Loving Those Who Hate You Matthew 5:43-48

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One of the most delightful aspects of life is going through the journey with loved ones.
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This can be family or friends. If you stop to think about it, life would be very difficult without loved ones.
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They are a gift from God. The thought of going through life without those we care about the most is almost too much to bear.
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When a loved one passes away, we are left with an aching feeling inside.
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Even though in Christ there is the rock -solid hope that one day there will be a joyous reunion.
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When loved ones are gone, we ponder the days when they were with us and how wonderful it was.
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We also ponder how wonderful it would be to have them with us in the present. To have loved ones is an enormous blessing in life.
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And it's not only biological, and it's not only friends, it's also the church family.
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What we know as a church family and what any Christian knows is that the bond you have with those in Christ so often runs so much deeper than the bond you have even with your own family.
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But when talking about loved ones, whether we're talking about family, friends, or our church family, we also have others in our life.
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We have certain people who are not a blessing, but a constant thorn in our side.
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They seek to do us harm. They make us wonder how much better our life would be without them.
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These are our enemies. Everyone here who is a Christian has these people in your life.
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We wonder how could someone take so much pleasure in doing harm and not care about the pain that they are causing?
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These enemies you may know personally. It could be family. It could be classmates, co -workers, neighbors, former friends who betrayed you.
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Other enemies you do not know personally, but you experience their harm from afar.
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These might be governing authorities, godless leaders in academia, much of the media today, much of Hollywood.
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As a Christian, you have enormous opposition in this world, whether up close or from afar.
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But how are you and I to live among your enemies? This is a difficult question.
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And thankfully, the Bible has answers for the most difficult questions of life.
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And we've seen this already in the Sermon on the Mount. We're going to see that again today. So I encourage you to turn in a
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Bible with me to Matthew 5. We'll be looking at verses 43 -48.
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And if you're using a red Bible in the pews, it is on page 964. Jesus addresses the topic, what do we do with our enemies?
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How do we treat those who hate us? This sermon is titled, Loving Those Who Hate You.
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Loving Those Who Hate You. And here's our big idea. This sermon is calling you to love those who are the hardest to love.
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Love those who are the hardest to love. And we're going to see two reasons why, and I will show you those as we go through the sermon.
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But before we jump into our text, let me give you a little recap of last week's sermon. And last week's sermon is so much connected to this week's sermon.
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We looked at four areas where we are tempted to retaliate. Obviously, when someone attacks us in some way, the strong temptation is, well,
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I want to respond the same way that they just treated me. But what we learned last week is that when you receive a personal insult, we are not to retaliate.
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When you cross the line legally, like let's say you cross the line in such a petty thing like a ticket.
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Pay the ticket. And even pay more, Jesus tells us to do. How about when our
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God -given freedoms are taken away? We've experienced that over the last several months. Jesus says don't just go with them one mile.
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Go with them two miles. And also, when we are faced with relinquishing personal property.
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When someone has a need. If the person truly has a need, we should be generous with that person and not say, you know what, it's mine and not yours.
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But we should be generous and be willing to give. To do this, to do all of these things, is so foreign to our world.
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What the world says is if one goes after you, then it's time to hit back.
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There may be times to defend yourself. That's true. But they are few and far between. Most of the time, we're just supposed to take it and trust that the
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Lord takes care of it. This is the normal Christian life. Realizing that God will take care of it in the end.
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And as I mentioned, the sermon today is related to this. It makes sense that Jesus would follow the topic of retaliation with the topic of our enemies.
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Because the enemies are the ones who most often attack us. So what do we do with the people in our lives who cause us so much trouble?
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And they are not trouble because they are annoying, or we prefer to hang out with someone else because our personalities don't mesh.
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No. The people that we're addressing today are the ones who seek to do you harm.
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And specifically, they seek to cause harm because of our faith in Jesus Christ.
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And it doesn't always show itself. They might say they're going after you for something else, when really the root issue is it's because you're a
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Christian. That's why they're going after you. So we're gonna see that today. Second Timothy 3 .12
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says, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.
