“Love Your Enemies”

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Preacher: Ross Macdonald Scripture: Matthew 5:43-48

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Well, this morning we begin the last antithesis as we've been working our way through the
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Sermon on the Mount here in Matthew chapter five. We have finally come to the end of this chapter, but this will be probably a two -part sermon.
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I'm gonna really focus on verses 43 through 47 this morning. Verse 48 certainly belongs to this antithesis, but it goes far more deeper than that.
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I think verse 48, in some ways, summarizes the whole section running from verses 21 and following, and perhaps maybe even bringing not only the antitheses, but all of chapter five sort of toward a head as we press on to chapter six.
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And so I wanna give some space and some time to consider verse 48. That'll have to be a two -week hold.
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You'll have to bookmark that as we anticipate our brother Greg preaching next week. Next week I'll be in New York at a church,
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Clifton Park Community Church in Clifton Park, New York, kicking off a prayer week for them with a message and spending some time with the pastor there.
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So I certainly covet your prayers for that. I'm sure Greg covets your prayers for his sermon prep. And we'll pick back up in Matthew 5, 48 in two weeks' time.
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In this final antithesis, Jesus gives us quite the challenge and that's why we really do need a second part to fully wrap our minds, our hearts, and our hands around what it means to love our enemy.
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So this morning we begin to understand what Jesus says. So let me read for us from Matthew 5, beginning in verse 43.
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You have heard that it was said, you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, love your enemy.
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Bless those who curse you. Do good to those who hate you. Pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you.
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That you may be sons of your father 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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For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?
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And if you greet your brethren only, what do you do more than others? Do not even the tax collectors do so?
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Therefore, you shall be perfect, just as your father in heaven is perfect. The first saying in this pair is a direct quote from Leviticus 19, 18.
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You shall love your neighbor. Now certainly, Jesus means to affirm that in its fullness.
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You shall not hate your brother, we read in Leviticus 19. You shall not hate your brother in your heart.
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You shall surely reprove your neighbor and not bear sin because of him. You shall not take vengeance nor bear any grudge against the children of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself,
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I am the Lord. Now what do you notice from Leviticus 19, 17 and 18?
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You have the command that is quoted, that is referenced, you shall love your neighbor. But look at the immediate context.
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You shall love your neighbor is set in the context of, you shall not hate your brother. You shall not bear a grudge against the children of your people.
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This seems to be borne out in the context of the immediate community. In other words, this is a love for the neighbor that corresponds to fellow
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Israelites in the context, or so it seems. Now as we press a little bit further into that, we realize the second phrase, hate your enemy, does not occur explicitly in the
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Old Testament. Remember, Jesus doesn't say it is written, he says you have heard it said. In other words, you've understood, or you've been taught in this way.
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Love your neighbor, but hate your enemy. We have love your neighbor, that seems to be implied toward fellow
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Israelites in Leviticus 19, but we don't have any place in the Old Testament that explicitly says hate your enemy.
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There are a number of passages that speak to enemies and speak to hatred. Deuteronomy 7, when the
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Lord your God delivers them over to you, this is speaking of the Gentile nations, you shall conquer them and utterly destroy them.
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You shall make no covenant with them, nor show mercy to them. Chapter 30, verse seven, the
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Lord your God will put all these curses on your enemies and on those who hate you, who persecuted you.
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So here you have some of the backdrop of hating the enemy, right? God's going to curse the enemies that persecuted his people.
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This is all speaking of the conquest into the promised land. We have this very language reflected as late as Zacharias' prophecy for the incoming
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Messiah in Luke chapter one, when Zacharias is, as it were, prophesying and rejoicing before the
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Lord. He says, as he spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets, that we should be saved from our enemies and from all who hate us, reflecting on this language from Deuteronomy.
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And perhaps foremost to this idea of hating one's enemies, we have David's sentiment in Psalm 26, verse five.
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I've hated the assembly of evildoers. I will not sit with the wicked.
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For Psalm 139, 21 and 22. Do I not hate them, O Lord, that hate you?
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Do I not loathe those who rise up against you? I hate them with a perfect hatred. I count them my enemies.
