Common Grace

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I invite you to take out your Bibles and turn with me to the Gospel of Matthew.
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We're going to be in chapter five and we're going to look at verses 43 through 48.
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We have been well, that came on.
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We have been in a long study now.
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In the Sermon on the Mount, we started in Matthew chapter five and verse one.
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We've just been going verse by verse through the text.
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We have seen so far the pattern of the Lord in this great sermon of sermons.
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It's interesting, there was once a pastor who was a good man.
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He was a good minister, but he was very shy when he was out away from his congregation.
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And he was with another friend who always said he wanted him to preach.
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He wanted him to preach, but he never would preach until finally one day he came up and to the pulpit and he had his friend there, the one who was shy.
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And he stood up behind the pulpit and he said, This morning, brother so and so is going to bring the message.
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Didn't tell him what was going to happen.
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Didn't tell him to prepare himself or anything like that.
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He just said, This morning, brother so and so is going to bring the message.
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And he sat down.
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So brother so and so, whatever his name was, stood up quite embarrassingly.
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So he walked up to the chancel, walked up behind the pulpit, opened up his Bible and he read the Sermon on the Mount start to finish and sat back down.
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He said, he said, what better sermon could I preach? Totally unprepared, totally unexpected.
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He didn't know what to do.
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He just read the Sermon on the Mount and he sat down.
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And that has been an interesting thing that I remember a lot about the power of the sermon.
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There is no there is no sermon that I know of that touches on so many things, that reaches so many areas of Christian ethic and Christian worship and what it means to be a follower of Christ than this great sermon.
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And so far we have looked at the Beatitudes.
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We have seen how Christ expounds on what a believer in him would be when he says, Blessed are they who do these things.
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He's talking about his followers, the poor in spirit, those who recognize their need for salvation, those who mourn, they mourn over their own sins, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness because they know they are so void of it.
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And then he gets into the ethic of what it means to be a Christian.
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And he begins looking at the Old Testament law.
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And he begins to say about this law, he says, You have heard it said this, but I tell you this.
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And in so doing, he was not saying that the Old Testament law was wrong.
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But what he was saying was that the interpretation of that law had been so misunderstood.
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The ethic of the Pharisees was one of hypocrisy.
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They had created an ethic which was ungodly, even though it was based on God's Word.
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They're not unique in that.
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There are many churches, even in our day now, who preach ungodly doctrines.
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And they say, Well, I just got it out of the Bible.
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But they have misinterpreted.
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They have misused.
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They have twisted the Scripture.
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As Martin Luther said, they have taken it like a like a wax nose and they have shaped it to whatever form they want it to be, rather than submitting themselves to the Word of God.
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They have become its judge and authority and made it say what they want it to say, rather than simply receiving from the Word what it says to their shame.
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Because that's just what it is.
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It is shame.
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We are to be submissive to the Word of God because it is the Word of God.
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We are to submit ourselves fully to it because it is inerrant.
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It is infallible.
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It is from God himself.
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The Bible says all Scripture is found in Greek.
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It is God breathed.
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It comes from him.
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And thus, when we open the Word of God, we are studying and believing what he has said.
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And it makes it all the more difficult when we come to a passage like the one we're looking at today, because when we come to the passage that we're looking at today, we read something that's actually very difficult for us to apply.
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We started looking at it last week.
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For those of you who were not here, I will give you a brief synopsis of what we talked about because I have to bring you up to speed as to where we are.
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We are looking at a passage wherein Jesus is going to talk about hatred of enemies and rather our commendation, our command to love our enemies.
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We're going to look at that passage even more in depth.
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Last week we did the message and I called last week's message a theology of hate because we looked at what it meant when the Pharisee said we're supposed to hate our enemies and what Jesus meant when he said we're supposed to love our enemies.
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And we looked at how God could be seen as one who hates his enemies, because what does God do to his enemies? What does God do to those who reject him? What does God do to those who live apart from him and die apart from him? He sends them to an eternal flame.
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One might say that that is hatred.
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And let me just I want to give you one thing from last week.
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If you were not here and even if you were at by way of reminder, I want to reinforce this truth.
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Don't ever mistake God's holiness for human hatred, because the reason why God judges sin is because he is holy, not because he is some spiteful, dictatorial, hateful monster, but because he is the only being in the entire universe who is completely and utterly holy.
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And every sin that happens from the least to the greatest is an offense to his holiness.
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I commend to you read again Isaiah 6, wherein Isaiah the prophet sees God sitting upon his throne.