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So what that means is the closer you follow Christ, the more opposition you're gonna receive from the world.
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And we should be surprised when it comes. Jesus teaching on the subject to this crowd as they're overlooking the
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Sea of Galilee in the Sermon on the Mount is different from how our world operates.
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As we have seen so far, Jesus has been correcting the false Old Testament interpretations of the
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Jewish leaders. They had a rabbinical tradition that sometimes contradicted the
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Old Testament. In our text today, what these Jews were teaching indeed did contradict the
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Old Testament. So we're gonna see that. And let's look at verse 43, and we will look at each of these verses as we go through.
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Here's what Jesus said to start off. He said, you have heard that it was said, you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.
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So Jesus, quoting the Jewish leaders of his time, were telling the people to love their neighbor and to hate their enemy.
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The Jewish leaders got the first half right. They were to love their neighbor as Leviticus 19 .18
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instructs, but they applied it wrongly. What the Jewish leaders thought was this excluded loving one's enemy.
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However, the Old Testament passage Proverbs 25 .21 tells us to love our enemies.
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The Bible always agrees from Old Testament to New Testament, and we see that right here.
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The teaching of the Jewish leaders is how the world operates. They said, yeah, love those who love you, but hate your enemies.
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If one loves you, then love them back. But if one hates you, hate them back. Seems fair, right?
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That doesn't, doesn't that, isn't that what conventional wisdom says? No, this isn't right.
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Not according to Jesus. To love those who love you and to hate those who hate you is immoral.
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It violates God's law. It is living like the world and not like Christ.
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It's living for that which is passing away. What Jesus says in verse 44 is so counterintuitive as what he says so often is.
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It's countercultural. So let's see what he says here in verse 44. I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.
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So Jesus is telling us to love those who hate us and to pray for those who persecute us. This, by the way, is a very good litmus test to let one know who are true followers of Christ.
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It's a good litmus test for yourself and even to see those around you. Who are the true believers out there?
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Jesus says that we will know true believers by their fruits. In Matthew 7, 17, he says, every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit.
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Believers have a character that is so otherworldly. It's true that there's some things that believers and unbelievers agree on, right?
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Most unbelievers think it's wrong to steal something from a store or to murder someone. We can have agreement on those things, but when it comes to loving your enemies, this is an area where you will really stand out from the surrounding world.
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And think about how otherworldly this is. Let me put this in perspective in our own day.
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Can you imagine one political candidate praying for another political candidate, especially on the national stage?
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This seems impossible. Or think of it this way. Could you imagine if one of your loved ones was murdered and you prayed for the one who committed the murder?
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Usually, sometimes they interview someone. You know, their loved one dies. And I mean, the grief is enormous.
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And they ask them, what do you have to say to those who took your child or took your loved one?
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And usually they say something bad, like go to hell or something like that.
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Could you imagine someone saying, you know what, I'm angry at what this person did to me, but you know what,
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I pray for this person. What I did against God in my sin is far greater than what this person did against me.
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Could you imagine someone saying that? What a testimony that would be to the world. And I hope that none of you ever have to go through that.
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But as Christians, that's what love is. Or think about this one.
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Could you imagine praying for the ones who are putting you to death? Jesus did this.
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He lived out what He said when He was dying on the cross. Jesus treated well those who mocked
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Him, spit on Him, beat Him, and eventually killed Him. Jesus said in Luke 23, 34,
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Father, forgive them for they do not know what they do. He knew that they were ignorant.
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They were crucifying the Lord of glory. And He prayed for them. He prayed for His murderers.
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He prayed for His enemies. And as I've shared with you before, one of my heroes from church history is
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Eric Little. He was a runner, famous runner. He was born in 1902 and died in 1945.
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So he died at the age of 43. He is one of the runners featured in the
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British film from 1981 titled Chariots of Fire. The story of Eric Little is an incredible one from his running career to his ministry in China that followed.