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So certainly we have some Old Testament bearing on this idea of hating one's enemies.
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Now, if we put this all together in a superficial way, those gathered around Jesus' sermon would not have been surprised by the statement, you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.
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It would have been already perhaps yawning, nodding off. Yeah, we already know that. We've got that one down.
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Of course you love your neighbor. Of course you hate your enemies. We're really good at that. We know we need to work on loving our neighbor, but we're very good at hating our enemies.
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The Gentiles, the sinners, the tax collectors, the Roman overlords, very easy to hate.
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The surprise would not have been in that. That's what they understood. The surprise is in what Jesus declares.
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I say to you. Remember, he's using his authority as the law giver. I say to you, love your enemies.
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That's the shock. That's the jolt. Bless those who curse you.
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Do good to those who hate you. Pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you. Remember, Jesus has not come to overturn the law.
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Jesus has come rather to fulfill the law. Jesus is pressing the law to its full depth, to its full breadth.
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Matthew 22, we see this so clearly in the logic of where Matthew goes. Jesus says in response to the challenge, you shall love the
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Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. The second is like it.
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You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all of the law and the prophets. So there's something about loving
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God and loving neighbor that sums the law. And on this, the law and the prophets, in other words, all of Scripture, all of God's revealed will depends.
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And so Jesus is hinging upon this broader reflection of how his people regard their enemies from the law itself.
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That's not withstanding Psalm 26, Psalm 139, Deuteronomy 30, Exodus 25, all of these other places, where we have the idea of curses and enemies and hatred.
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But what Jesus is doing is he's saying, let's go a little bit further, a little bit deeper to the very heart of the law itself.
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In the law, God says, if you see your enemy's ox going astray, return it to him.
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There's no place where you see your enemy, your competitor, the person who's spitefully treated you, and you see something go wrong for them and you have this bliss of schadenfreude and you go, oh, that's too bad.
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If you see your enemy's ox going astray, you have to sort of bite your tongue and bring it back to them.
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That's the idea. Or again, if you see your enemy's ox struggling under his burden, you shall help him.
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Now you're actually rolling up your sleeves and you're doing what you need to do to help your enemy. Certainly, this is part of where Jesus is going from the law itself.
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We could think of the mercy that David shows in 1 Samuel 24. Remember when he's in the cave of En Gedi, Saul's been trying to murder him.
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And he finally, you'd almost think that God gave him his enemy like prey before him. He's in the cave, he can simply get rid of Saul, take the throne for himself, spare his life, defend himself.
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But what does he do? He just cuts off a piece of Saul's cape, waves it out to show him,
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I could have killed you, but I refuse to do that. Or in Proverbs, where we're told not to rejoice when our enemy falls, something we perhaps need to ask,
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I know I need to ask forgiveness from the Lord. Whenever I watch highlights from MSNBC, I rejoice to see the enemy fall.
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Or you think of Job 31. Job in chapter 31 is defending his righteousness before the
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Lord. And part of him defending his righteousness is to say, I've never gloated when my enemy has fallen.
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When wicked men are brought to ruin, I don't rise up or lift myself up.
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That's part of him defending his righteousness before God. The fact that he is full of mercy. And so bread and water must be offered to the captured enemies of God's people.
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And we find language like this and teachings like this throughout the Old Testament law. So here in Matthew five,
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Jesus is not redefining love, nor is he redefining enemy. What he's doing is expanding upon the idea of one's neighbor.
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Not a new concept of love, not a new concept of enemy, but a new concept of neighbor.
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And we can see this whole idea that neighbor was taken as something exclusive. And honestly, that's sort of a superficial, maybe surface level reading of Leviticus 19.
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It's the brother, it's the children of your people that are in the immediate context. And so perhaps the sentiment stemming from that had been we're to love only our neighbors.
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And therefore, if we're to love our neighbors, then it's right for us, like David, to hate our enemies with a perfect hatred.
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The very problem, I think, is evidence found in Luke 10. This is something that they're wrestling with, perhaps as a result of hearing
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Jesus teach. They're working this through, and you have a certain expert in the law, and he can't quite figure it out.