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He said, I saw the Lord seated upon his throne and the robe of the train of his robe filled the temple.
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And what did Isaiah do? He said, Jesus is my homeboy.
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No, he did not.
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He said, I'm all right with God and God's all right with me.
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Kumbaya.
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No, he did not.
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What he said was, woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips.
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This is a prophet of God.
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Yeah, but he said, I am undone for I have seen the Lord.
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Woe is me.
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These guys on television, I saw Jesus and we walked and held hands and ate apricots or whatever.
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They're they are so wrong, for they have not seen God face to face.
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They are liars and they are charlatans.
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Those who saw God fell prostrate in his presence, face down before him and understood their holiness or his holiness and their sinfulness.
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Those are the ones who saw God.
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So I say that to say this.
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If we confuse holiness with human hatred, we have misunderstood God and we've misunderstood the value of our own hatred because we think it somehow compares to God's holiness and it does not.
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So that was last week in a nutshell is a little longer than that.
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If you want to go back and listen to it, it's in the archives if you want to listen to it.
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But this week we're going to continue on and we're going to see why Christ gives this command because he gives the command, he says, he says, you have heard it said to love your neighbor and hate your enemy.
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But I say unto you.
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Love your enemies.
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That's what we dealt with last week, but we're going to expand on that this week with something that is important for us to understand doctrinally, and that is the concept of common grace.
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So that being said, let us stand and we will read the word of God together.
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That was a lengthy introduction, but I do want to now read the text and deal with it and we stand to give honor and reverence to the word of God.
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Verse 43, you have heard that it was said you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.
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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.
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For he makes his son rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the just and the unjust.
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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.
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As your heavenly father.
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It's perfect.
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Our father and our God, we thank you for your word.
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We thank you for this opportunity to expound upon your word.
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I pray that you would first and foremost, as always, Lord, keep me from error and open your heart, open the hearts of your people to the truth.
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I pray that this would be a time of conviction for us all, that it would be a time of conversion for those who have come here today apart from Christ, and that this would be used to honor you and to glorify you for you are the only one worthy of glory, honor and praise.
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In Christ's name we pray.
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Amen.
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You have heard that it was said.
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You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.
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That particular statement is not found in the Old Testament.
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I mentioned this last week.
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Nowhere in the Old Testament does it say you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.
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It does say you shall love your neighbor.
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It says that very clearly.
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It says you shall love your neighbor as yourself.
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That's very clear.
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People think that's a New Testament concept.
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It's not.
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It's found in the Torah.
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It is found throughout the Old Testament.
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It is a command of God from the earliest pages of Scripture that you are to love your neighbor.
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But here is how the Pharisees had construed that to their own devices.
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They had changed it to fit their own personal whims.
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They had said you love your neighbor, but you can hate your enemy.
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See, what they had done is they had established, then, a dichotomy of personage.
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I have neighbors and I have enemies.
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My neighbors I will love.
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My enemies I will hate.
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Jesus comes along and he satisfies this by asking them, who do you think your neighbors are? Your neighbor is your enemy.
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They're still your neighbor.
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He tells that story of the Good Samaritan.
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Remember, we talked about that last Sunday.
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He said, here's a Samaritan who does good to someone else.
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He does good to his enemy because the Jews and the Samaritans hated one another.
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And he says, but he did good to him.
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In that, he demonstrated that even our enemies can be recipients and should be recipients of our love.
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Now, that's verses 43 and 44.
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Now, verse 45, he says, why? Why is it that we are caught? By the way, I must admit, this is one of the most difficult things that Christians are called to do, to love those who hate you, because, I mean, honestly, right in our minds snaps at least a couple of shots of people that hate us.
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I mean, you could probably think right off.
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I know a few folks who don't like me too well.
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I know whole communities of people who hate my preaching.
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I get emails and they are unflattering, but in that hatred, the proper response is what? Well, the natural response is to hate back because that is the built in response of the human nature.
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It's not a natural thing that God put into us.
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It is something that is a result of the fall and it's the retaliatory nature that we have.
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You slap me.
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I slap you harder.
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You say something ugly to me.
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I say something to you worse.
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It's always the one upmanship.
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We practice it in school.
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I remember when I was a child, we had cut down contests.
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I don't know if you know what that is, but it's where one person will say something ugly and you have a responsibility to bring it back harder than he brought it to you.
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And then he comes back to you and then it's a contest.
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Who can get the ugliest? Who can get the most raw on the other person, the harshest? Right.
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We do that.
