WWUTT 2321 Love Those Who Hate You (Luke 6:27-28)

Jesus said, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. You know the words, you've probably even repeated them before, but how often have you done them? It's not something we see often, even among Christians, when we understand the text.

This is when we understand the text, studying God's word to reach all the riches of full assurance in Christ. Find all our videos online at wwutt .com, as well as links to follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Here's your teacher, Pastor Gabe Hughes.

Loving Your Enemies in Luke 6

Thank you, Becky. In our study of the gospel of Luke, we've been in the Sermon on the Plain in Luke 6, and we come back to that message, verses 27 to 36 is what we're looking at today, where Jesus teaches to love your enemies.

So let me begin reading here in Luke 6, 27 to 36, hear the word of the Lord. But I say to you who hear, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you, to one who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also.

And from one who takes away your cloak, do not withhold your tunic either. Give to everyone who begs from you, and from one who takes away your goods, do not demand them back. And as you wish that others would do to you, do so to them.

If you love those who love you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you,.

What benefit is that to you?

For even sinners do the same. And if you lend to those from whom you expect to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners to get back the same amount. But love your enemies, and do good, and lend expecting nothing in return.

For your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, for he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil. Be merciful, even as your father is merciful.". And that statement there at the very end is really what brings the whole thing together.

Why love your enemies? Why pray for those who abuse you? Because the father loved his enemies. Because Jesus prayed for those who abused him. And so in imitation of God, if we desire the Lord and to grow in godliness, so we are to do the same.

So let's come back here to verse 27, where Jesus says, "'I say to you who hear,' that's a great beginning there, "'for he's speaking to only those who are listening to him teach, who are learning from his teaching.

Remember that at the beginning of this message, his disciples came to him.'". Luke 6 20, he lifted up his eyes on his disciples and said, and then he issued those four beatitudes and then the four woes.

Disciple means learner. So even though the crowds are there, there are many who have come to him to hear him teach and to see miracles, but it's only to his disciples that he's really addressing, because it's only they who are learning from him.

And that's reiterated here at the beginning of this section when he says, "'I say to you who hear,' so he's not speaking to everybody, the rest of the crowds are there, but they're not going to love their enemies and they're not going to pray for those who abuse them if they're not there as Jesus' disciples to learn from him.

When Martin Lloyd-Jones wrote his book on the Sermon on the Mount, which really that book is taking the sermons that he preached on the Sermon on the Mount and compiling them into a book. But one of the things that Lloyd-Jones said in that book, "'To expect Christian conduct from a person who is not born again is heresy.'".

This sermon that we have in Matthew 5, 6, and 7, and also here in Luke 6, this is like a manifesto for Christians on how they are to behave in the kingdom of God. We can't expect a person who is not born again to live this way.

Now, it's not that you couldn't use the Sermon on the Mount to show to a person how they fall short of Christ's standard. You could certainly demonstrate that, but you can't hold them to or obligate them to keep these rules that they're incapable of keeping when they're not followers of Jesus and they don't have his Holy Spirit in order to live by these things that Jesus tells his disciples that they must live by.

So they need the gospel first. They must first turn from their sin to the Lord Jesus Christ and then in Christ are able to keep his words. They come to him, they learn from him, they desire to do what he asks and to please him.

That's a disciple of Jesus. And so that's who Jesus is talking to. He's not talking to everybody. He is talking to those who learn from him, who actually are in submission to the word of the Lord, who know that his word is the highest authority and they will do what he says.

And so Jesus says to his disciples, we shouldn't expect this from anybody who is not a Christian. They don't desire to do it. They rebel against it. It's in their nature to rebel against it. But to those who are Christians, who follow the word of Christ, we can hold them to this standard.

They claim to be a follower of Christ. We can hold them to this standard. Love your enemies and do good to those who hate you. I really see this very seldom. I don't see it very often, especially in a social media world that we live in as we do now where people are so willing to put their thoughts and their words all over the place.