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What in the world does it mean, love your enemy? Leviticus 19 is so clear, I love my brother, aren't
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I supposed to hate my enemy? And so finally, the lawyer works up his gumption, he goes to Jesus to test him.
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And he says, teacher, this is Luke 10, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?
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He said to him, what's written in the law? Well, what's your reading of it? So he answered and said, you shall love the
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Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength, all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself. This is a very good expert in the law.
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That's like the gold star on the quiz, good job. You got it right.
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But he said to him, you've answered rightly, do this and you will live.
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Wanting to justify himself, he responded to Jesus, but who is my neighbor? That's the issue, who is my neighbor?
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I know what the law says. We've always understood it, that we're to love our neighbor, hate our enemy, you seem to imply something different, who is my neighbor?
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Well, Jesus answers. You know the story so well, a certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho. He fell among thieves, stripped him of his clothing, they wounded him, departed and left him half dead.
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And then a priest walks by, sees this miserable man bleeding out on the side of the road, doesn't want to become unclean, doesn't want to be harassed by the delay, and so he steps to the side and moves around him.
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A Levite does the same. And finally, one of the hated, despised peoples, the
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Samaritans, the Mishlinga, the half -breed, comes, and out of his own expense, he begins to bind up the wounds, brings the man to the inn.
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Whatever it takes to make this man whole, you put that on my account. And Jesus finally brings this story to a conclusion, and he responds to the lawyer, which of these three was a neighbor to the one who fell among the thieves?
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The lawyer, again, another gold star coming, he rightly says, the one who showed mercy.
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And Jesus says, go and do likewise. So Jesus points out that one's neighbor is anyone you are in a position to help.
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That's who your neighbor is. Anyone that you are in a position to help. It's a question that each of us has to confront this morning, sitting here.
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Who is my neighbor? Who, circumstantially, providentially, has the
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Lord put into my life, however marginally it may be? Who is in my life?
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Who am I in a position to help? That's your neighbor. And Jesus says, go and do likewise.
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Doesn't say go and regard likewise. Go and think about likewise. Go and sentimentalize likewise.
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Go and do likewise. Now this doesn't flatten out the other ways that Jesus shows and speaks about love.
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In fact, one of the problems of the love command, and I hope you'll see, if not this week, then in weeks to come, this is a very challenging and problematic command for a reason.
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It's sort of been the Gordian knot for many theologians down through the centuries. And on the one side, it's hard to comprehend the basic level of the love command.
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On the other side, we have a heightened relationship of love that is meant to exist between Jesus' followers.
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So we have what he calls a new commandment in John 13, 34, which is to love one another.
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So we don't want to flatten out the love command by saying somehow love for brother and love for enemy just gets rolled out and sort of pancaked into the same thing.
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There is a differentiation that's true even in Jesus' teaching, and that's reinforced in the New Testament. But from the very beginning of our faith,
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Christian writers understood the significance of this command, to love one's enemies. It appears in virtually every writing of the early church, every type of writing, philosophical, apologetic, fictional, narrative, what have you.
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This was a cardinal principle of early Christianity. Tertullian, an early church father, describes it as the principal precept of Christianity.
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I think it was Tertullian, it might have been Origen, who said, we don't regard them as Christians who hate their enemies.
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And as it stands here, as the last of these antitheses, we need to see its importance. It's very important.
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This is where it concludes, and this is going to now bridge into the next section of ethical teaching.
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And look at how powerful the illustrations are. Love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you.
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Each statement is placed with a very high contrast. Love enemies, do good to those that hate.
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Bless the cursers, pray for the persecutors.
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You see how high this contrast is. It's a powerful contrast. It's an entirely different way of living.
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Now, these words would have been jolting to the hearers of Jesus' sermon.
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Perhaps they don't hit us very hard today. This way of Jesus has become so familiar to us that the teeth of this challenge have been safely removed.
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The bite of Jesus' teaching has been muzzled. And it's not because it's so familiar, and we already know that.
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It's because of our own hardness of hearing, our own hardness of heart, that we don't feel the weight of this teaching as it should be felt.
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And of course, we can't just say it was jolting 2 ,000 years ago, but we know better now. We don't know better now.
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What does media, whether social media or otherwise, constantly inculcate in our lives, but this tendency to hate the other?