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We know what it's about and we know there are people who hate us.
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I've seen video footage.
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I've read blogs and Internet posts and books of people who hate us.
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And I don't say that to develop some sort of persecution complex.
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I don't get excited and happy that people hate Bible believing Christians.
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I really don't.
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I don't write that that's the truth, but to deny it would be foolish.
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And so we are called to live in a world wherein there are people who actively hate us.
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They don't just dislike us.
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They don't just, you know, tolerate us.
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They don't want to hear what we have to say.
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They don't want to deal with what we want to do.
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They want us shut up and shut down or put away.
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There is no desire, no love, no concern.
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They hate us.
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And what's our response? Hate them back is the natural response.
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It is the it is the it is so ingrained that it's it's the it's the response.
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It's usually the only response we give.
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People tell me stories.
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Pastor, I had somebody come to me today.
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They said something ugly to me.
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And what did you do? Well, I gave it back to him twice as hard.
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Aren't you proud of me? No, but see, it's so natural.
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That's what we think we ought to do.
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When someone is hurting me, when someone is persecuting me, when someone is when someone is hating me, then the natural response is to return in kind with the same level of vitriol that I have been given.
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So that being said.
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Christ gives us this command, but I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you so that this is what we're getting today.
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Verse 45, so that what so that you may be sons of your father who is in heaven.
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Now, I want to make there's an interesting linguistic note that I want to make at this section of this text.
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Hebrews is not Hebrew.
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The Hebrew language rather is not rich in adjectives.
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And for that reason, Hebrew often uses the term son of something.
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Some type of abstract noun where we would use an adjective, for instance, Hebrew in the Hebrew language, someone might be called the son of peace.
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We would simply call them peaceful.
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You understand, you've seen that he's a son of peace.
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Well, in English, we would just say he's a peaceful person.
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So they might say, you know, he's a he's a son of consolation.
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We would say he's a merciful person or consoling person.
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So when Jesus uses this term so that you may be sons of your father, what he's saying is so that you might be a godly person.
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He's not saying that this is how you get saved.
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He's not saying this is how you become a son of God in the sense of this is how a person goes through the process of becoming one of God's children.
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What he's saying is that in doing this thing, you are being like your father.
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You are being godly when you do this thing.
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Sons of your father is indicating that by loving people who do not love us back, we are we are behaving as God has behaved toward us.
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And that's the most important thing I think that we could get from this text.
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And we're going to talk about common grace.
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We're getting there.
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But I just want to stress where he's going with this, because there's a natural progression in the text.
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He says, you've heard it said to love your neighbor, hate your enemies.
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But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you so that you may be like your father and so that you may be sons of your father in heaven, that you may be godly.
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That's the natural thing.
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Why would we want to do this? Because in doing so, we're being like God.
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How are we being like God? How are we imitating God in doing good to those who hate us? Do I really have to ask that question? How are we being godly by loving those who hate us? Because God loves those who hate him.
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God loves those who hate him.
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Thank God, because such were all of us.
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Beloved, I cannot stress this enough.
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The Bible says that we were all at one time haters of God, that we were all at one time at enmity with God.
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And you may say, well, I don't remember a time when I hated God.
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Well, let me stress this.
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I could go out into the world.
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I could go talk to 50, 75 and 100 people.
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And I tell you, very few of them would outright tell me they hate God.
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Unbelievers, they could all be unbelievers, but very few of them would use the language that I hate God.
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Now, I know a few who would.
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We have some family members, don't we, that would just straight up say, I hate God.
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But the enmity, the hatred of God that I'm talking about is the love for sin, which in that love for sin is a hatred of the Creator.
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It's a built in thing.
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I tell people, people all the time, they say, I love God.
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I'm seeking after God.
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And I say, no, you're really not.
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You're seeking after the blessings of God.
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You're not seeking after God himself.
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The person who says, well, I love God, but I don't want anything to do with Jesus.
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I don't want anything to do with Scripture.
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I don't want anything to do with, you know, I believe God exists, but I don't want anything to do with Christ or the church or Scripture.
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Beloved, let me let me turn this back to you and simply ask you a question.
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What God do you love? Because the God that you say that you love is not the God of this book.
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The God that you say you love is not the God of Scripture.
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You may say you love God, but if you create a God in your own mind just to give you a God to love, that is idolatry.
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It's no different than if you had taken a piece of gold and carved out a piece of gold that you wanted to worship and said, hey, I'm going to worship this.
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Then if you take in your mind, you create God to be a different way than he is.