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The movie Chariots of Fire showed that God was first in Little's life and not athletics.
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He could have won another gold medal, but instead he went to the mission field. His best event in the 1924
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Olympics was the 100 meter dash. He was one of the best runners in the world.
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And he was the favorite to win this event. But he refused to run because the preliminary rounds were run on Sunday.
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And it was his conviction that this is a day of rest and worship and time with family. And so what did he do?
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He said, I'm not gonna run the 100 meter dash. Instead, he ran the 400 meter dash, which is one lap around the track.
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And he was not the favorite. Everyone thought he would burn out after 200 meters. But this is what makes this story even more incredible.
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There were some people before the race who said, you know what, he has something to run for here. Don't count him out. And as he came around the last turn, he ran it like a 200 meter dash.
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Everyone thought he was gonna burn out. But he said, I run the first half as hard as I can.
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I run the second half with God's help. And he hung on and he won the race. He won gold medal and he gave all the glory to God.
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And after his athletic career, he went to China as a missionary.
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And in world history in China at this time, this is when Japan was one of the most powerful countries in the world.
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And of course, as Americans, we know all about Japan's power, Imperial Japan. They took over the
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Chinese mainland where Eric Little was a missionary and they put him and everyone with him in an internment camp.
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So he lived the last couple years of his life as a prisoner of war. And one of the young kids saw him one day and Eric Little pointed to this passage that we are looking at today.
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And he said, we need to pray for the Japanese. We need to love our enemies.
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And what a powerful testimony it was to that kid. He remembered it into his old age. And what a model
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Little is for all of us. He did what Jesus told him to do. The very people who were holding him captive in this
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Japanese prison camp, he would get up early in the morning and pray for them. He was showing his otherworldly character by praying for those who sought to do them harm.
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This is what Christ followers are supposed to do. This is the fruit of the Spirit. The first fruit of the
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Spirit is love. And true love does this. And so my question to you and to myself is, do we do this?
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We need to ask ourselves this. This is not an optional command that Jesus gives. If we are gonna be his followers, this we must do.
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It is incredible when you think about it, how often we fall short of this. People do far less to us than the examples that I've already mentioned.
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And we find it very difficult to forgive. But we must do this. When someone cuts us off in traffic, we are tempted to hold a permanent grudge against this person.
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And yet our Lord treated his murderers well. Think about how remarkable that is.
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And as a side note, forgiveness is not the same thing as trust.
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You can forgive someone without trusting someone. A trust is earned over a long period of time.
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But to forgive someone means that you don't hold their sin against him or her, the one who sinned against you.
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When your enemy sins against you, you are to forgive and treat this person well. Jesus tells us to love our enemies and pray for them.
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And you may be asking, what does he mean by loving them? And what does he mean by praying for them?
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As I alluded to above, we love them by treating our enemies well. This means showing kindness to them, even if they do not show it in return, and they probably won't.
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And if your enemies who are unbelievers, if they are unbelievers, they are very likely to show kindness to you in return.
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And in fact, by the way, if someone's a believer, they shouldn't be your enemy, even if you're in conflict with them. Jesus is talking about those who are unbelievers, who seek to do you harm.
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The Apostle Paul wrote in Romans 12 .20, "'If your enemy is hungry, feed him.
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"'If he is thirsty, give him something to drink. "'For by so doing, you will heap burning coals on his head.'"
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Maybe you've read that passage before, and I hope you have. Burning coals, what does that mean?
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I was wondering that this week as I was reading that. "'For one, to heap burning coals on one's head "'was an ancient
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Egyptian custom. "'By doing this, they would bear their shame in public "'for all to see.'"
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What Paul means by burning coals is if you show kindness to one of your enemies, it should bring shame upon them.
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This is so because your enemy treats you horribly, yet in return, you treat your enemy well.
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You do not return evil for evil, but you return good for the evil that has come upon you.
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To return bad treatment with bad treatment is not the way of Christ, and that's the temptation, right?