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And we find, and we sort of smile and laugh and regale with the invective and the spite.
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We're basically trained by the airwaves, by the screens, by the radio shows, by the commoners all among us on the sidewalks to hate our enemies.
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It is something completely counter -cultural, counter -societal to love those that hate you.
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And so we don't wanna water down what Jesus is teaching here. What we can't do is I, one of our
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Christmas presents this year was one of my favorites, electronic talking battleship, one of the best games ever made.
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And we got this version that has these new little weapons you can employ, and when you press a certain button, if the peg is within range, it will say enemy sighted.
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And I always, my hair kinda stands up on end. Oh, I'm gonna get you now. Enemy sighted, and we go around our world, enemy sighted, enemy sighted, enemy sighted.
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Those who follow Jesus do not treat others the way that they've been treated. Those who follow
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Jesus do not treat others the way the world treats others, and they certainly don't treat others the way the world treats them.
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This is part of following Jesus. This is part of belonging to the kingdom of God. A powerful book,
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I think I've mentioned in the past, a theologian that is far too liberal for my taste, but in the early 90s, he wrote a seminal book worthy of all of its accolades.
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I remember reading it in 2015, a very powerful book, Miroslav Volf, and it's called Exclusion and Embrace.
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And he grew up, and his family lived in former Yugoslavia.
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It was during the Yugoslavian wars in the early 1990s. You remember that this was a sort of downstream from the dissolution of the
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USSR, and there was all sorts of ethnic strife that communism had sort of repressed, and when the wall fell, all of the ethnic reprisals and atrocities began to burgeon forward, and that was true between the
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Croats and the Serbians. Perhaps the name Slobodan Milosevic rings some bells.
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Well, Miroslav Volf, as a young man, as a Christian working through this, and he was a theologian, and he was lecturing in the 90s.
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He had been trained by a man named Jürgen Moltmann, and he was lecturing at Yale on theology and about God's forgiveness and the forgiveness of God, and Moltmann stood up at the end of his lecture with a very straightforward question, and you should know,
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Moltmann himself had wrestled with this question because he was a German prisoner of war during World War II when he was converted, and so he stood up and he looked at his young colleague's face and he said, so then, can you embrace a
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Chetnik? That was his question. Now, a Chetnik would have been the
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Serbian death squads that were going through the villages in Croatia and murdering people in droves, burning down churches and homes, raping, pillaging, driving into concentration camps, if not outright killing, savagery, and Moltmann was saying, so then.
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You've been lecturing a lot about God's forgiveness. You've been lecturing in these abstract ways about reconciliation.
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Can you embrace a Chetnik? Now, one of the helpful things that Volf does, and this led to his whole book,
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Exclusion and Embrace, because he knew that was the challenge, that was the question.
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One of the helpful points he does in resisting the categorization of victim and perpetrator simpliciter, in other words, he says we cannot divide other human beings into simply victims or perpetrators, as if there's only one or the other, and this doesn't, by the way, in no way does he imply that we're to blame the victims or take away accountability and responsibility from the perpetrators.
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He calls that a cheap embrace, a sort of token embrace that doesn't mean anything, but this is Volf, if one is labeled solely a perpetrator, they become inhumane, easy to demonize, unworthy of any embrace.
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If one is labeled solely as a victim, the memory of the past propels them to become tomorrow's perpetrator.
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Something then is needed beyond victimization and perpetration, beyond oppression and liberation.
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It is the will to embrace. Now this, I believe, is exactly what
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Jesus is getting at here in Matthew 5, 43 through 47. It's the will to embrace.
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It's following his own example. We are to imitate the path that he's laid down before us in, again, whatever providential circumstances we may find ourselves, we're to imitate his embrace.
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That's the idea. Volf, again, the only available options to the follower of Jesus is either to reject the cross and with it the very core of the
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Christian faith or to take up one's cross and follow the crucified and be scandalized ever anew by its challenge.
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I think that's exactly a right way to read Matthew 5. The Chetnik forces
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Miroslav Volf to say, the pain, the injustice, the indignity, the inhumanity, the evil is so great that I cannot embrace and there
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I drop my cross and I can no longer follow the crucified one or I pick up that cross and by his own will to embrace,
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I find by his own spirit a will to embrace even the one who perpetrated such atrocities against me and my people.