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And you worship that God that is idolatry.
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Beloved, it's so dangerous because it's so prevalent.
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We live in a nation of idol worshippers.
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We live in a nation of people who want God to be the way they want him to be.
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So they create him in their own image and they worship only the God that they were.
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And how do I know this? Because I take them to Scripture and I say, but what about where God says this? And they say to me, and I have heard it said very clearly, I don't believe that about God.
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My God wouldn't do that.
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Ding, ding, ding.
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You're an idol worshipper.
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You just told me.
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You just proved your own idolatry by saying my God wouldn't do that.
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Then he's not the God of this book.
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If your God wouldn't do what's in this book, then you have a false God.
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And beloved, the world lives in idolatry.
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Idolaters are not just those of other faiths.
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The churches are filled with idolaters.
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Churches where people go in and they want this health and wealth garbage of a gospel that's not a true gospel.
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That is idolatry.
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When they go to churches where they will not speak on the truth of Scripture and the heinousness of sin and the holiness of God, they are worshiping an idol.
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And they are being taught in that to hate the true God.
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And they don't even realize it.
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But how do we know that they hate the true God? Expose them to the true God and they will hate him.
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It will come out in their language.
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My God wouldn't do that.
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And I always say you are so right because your God does not exist.
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Those are harsh words, pastor.
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These are harsh times.
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Gone are the days when we can speak softly on these issues.
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We must speak the word of God in love.
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But we cannot shirk from speaking the whole counsel of God.
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So getting back to our text, how are we the most godly when we love those who don't love us? Because God loved us when we didn't love him.
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Very simple.
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And that's why he goes on to say in verse 45, he says, he says, so that you may be sons of your father who is in heaven, for he makes his son rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.
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Now, this passage is so important.
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In fact, in Reformed theology, in our theology that we teach, Reformed theology, this passage sets the stage for what we call common grace.
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And just because we call it common grace does not mean it is common in the sense of regular or normal or somehow mediocre.
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It's not.
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It's common in the sense that we believe that all people are recipients of the grace of God in that we do not all receive judgment at the very moment we sin.
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We don't all.
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I made this mention last week.
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God is holy.
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We are sinful.
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We rebel against God.
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God would be absolutely just in judging us at that very moment.
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He would be absolutely just in opening up the earth, swallowing us whole and forgetting us forever.
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And you say to me, that is not the God I love.
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That's not the God I worship.
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Then then then please repent of your idolatry, because the holiness of God, the power of God, the majesty of God has been lost.
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And has been replaced with the Santa Claus God who begs us to come sit on his knee and tell him what we want for Christmas.
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So this holiness, this power, this God that we're talking about, he does have a love that extends universally.
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It is a grace that extends universally, and it's demonstrated in the fact that all people share in this.
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And that's why it's called common grace, by the way.
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It's not common grace because it's it's it's normal or in some way in some way menial.
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It's common in that all people share in it.
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And he gives us two examples.
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He says he makes the rain fall on everybody.
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Guess what? You're a saved person.
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Your neighbor who's unsaved.
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You're not the only one who gets the rain.
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You're not the only one who gets the clouds.
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You're not the only one who gets the sun.
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God's grace extends to all people.
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In the very beating of our hearts, in the very air that we breathe, in the very fact that our molecules are held together, that is all part of the sustaining work of God.
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The Bible says in him we live and move and have our being.
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Years ago, that hit me like a ton of bricks.
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It's not that may not sound like much, by the way.
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I'm going to be preaching on that text on Resurrection Sunday.
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But that that verse years ago, it hit me because I realized something.
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I said, if God if God did not exist, I would not exist because God holds all things together.
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And if God chose at any moment that I do not exist or that we do not exist, if he chose to stop holding all things together, all things would spin apart.
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It would cease to be because in him we live, in him we move, in him we have our being.
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He is the very sustainer.
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We talk about God as creator.
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Yes, he is creator.
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Yes, he is the providential sovereign of the universe, but he's also the sustainer of everything.
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People talk about the natural process.
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The only reason why the natural process continues to be consistent is because God himself is consistent.
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People talk about science versus religion.
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There is no science without God because God is the reason why everything is consistent.
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There's a reason why you do this experiment this way and you get the same results tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that and the day after that is because God has so ordered the world that there is consistency in this world.
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So in him we live, in him we move, in him we have our being.
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He sustains us and he does this commonly to all.
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We all share in this common grace.
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God is good to all people and say, well, what about those people he sends to hell? Beloved, let me just remind you that God is under no obligation to give grace to anyone.
