MUST also include our enemies and those who would do evil to us.
Why?
God is like this, so we must be like this. Jesus gives us a couple of illustrations. God gives light to all and God gives rain to all.
so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.
Lloyd-Jones taught me that God does not differentiate this based on what they are or what they have done to Him. Therefore, we must treat others in a way that does not depend on what they are or upon what they have done to us.
If we don’t pay attention, it’s easy for us to allow the way people treat us or react to us, influence how we treat them. Jesus calls us to something higher.
Not for what they might become…
This is what sets those of us who follow Jesus Christ apart from those in the world who do not. It’s easy to love those who love you and treat you well but it is much larger of a task to love without discrimination based on others’ treatment of us. It sets us apart from people who don’t know God as their Father.
We must not make the same mistake as the scribes and Pharisees and limit who we define as our neighbor more narrowly than how God would.
So here’s the million dollar question:
III. How do we love our enemies?
III. How do we love our enemies?
Scripture teaches us what true, real, genuine love looks like in I Corinthians 13. We tend to use it as the key verse in weddings but it actually applies to love in general and not merely the love between a man and woman in marriage. If God wants us to love our enemies, hadn’t we understand what love looks like? It can’t be just a warm fuzzy feeling when we think of another person, right?
Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant
or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;
it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.
Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.
The first thing I would ask you, when you say you love someone is: do you love the way that God describes love in His Word. Now if we aren’t careful we can make this all sorts of philosophical and what some of us need today are some practical ways we can put those things into action. Remember that love is a verb. Loving is doing something, it’s active. It is not just a feeling.
Speak well of them.
don’t give in to the temptation to gossip or slander
don’t share a prayer request as a low-key way to convey that that person is a dirtbag
don’t call them a dirtbag
speak good things about them when you have opportunity
find things you appreciate about them… not backhandedly as we are tempted to
don’t do passive-aggressive thing
2. Do good to them.
greet them
serve them
find ways to bless them
sacrificially give of yourself to them
3. Pray for them.
It is very difficult to hate someone you are actively praying for.
This is exactly the way God treated you when you were his enemy.
Gospel here
Being perfect? What is that about?
Conclusion
Your enemy is your neighbor.
Loving your enemies shows that God is your Father.
Loving our enemies is in-separately connected to humility. In his book Revitalize, Andy Davis gives us ten reasons to be humble toward our opponents or enemies. As I read these as recounted in one my commentaries I thought they would be appropriate for us today as well.
Exalting Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount Love Your Enemies: It Is the Way of Jesus 5:43-48
1. Because God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble (1 Pet 5:5).
2. Because we are sinners too (1 Cor 4:7).
3. Because God is motivated to fight for those who do not fight for themselves (1 Pet 2:23).
4. Because Paul was willing to trade his salvation to rescue his enemies (Rom 9:1-4).
5. You cannot tell the wheat from the weeds (Matt 13:29).
6. You are not the issue; God’s glory is (1 Cor 10:31).
7. A humble response to attacks will motivate church members to join you (Rom 12:9-21).
8. Your enemies may be right . . . about something (Ps 139:23-24).
9. Humility will adorn the gospel for outsiders to see (Matt 5:16).
10. Suffering well grows you in Christlikeness (Rom 5:3). (Davis, Revitalize, 121–24)
What does it look like practically to be humble toward our opponents? There are many ways we can live out God’s call to be humble. Here are ten:
1. Make it a point to obey Jesus’s command to pray for those who oppose and insult you. Pray for them by name.
2. Bring all criticisms back to God in prayer. Where you are convicted that you have wronged someone, be humble enough to go back to that person and seek forgiveness.
3. Practice good listening skills with people who disagree with you.
4. Ask the Lord in prayer to give you a discerning heart to know when to fight like a lion and when to be humble and yielding.
5. Get prepared for potentially contentious meetings, especially before the whole church (like in church conferences), by praying in great detail about what you’re about to face, putting on the spiritual armor Paul lists in Ephesians 6:10-17, and by reading many Scripture verses on humility.
6. Be especially wary of gossip and slander when gathered with passionate supporters of your efforts. . . . Understand how sinful it is to act as though you could never commit the same sin as others.
7. Ponder the example of the Pharisee and the tax collector in Jesus’s parable of humble prayer (Luke 18:9-14).
8. Understand that some opponents really are children of the devil and will never be reconciled to biblical doctrine. But also know that some of the bitterest enemies right now could become staunch allies later.
9. Be wary of lawsuits. Read Paul’s prohibition passage in 1 Corinthians 6:1-8 and submit to God’s wisdom.
10. As you proceed in the Christian life, be more and more zealous for Christ’s glory than for your good reputation among others. (slightly adapted from Davis, Revitalize, 125–27)