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And I love what he says. If we do that, if we take up the cross to follow Jesus, we will ever be scandalized by its challenge.
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That's a perfect phrase. Scandalized by the challenge of the cross. It's the most salient point for us this morning.
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Jesus says, love your enemies and everybody's toes gets crunched. Nobody says, oh, maybe that's for someone else this morning, not for me.
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This is a challenge, if you're hearing it rightly, this is a challenge for everyone. There's of course a place for anger.
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We see that in Jesus' own ministry. Of course there's a place for rebuke. Of course there's a place for zeal consuming us in the face of atrocities and injustices.
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Christians, in other words, aren't detached hippies, not Buddhist monks floating above the evil actions of men.
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That's not Christianity. Christians aren't the sea turtle from Finding Nemo, the sort of like hippie, just kind of go along with the flow.
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That's not Christianity. There is a reactivity. There is times where a strong rebuke, a strong presence, a defense is needed.
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What the Christian stands against is this eternal death wish upon their enemy.
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This hope for ruin. Even to the gravest enemy, somehow, even in our thirst for righteous judgment, a
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Christian will have the humility of pity. And you've seen the videos that I've seen in the courtrooms of what this looks like when you have the witness impact statements and you have a whole family that's been torn apart by a murder.
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And this callous, hardened criminal there glaring at them and each one of them unloads all of that pain, all of that hurt, all of that death wish, all of that I will sleep well at night knowing you are suffering.
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And then you have the one family member who says, I want you to know that because God has forgiven me, I forgive you.
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And though you have to face the penalty for what you did, I truly wish no ill upon you.
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That is something the world cannot fathom. That is something born of God. You remember
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Ahab with Naboth's vineyard in 1 Kings 21.
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And of course, we have this sort of narratival setting that no one was wicked like Ahab. Ahab is sort of definitively the evil ruler of the
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Old Testament. If you wanted to have a stand -in, a term, a shorthand term for an evil, depraved ruler,
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Ahab will fit the bill. And Jezebel, of course, conspires to murder
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Naboth and take over his vineyard. In 1 Kings 21, we find that Elijah now has been sent by the
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Lord because here this murderous, evil, idolatrous king is in Naboth's vineyard decorating it for himself.
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And so God tells Elijah, go down and meet Ahab. There he is in the vineyard of Naboth where he's gone down to take possession.
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You speak to him this saying, thus says the Lord, have you murdered and taken possession? And you shall speak to him saying, thus says the
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Lord, in the place where dogs lick the blood of Naboth, dogs will lick your blood, even yours.
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Now, if you know anything about the exchanges between Ahab and Elijah, I think this is probably the most excited
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Elijah had ever been to give a prophecy. Right on it, Lord. I can't wait to tell this to Ahab.
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I don't think he ever made it so fast down to Samaria. I can imagine him winding up that curse, relishing every articulation of its delivery.
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And how does Ahab respond in verse 20? You've found me, O my enemy. You're my enemy,
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I know that. And then, of course, the prophecy goes even further.
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The condemnation won't just be upon Ahab himself, but on his whole household, his whole dynasty.
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And this finally breaks him. In verse 27, we read, when Ahab heard these words, he tore his clothes, he put sackcloth on his body, he fasted, he laid in sackcloth and went about mourning.
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You know, it's true, Romans 2 .4 says, the goodness of God leads men to repentance. But let me tell you, sometimes the severity of God leads men to repentance too.
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We see that with Ahab. And the word of the Lord came to Elijah, saying, see how
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Ahab has humbled himself before me? Because he's humbled himself before me, I won't bring this calamity in his days.
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Now I can picture Elijah's smile turning into a frown. Wait, what? No, no, no, no, no,
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I mean, yeah, who wouldn't be humbled by that? His whole household has come to an end, but let's not forget how evil this man was.
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He killed all of your righteous prophets. He was after my own life, Lord. There was a certain surprise that Elijah must have felt.
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We were listening to a children's podcast that was recounting this story.