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People say God is unfair when he sends people to hell.
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A fair is the place where you go and you ride rides and you go around, you know, and you spin around and you eat bad food and you pay too much.
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That's a fair.
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God is just and merciful.
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And if he for a moment stopped being merciful, his justice would collapse upon us all.
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So please don't ask for fairness from God because you just might get it.
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Because fairness means that we get what we deserve, right? And what does a sinner deserve, according to Scripture, for the wages of sin is death.
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But the gift of God is eternal life.
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The gift tells us something about it.
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It tells us that it wasn't earned.
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Last night, we had our little sweet 16 for my daughter.
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She's turning sweet 16.
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And so many people brought gifts.
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It was a beautiful night.
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We appreciate people who brought gifts.
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She didn't earn one of those things.
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You don't earn that by turning 16.
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Where you at, Ashley? You didn't earn it.
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You didn't earn a gift.
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Nobody came up and said, this gift is because you did so and so and such and such.
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Because you know what you would say? That's not a gift.
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You pay me to come cut your yard and then you hand me the money and say, this is a gift.
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I would say, no, it's not.
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It's the due.
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It's what's due.
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At the end of a work week, you work 40 hours, you go to your employer.
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He doesn't say, I'm granting you this gift of a paycheck.
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No, that's what I earned.
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The Bible says what we earn is death.
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We earn death because the wages of sin is death.
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But the gift which we didn't earn for by grace, you have been saved through faith.
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And that is not of yourself.
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It is the gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast.
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That is the gift.
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And what does God tell us to do? Extend that gift.
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I gave you grace.
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Give grace to others.
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I gave you love when you hated me.
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Love those who hate you.
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It's hard, God.
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And you know what he says to that? He says, read on in the text.
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I mean, this is the part where he gets interesting because he says he gives an illustration.
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He says, for if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? And if you greet only those brothers, if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even Gentiles do the same.
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See, this is the illustration he's saying.
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Number one, if God only gave, if God only gave goodness to those who earned it.
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Then no one would ever have any goodness.
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I mean, if God only gave sunlight, if God only gave rain, if God only gave breath, if God only gave the holy molecules together, if God only gave this goodness to those who earned it, we'd all been lost long ago.
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So he says, if you love those who love you, what reward is that? He's not telling you not to love those who love you.
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And he's not also saying that there are not differentiations in the way that we love.
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There are.
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I love my wife differently than I love my children.
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And I love my children differently than I love you.
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And I do believe that there is a special relationship that God has with his people that he does not have with the world.
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There is, and he says in Hebrews, he says, I discipline those who are my own.
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He says, I don't discipline the world.
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He says, but those who are, he says, like a loving father.
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He disciplines those who are, and he says, if you're without discipline, then you are illegitimate and not sons.
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There's a very specific demarcation in Hebrews between God's people and the world.
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And there is a difference in saving grace versus common grace.
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And the grace that's out there, we say there is a difference, but it doesn't mean that there's no grace.
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The whole world is under grace.
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It's spinning because of grace.
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And God tells me that I am to extend grace to those who don't deserve it, because that's what grace is.
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Grace is unmerited favor.
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Love is, this love that he's calling is a love of grace.
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He's saying, be like me.
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What did you what does the Bible say about Christ is while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
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Let me put it in the modern vernacular.
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While you didn't deserve it, Christ still did it.
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And that's what he tells us to do.
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He says, love those who hate you and pray for those who persecute you.
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Do unto others as God has done unto you.
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How about that? We often say the golden rule is doing others as you would have them do unto you.
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Well, maybe we could just tweak that a little.
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Not that it's not perfect, because that was the words of Christ.
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And I don't mean to change them.
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I'm just adding a little different way of interpreting it.
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They say doing others as God has done unto us.
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What has God done to us? He has graced us beyond measure.
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He has given us his love beyond measure.
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He has given us something we never deserve, never could work for, never could earn.
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And how then could we look at a person who hates us and say, I'm just going to hate you back? Jesus told a parable of a man who went before a judge and he owed money and the judge forgave his debt.
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Remember? And the man went out into the world and he saw someone who owed him a debt and he demanded his debt be paid.
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And the man couldn't repay his debt.
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So what did he do? He put him into debtor's prison.
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He put him into jail.
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And when the judge heard of that, what did he do in response? He brought him in and he condemned him.