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You did this to me, I'm gonna return it the same way that you did to me, and we saw that last week.
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But this is not the way of Christ. The way of Christ is so often the hard road.
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It's living life upstream, but this can be done through the strength of the
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Holy Spirit who has been given to us. During COVID -19, there were politicians who did things that I didn't agree with, and even today,
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I would say, and in general, I would say that I think you can make the case that their policies have been anti -Christian.
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If you look at, they give more freedom to businesses than they do to churches.
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I mean, I think one can rightly draw that conclusion. And as I was thinking about this, the politicians during this time are governing authorities.
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I was thinking, you know what? They're probably receiving a lot of hate mail right now from both sides, from everybody.
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In fact, I talked to our representative, Mark and Lori are friends with her, and she told me that she was receiving hate mail from people, and we should have compassion for that.
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It's no fun when someone writes a horrible message to you. So I felt led by the
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Lord as I was thinking about this passage. Well, how about I send an email to our different authorities, and who knows, maybe they'll respond, and I sent about half a dozen out.
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And it's interesting, only one responded, and the one who responded was one who I would classify as my enemy.
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And this governing leader told me how I might pray, and I responded, and I said, okay,
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I'll be glad to pray for you. And so I did, and I even prayed in some different ways than the person even would know about, namely their salvation, which is something that should be high on the list.
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But this we must do. I think everything's okay over there. But this we must do.
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It is hard to do good to your enemies, but Jesus calls us to do it, and by God's grace, we can do this.
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You can resist the temptation to hate your enemy, but rather to love the one who hates you.
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When we love our enemies, we demonstrate the character of God. And God loves his enemies in two ways.
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The first way is that he loves his enemies by sending his son to die for sinners.
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Romans 5 .8 says, God demonstrates his love for us, and yet, while we were sinners,
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Christ died for us. Everyone in this room who knows Christ has experienced this.
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You were once an enemy of God. Now you are his friend. Now you belong to his family. We sing that song today.
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Once your enemy, now seated at your table. And we should say, always, Jesus, thank you.
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This is the gospel. God makes his enemy his friend. God does good to his enemies in Christ by reconciling everyone who would believe in him to himself.
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And if you are here, and you do not have a relationship with Christ, I call you to receive
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God's gracious gift of salvation. If you believe, you will become a friend of God.
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You will enter his family. But God's love does not stop there. He also does good to those who will never belong to him.
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This is what we see in our text in verse 45. Let me read verse 44 again to give us some context here, then
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I'll read verse 45. Jesus says, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you so that you may be sons of your
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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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What we read in the beginning of verse 45 is that God calls us to follow his example.
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We already saw that we are to follow Christ's example as he prayed for his enemies who crucified him.
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But verse 45 tells us how God the Father loves his enemies.
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What we read is that he makes his son to rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.
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We live in a world full of people who rebel against God every single day.
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And anyone who does not have a relationship with Christ is in rebellion against God right now. And yet, as we saw last night, he sent his rain.
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As we see today, he sends his son. The crops are growing, right?
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I know Kyle would tell you, right? They're growing really nice right now. And God does this for everybody in the world, whether you are a believer or unbeliever, and he does it out of his kindness.
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And I'm struck, and we all should be, by the fact that many unbelievers very much enjoy their life, but they do not realize what they are missing as they are cut off from Christ.
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Some people live to be 100 years old who never had a relationship with Christ.
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God is gracious. In theology, this is known as God's common grace.
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And what this means is that God continually bestows his goodness even upon unbelievers, upon those who will never believe.
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God gives son and sends rain on believers and unbelievers alike. As Psalm 145, nine says, the
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Lord is good to all, and his mercy is over all that he has made.
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So God is a lover of his enemies, not because they are lovely, but because he is that gracious.
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In God's extraordinary kindness, he takes care of everyone who is created in his image.
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And what verse 45 is telling us is that we need to follow God's character by loving our enemies.