Online, here's my words and I want you to read them. You don't see much of this in practice. You don't see much of love your enemies and do good to those who hate you. What do you see instead? Usually it's belittle your enemies.

I'm going to try to tear you down the way that you're tearing me down. You see a lot of reaction in the same way. People reacting to their enemies in the way that their enemies are treating them. That's what you see largely.

And I'm talking just in the online world, different when it's in person. But online, this is how a lot of Christians act toward people who hate them. I don't see much of doing good to those who hate you.

Speaking kindly, respectfully, not name calling, not belittling. One of the things that I try to do when I encounter somebody who hates me, which if I'm online on any given day of the week, it's every day.

It's every day that I'm online, I'm going to encounter somebody who hates me. It's in the comments to my videos. It's on X or social media or whatever else. There are people who hate things that I say when I'm speaking biblical truth.

And one of the things I try to do when I'm responding to those individuals is just simply ask for questions. I hope that in my asking a question of somebody that I'm putting them in a position to have to think about what it is that they're saying.

And now they have to back up what it is that they're saying. And hopefully that cognitive dissonance will strike their conscience and they will realize that I've spoken too presumptuously. I'm speaking out of turn.

I've spoken out of my feelings instead of reasoning with somebody. So when asking a question, it'll kind of jam the conscience in a certain way and force them to have to look at the words that they're putting out there.

Are they speaking with sense or are they just reacting emotionally? So that's one of the reasons why I asked the question. Another reason why I might ask a question of somebody who's demonstrating hate toward me is so anybody else who's watching the conversation can see that the accusation that they're making of me is not accurate.

So I'm asking a question that they're unwilling to answer and they'll just double down on their insult or on their criticism. So anybody else that's watching the conversation will see, okay, what this person is saying about Gabe isn't accurate at all anyway.

That's the second reason why I'll ask a question.

Loving Your Enemies by Asking Questions and Showing Kindness

Here's the third.

Third reason why I asked the question is so it will demonstrate to others my kindness toward them and I'm not reacting to them the way that they are acting toward me. I don't respond with name calling.

And incidentally, my behavior online is watched by members of my church. There are people from my church that follow me online so they see what it is that I say and my elders know as well. And when I came to Providence here in Casa Grande, one of the questions that we, or the question I had for the elders, one of the things that we talked about, the two elders who have been here from before I got here, Chris and Alan, one of the things I talked with them about was sometimes things I say online tends to stir quite a bit of hate and we're probably gonna get some hateful emails and we're probably gonna get some hateful phone calls.

You'll get voice messages from some of these folks as well. It's happened before. It's been going on for years. I'm just making you aware of it. And one of my elders said, really, it doesn't bother me or it doesn't concern me that you have this online presence.

I mean, really the only thing that I'm concerned about is are you responding to them like a Christian? Are you calling people names? Is that what you're resorting to in the responses that you make online?

If you're not out there trying to rile people up, stirring them up, calling them names, then just conduct yourself in a civil and respectful Christian way. And it doesn't matter what other people are gonna say about you.

We'll field those phone calls. That's fine. Because we know that our pastor is behaving in a way that is acceptable for his public behavior. One of the qualifications for a pastor in 1 Timothy 3 .3 is that he must not be violent, but gentle, not quarrelsome.

So not stirring up quarrels online. One of the interesting things about that same verse. So 1 Timothy 3 .3, it also says he must not be a lover of money. And now that X pays people for their content, that's something that a pastor who has an online persona really has to keep in mind and be careful of because he might be tempted to wanna say triggering things that are gonna stir people up to anger and give all kinds of attention to the stuff that he's posting so that he can generate income because X will pay for viral posts and things like that.

So that's even something that somebody who is involved in social media has to think about. And YouTube videos, of course, as well. If you have ad-sponsored YouTube videos, then you're going to, you're making revenue off of that.