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He said, what have you done that you who have been the recipient of such forgiveness would not extend that forgiveness out to someone else? That you who had your entire debt cleared, one that was of greater debt than this other person, you have demanded your debt be paid to you when the debt you owed was forgiven you.
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That's what it's saying.
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Jesus is saying, why are we supposed to love those who hate us? Because God loved us when we hated him.
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Why do we give grace to those who persecute us? Because God loved us when the very words of our mouth were in rebellion against him.
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The very actions of our hands were working against him and our lives were lived in hatred towards him.
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That's why we love others, because God has loved us.
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So finally, he says in verse 48, You therefore must be perfect as your father in heaven, as your heavenly father is perfect.
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I talked about this last week, and I want to again reiterate that we are not perfect.
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We are not.
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We live even as saved people.
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If you are saved this morning, if you have been regenerated by the Holy Spirit, you have the Holy Spirit within you.
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You are still not perfect because you live in a body of flesh that is constantly fighting a battle with sin.
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If you think that you're perfect, the Bible tells us that we're lying to ourselves.
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It says if you say that you have no sin, you are a liar and the truth is not within you.
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That's pretty condemning.
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But does that mean that the standard has dropped? You say, well, I can't be perfect.
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Byron made such a good point this morning, because he and I were talking about this before the message.
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He said the Bible also says husbands love your wives as Christ loves the church.
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We know we don't do it like that.
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We know we don't do it that well, but does that mean the standard's any lower? Does that mean God says, well, you can't do it perfectly.
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So I'm going to bring that standard on down.
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I'm going to meet you in the middle.
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No.
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Why would God relax a standard of holiness? Simply because we can't reach it.
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Beloved, if you're relying on your own perfection to save you, then you're relying on the wrong thing to begin with anyway.
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We don't rely on what we do to save us.
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Nothing that we do will save us.
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Only the blood of Christ, which washes away our sin.
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Only the righteousness of Christ, which is applied to our account, will save us.
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But that doesn't mean that then we live in wanted rebellion.
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How should we then live? Live as Christ.
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We seek to live as Christ.
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Here's the thing we should never be happy with.
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And it's become the modern vernacular, and I'll end with this.
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The modern vernacular has become quite satisfied with the statement nobody's perfect.
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Nobody's perfect as if it doesn't matter.
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Really, the reality is in all those imperfections, is death and destruction and disease and pain and torture and hatred and murder and all other things are found in those little imperfections.
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What should we strive for? Should we strive for mediocrity? Should we strive for a halfway faith with a halfway result? Or should we strive to live as Christ? Paul says, I press on towards the goal.
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The Apostle Paul didn't make it, but he pressed on toward that goal of Christlikeness, the goal of godliness.
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Beloved, that should be all of our goals.
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I fail every day.
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I fail miserably every day.
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There are times when my failures lead me to my knees and tears that fall from my eyes.
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But when I rise from those prayerful tears, I am reminded that my salvation is not wrought in what I do.
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My salvation is wrought in what has been done for me by Christ.
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And in that, I am re-strengthened to start afresh.
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Don't let this word of perfection discourage you.
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Let this word of perfection be a word that pushes you toward that godliness that Christ is calling us to.
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Let us pray.
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Our Father and our God, we come to you in Jesus' name, and we thank you for this opportunity that we've had to open your word together.
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I pray first and foremost, Father, for the believers that are under the sound of my voice.
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That they would understand our call.
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That our call is a strong call.
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It is a call to live as Christ in the world.
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The Apostle Paul said, for to live is Christ and to die is gain.
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So help us as believers this morning, Lord, move out into this world and seek to live as Christ.
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To love those who hate us as God loved us when we hated Him.
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And Lord, also I know that, as is always the case, Father, there are those under the sound of my voice who do not know Christ.
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There are those under the sound of my voice that are still in rebellion against Him in some way.
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Maybe they don't recognize their sin, Father.
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Maybe they don't recognize their need for a Savior.
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I pray that they understand today.
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I pray that they understand that we will never in this life reach perfection, but Christ was perfect.
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That in Him is perfection.
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And the Word of God, Your Word tells us that when we are in Him, we are safe from Your judgment.
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That in Christ there is no condemnation.
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And I pray again, if there are those here who are not in Christ, that Lord, You will, by Your Holy Spirit, open their hearts to receive Him today.
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To repent of their sins and to come to Christ.
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And to live a life, Lord, that is changed by Your Gospel.
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I thank You for Your Word.
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I thank You for Your truth.
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I pray that You would use it to change hearts today.
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In Christ's name we pray, Amen.