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And if you have a relationship with Christ, this you can do through the power of the Holy Spirit. Jesus says you are a child of your father in heaven.
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And as his child, you need to follow him and look like him. And this is done by loving your enemies.
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So love those who are the hardest to love. And the first reason why that we have seen here is your father in heaven loves this way.
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The second reason why we are to love those who are the hardest to love is that you will stick out like a sore thumb from the world.
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You will stick out like a sore thumb from the world. We'll see this in verses 46 through 48.
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So we read these verses at the beginning here, but let's take a deeper look at these verses in verses 46 through 48.
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If you'd look with me right now. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have?
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Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others?
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Do not even the Gentiles do the same? I'll stop right there. It is interesting that when you talk to many people, that they are persuaded how much of a loving person they are.
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What one will say is talk to my spouse, talk to my kids, talk to my family, talk to my friends, talk to those who love me.
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They will tell you how much I love everyone else. And yes, we should have a deep love for those whom we love the most.
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In fact, our society rightly calls them loved ones. These are the ones who are near and dear to our hearts.
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But if we do not love our enemies, then we are not very loving people.
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This is the real test to show whether or not you are a loving person. As I said earlier, this is a good litmus test to see whether you truly have a relationship with Christ.
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Do you love your enemies? What Jesus says in verse 46 is if you love those who love you, what good is that?
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What he tells his audience, who is largely Jewish, as he speaks on this mountain, is this is what the tax collectors do.
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In the first century, some of the Jews became tax collectors. And when they became a tax collector, they became a traitor because the tax system often abused the public and specifically the
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Jewish people at this time who lived in that region. And so they were saying, well, why are you doing this to us?
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And Jesus is saying the tax collectors here love those who love them.
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And as we think about tax collectors, this might be like used car salesmen in our day, defense lawyers, or politicians.
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They have the reputation of not telling the truth, but rather taking advantage of the populace.
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Thankfully, there are Christians in those fields who do represent Christ well. But these have a reputation of not.
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Then in verse 47, Jesus mentions the Gentiles. He says the
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Gentiles were loving those who love them. The Gentiles are non -Israelites.
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These are the people that God didn't have this big plan through in the Old Testament, the covenants and everything.
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And the Messiah came from the Jewish people. The Gentiles were the ones who were looked down upon because they were not the vehicle through whom
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God was working in the world. The Gentiles were largely made up of unbelievers.
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And what Jesus is saying is the corrupt of society, the unbelievers of society love those who love them.
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And these people are on their way to hell. There is no reward waiting for them.
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Their love is weak. They only love those who love them. But as a follower of Christ, you have the opportunity to gain reward for your love by loving in ways that are so difficult.
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When I look at my kids and how precious they are, it's not difficult to love them, right? It's difficult to love the guy who sends me a hate email or does something that's insulting.
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And you can think of examples in your life. We had a sermon on the final judgment in mid
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June when we talked about reward, how God is going to reward us for our faithfulness.
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And what we learned is that there are different levels of rewards. When we're not faithful to the
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Lord, we lose reward. When we are faithful, we gain reward. And what
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Jesus is saying in verse 46 is that if you love your enemies, you will be rewarded in the age to come.
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God sees every kind thing you do to the one who hates you. And He records it.
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It's been written down in heaven. To love one's enemy is an uncommon godly virtue to display as very few do it consistently.
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It's so hard to do. One's enemies don't know what to do with it when kindness is shown to them, when they don't give kindness to you.
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And society looks on like they haven't seen anything like this before.
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Like, what in the world is this? And what the world mistakenly believes is that to turn the other cheek and to love our enemy is weakness.
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I mentioned that in last week's sermon. But in fact, it takes a tremendous amount of strength given by the
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Holy Spirit not to retaliate and to love our enemies. What the world thinks is only weak people treat their enemies fairly.
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They are not tough enough to fight. But this cannot be further from the truth.
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Think about how hard it is to love your enemy. It takes strength. To resist any sin is difficult.