I don't, the What channel is free. It doesn't have any ads on it at all. Unless somebody makes a copyright claim or something like that. That's probably the reason why you might see a What video with an ad on it, but I keep them ad-free.

Anyway, this is just some of the disciplines that I've tried to enact to conduct myself online in a way that demonstrates this. Loving my enemies and doing good to those who hate me. Doing good to them and not blowing them off and not trying to belittle them or make them feel low, but doing good to them in speaking kindly to them and also sharing the gospel with them.

I might share the law with them in the sense of showing to them, according to what scripture says, how they are sinning, how they are going against what God says. And I've done this with Christians and with unbelievers online.

Showing them that here's what God's standard is according to his word, and you're not living according to that standard. So you stand in judgment for your conduct. How are you going to be forgiven this sin that you've committed?

Not against me, but against God. And then hopefully having an opportunity there to share the gospel with them. And that forgiveness comes through faith in Jesus Christ. And so even as Jesus goes on here and he says, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.

One of the ways that we might bless somebody who curses us is sharing the gospel with them. It is the most good that we can do for another person is to give them the message that saves. Not just forgive sin in the immediate, but forgive sin in the registry that's kept in heaven by which we will be judged on the last day.

And by believing in Jesus Christ, we will not perish in the judgment of God, but we will have the forgiveness of sins and everlasting life. The greatest blessing you can give to somebody who curses you.

Forgiving a Former Bully

Number of years ago, there was a fellow by the name of Ryan. He was a little bit older than me, still alive as far as I know, and still older than me. Anyway, Ryan used to bully me in middle school. We played on the same baseball team together even, and he was not kind to me.

I was a decent baseball player. It wasn't like I was the loser on the team. I was pretty good. And yet he just did not like me and tried to bully me in whatever way that he could. If I was sitting with him on the bench and I had my drink sitting on the bench, he would just swat it off the bench.

I mean, in whatever little puny way that he might pick to just try to make me feel low or make me feel bad or inconvenience me in whatever way whatsoever. Sometimes he would even do things during the games to try to sabotage a play that I was making or running the bases or something like that.

It was pretty obnoxious. I just want to play baseball and this guy wants to make me feel bad on the team. Anyway, I was a musician. This would have been, so we were playing baseball 13 years old or something like that.

So this was now over 10 years later. I'm in my mid -20s. So maybe a dozen years later after we were playing on the same baseball team together. I was a musician and I was asked to come and lead the worship for a series of revival meetings that a church was doing in a small Southwest Kansas town.

It was actually a pretty big revival, even though it was a church in a small town, I think the room was packed almost every night. And I call it revival. I say that very loosely because I don't know what else to call them, but they were just having these services every night during the week and they had a guest preacher come in and I was the musician that was leading the worship.

And there was one night, it was like a Tuesday or Wednesday. It was somewhere in the middle of this week-long, these week-long gatherings that we were doing. There was one night where the pastor gets up and he's welcoming everybody.

And before I'm supposed to go up and lead worship, he's told me beforehand, we got something we're gonna do in the very beginning. So just hang tight. And then I'll tell you when to go up and play. And I said, fine.

So I'm sitting on the front pew there. And as I'm sitting there, I look over and there's someone staring at me, like leaning forward, looking at me. There's people in between us, but he's leaned forward and he's looking right at me.

And I make eye contact with him and I recognize him immediately. And it's Ryan. A dozen years since we played on a baseball team and he bullied me on that team. And here I am looking into the face of my former bully.

But his demeanor is completely different. I can see it in his face that his demeanor is different from when I remembered him bullying me. And he just makes eye contact with me and he just simply says, Gabe.

And I looked at him and I'm going, Ryan? And so the pastor stands up and he says, we have somebody who's come tonight who wants to confess his faith in Christ and be baptized. And he welcomes Ryan up there.

And Ryan came and stood with him and shared his testimony and talked about how he had been strung out on drugs and alcohol and the Lord really got ahold of him, wrenched his heart, broke him in pieces.