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The Christian life is the life upstream, right? Satan is against us. The world is against us.
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Our own sinful flesh is against us. But think about how hard it is to love your enemy.
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You wanna talk about swimming upstream? It's hard. It takes tremendous strength to resist this sin and practice righteousness.
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And only believers can consistently live this out. Only believers can truly do this in a way where it's pleasing to the
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Lord as the Spirit empowers you to do it. And recently,
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Patsy Anderson told me a story that really fits in well with this text.
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As many of you know, Patsy worked at Wayne's for a number of years.
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And she had a customer one time who was probably having a bad day and treated her poorly in front of a lot of people who were at the restaurant.
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And obviously, like it would do to any of us, it really shook her at the time. But in the moment, she didn't return that evil with evil, but she took it.
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And later on, she knew where the man lived and she made cookies for him and showed up to the man's door.
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And as you might expect, the guy was probably thinking, what in the world is going on here? I've never seen anything like this.
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And what Patsy mentioned is there were tears coming out of his eyes, down his face because of the love that Patsy showed him.
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And what an example for us to follow, to love those who do something wrong to us.
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And we can even extend this to people who aren't our enemies, right? Because sometimes someone does something wrong to you who isn't your enemy, but we should still return love to that person.
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But what Jesus is saying here is He's talking about those who seek to do you harm. And who knows, maybe the person will repent.
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This unbeliever who does wrong to you, maybe they will repent and maybe they will be on this path of forgiveness.
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And maybe they too will love their enemies in the future and follow your example.
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So what we have seen here is we are to love those who are the hardest to love. And we have seen two reasons why in this sermon.
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Your Father in heaven loves this way. And second reason is you will stick out like a sore thumb from the world.
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As we wrap up this sermon, we're gonna close with the last verse in this text. And that is verse 48.
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An entire sermon could be written on this one verse, but I'm just gonna summarize it very briefly.
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This is what Jesus said in verse 48. He said, you therefore must be perfect as your heavenly
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Father is perfect. To this point in the sermon on the Mount, Jesus has commanded
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His listeners to obey them in these areas. And what I've said before is that we will inevitably fall.
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We'll inevitably fall short in our obedience to God. No saint is perfect to this side of heaven.
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We are saints who sin, but by God's grace are growing to become more like Christ.
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That's the mission of this church, to grow in Christ together. But even as we strive for growth, we still sin.
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And while we are here on earth, Jesus calls us to aim for the perfection we will have one day.
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Every believer in this life has the perfect righteousness of Christ counted to you.
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And in the age to come, you will have perfection. And when you are obedient to Christ in this life, you are becoming what you already are in Him.
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You are becoming righteous. And this is what Jesus calls us to do. Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.
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And it's not a coincidence that Jesus tells us to aim for perfection after maybe the hardest command to this point, to love your enemies.
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He's saying, do this, aim for this. It's going to be hard, yes, but by God's grace, you can do it.
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Patsy did it, right? Eric Little did it, I'm sure. And you have at times in your life, we just need to do it more.
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We need to live this out so we can be obedient in every area of life, including this area.
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And as we do this, God is glorified as we reflect Him. And the outside world will be forced to ponder this other worldly behavior that is so rare to see in this fallen world.
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Now, next Sunday, Jesus addresses another very important topic.
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And that goes without saying, every topic is important. But we are going to look at the importance of secret obedience in Matthew chapter six, verses one through four.
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Who are you when no one is looking? We'll look at that next Sunday, Lord willing.
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Let's bow our heads together. Father in heaven, what a wonderful God you are.
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And we praise you, Lord, for how wonderful you are and how kind you are to us.
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You have made your enemy your friends. And Lord, you call us to follow your example in this.
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And as I've said throughout this sermon, how hard it is to live this out, but it can be done.
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Jesus tells us to do it. And may by your strength, Lord, we live this out.
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May Eureka Baptist Church be known as people who love their enemies and may our light shine and may others give glory to you and may it bring repentance to others as they see us live this out.