He's turned from his sin to the Lord Jesus Christ and now he's a Christian. And I'm just beside myself. I'm sitting there in the pew watching this testimony. I can't believe it. Afterward, we shook hands and hugged and that was it.

There was no conversation about, you remember what you did to me in my childhood? You remember how miserable you made me on that baseball team? And all the different ways that you bullied me and put me down and the names you called me and all this, do you remember all of that?

I didn't do any of that. There wasn't a keeping record of wrongs. There wasn't a demanding of him some sort of restitution because I saw in this man a changed person, changed by Jesus Christ who turned him into someone new, who forgave his sins.

And now he was a brother in Christ to me. He was not my enemy. He was my brother. Now I share that story not as, see, here was an opportunity where I blessed someone who cursed me. That's not really the point because I wasn't the one who led him to the Lord.

So someone shared the gospel with him and brought him to Christ. But even though he at one point lived in that rebellion, God had mercy on him and forgave him of his wrongs and brought him into the fold.

You know, what I wished I would have done looking back on that in hindsight, what I wished I would have done, I wish I could say that I prayed for Ryan. I wish I could say that, that even though he treated me that way as a kid and bullied me, I would go home and pray for him.

I wish I could say that, but that was not my attitude when I was a kid. I did not pray for those who abused me. And yet the Lord was merciful to him and the Lord was merciful to me. And the two of us became brothers because of what the Lord had done for both of us.

And it's this kindness of God that is given to us that we must be willing to demonstrate and show to one another. And like I said, I just don't see it much today, especially online, I don't see it much.

I am constantly name called by people who call themselves Christians and probably don't want to acknowledge me as a Christian. That may be the reason why they call me names. Well, he's not a brother to me anyway.

I can call him whatever it is that I want. There's very little of this attitude of demonstration in social media today of loving our enemies and doing good to those who hate us and praying for those who abuse us, even if it would be in a chat message context of showing this abuse to us.

A lot of us want to instead claim a victim status. We want to try to get people to feel sorry for us. We even want to try to move into a position of authority or I know better than you because I am a victim.

And that gives me some sort of power over you. Raising the victimhood status to a position of power over the other person, of moral authority over this person who has treated us this way. When we who have been made victims of our circumstances or victims of other people who abuse us, even victims need to be humble.

Even victims need to come before God and bow the knee and say, I've sinned against you too. Lord, please forgive me. And I pray for those who are abusing me that you would forgive them. Because we have this message here in the Sermon on the Plain.

What do we have later on in Luke when Jesus is being crucified? It's only Luke's gospel that captures it. The words of Christ from the cross Father, forgive them for they know not what they do. And are we willing to pray the same prayer for those who abuse us?

Or would we rather fire back, make them feel low, widen that separation that already exists between us, trying to tear them down, wishing that God's judgment would come down upon them? Or would we rather see them repent and come to know the Lord and live?

Would we rather see them come to Christ and become our brothers and sisters in faith instead of our enemies? Then you need to bless those who curse you and pray for those who abuse you. It's not a common message, even in many churches today, but it is the word of our Lord in the Sermon on the Plain.

A Prayer for Mercy Toward Abusers

Heavenly Father, I pray that I would indeed humble myself and desire to bless those who curse me and pray for those who abuse me. And not just try to shrug them off or ignore them or walk away or kind of leave them to their own devices, but that I would actually, part of my heart, would invest in them and come before my God and pray on their behalf, God have mercy on them.

As you have had mercy on me when I was rebellious against you, have mercy on these who curse and abuse. May we desire that the gospel of Jesus Christ would go forth in this dark, this lost and dying world and rescue sinners into your glorious kingdom.

It is in Jesus' name we pray, amen.

Thank you for listening to When We Understand The Text with Pastor Gabe Hughes. If you'd like to support this ministry, visit our website, www .wutt .com, and click on the Give tab in the top right corner of the page.

Join us again tomorrow as we continue our Bible study When We Understand The Text.