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And it was very well done, it was sort of dramatized in its audio. And it was perhaps a week later that Elsie was asked a question about this.
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We hadn't heard anything about Ahab for about a week. So it was just something that was in the crockpot of her mind for a while.
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And one night we were driving, and she said, Dad, why did
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God show Ahab mercy? She was as surprised as Elijah must have been.
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Why would he show mercy to Ahab? Don't we all hate
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Ahab with perfect hatred? And the only answer is, because God is merciful.
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It's who he is. God is so full of mercy. He blesses those who curse him.
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He does good to those who hate him. It's who he is. Listen, you cannot understand righteousness until you're scandalized by sin.
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You see the evil horror of what sinfulness is. And now you understand something of righteousness, something of the purity and the perfection that is so far beyond any hope of our human nature.
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And if that's true, then you cannot understand love until you're scandalized by God's mercy.
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Until God's mercy is a problem for you, you haven't even begun to theologize about love.
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You don't know what love is until the grace of God is a challenge and a problem for you.
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Isn't that the whole point of Jonah three and four? I knew it would be this way,
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Lord. I knew that you would show mercy to these people that I hate so much. It was a problem for Jonah.
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It was a problem for Elijah. So there's no eternal death wish upon our gravest enemy somehow, even in our thirst for a righteous judgment, even with the cry, how long,
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O Lord, there remains a humility of pity. And within that humility of pity, there is, however faint, the hope of mercy.
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Why? Because that's what God is like. Now, isn't that exactly what
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Jesus does here in this passage? Isn't that what he says? Love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you.
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Why? So that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. Why are we to be this way as Christians?
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Because that's what God is like. So love for enemies means being sons of the
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Father. In other words, this is not about what's right, what's owed.
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Those things already had to be crucified in the last antithesis we saw last week. This is about the will of the
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Father to embrace even hateful, spiteful mankind.
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It's about the will to embrace. Miroslav Volf got that part exactly right. It's the will to embrace.
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The extreme demand that Jesus puts upon his followers to love their enemies corresponds identically with God's love towards sinners and outcasts as his kingdom continues to advance and increase.
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And this is why Jesus links this demand with the sort of future leaning. You will be the sons of God.
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We have that as a you may be, but it's a future orientation, an eschatological orientation.
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If you love your enemies, you will be sons of God. Doesn't that sound a lot like, blessed are the peacemakers, they will be called sons of God?
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Do you see? And notice what Jesus says. Martin Lloyd -Jones, in his tremendous study, picks this out.
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He says, do you notice how the Lord puts it? I say unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, pray for them who spitefully use you and persecute you.
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Why? That you may be like God? No, that's not what he says. That you may be children of your
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Father in heaven. And Lloyd -Jones says,
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God has become the Father to the Christian. He's not the Father of the non -Christian, he is just God to them, the lawgiver.
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But to the Christian, God is the heavenly Father. And if God is your Father, you cannot help it.
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If the divine nature is in you, and has entered in you through the Holy Spirit, you cannot be like anybody else. You must be different.
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You're his son. You're his daughter. That's the whole idiom of sonship, by the way.
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This is not about attaining a relationship. You will become a son in this new relationship.
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That's not the idea. The whole idea of this idiom of sonship is you will become like, you will begin to have the characteristics.
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A son is meant to be like his father. That's the driving force of the idiom here. Of course, we know this to be true.
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We're like our parents in ways we cannot help, in ways we can't even see. I see that in my own life.
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We have a number of instances here where we have sons and fathers. It's amazing to me how much of the father
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I can see in the son. I had a buddy in high school that used to be very embarrassed about his dad.
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His dad had a very abstract sense of humor. He'd just come out of left field, and he'd be very sort of zany.
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As long as he was making himself laugh, that's all that mattered. And so whenever I'd go to my friend's house, his dad would come in the kitchen and start poking fun and teasing.
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And I would be cracking up. I thought his dad was hilarious. And he'd be sitting there rolling his eyes. He's going, ah, my dad,
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I can't wait to move out. He just drives me nuts, his sense of humor.
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I'm like, you're just like him. His sense of humor, that's your sense of humor.
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You do the exact same, you are him. You're literally becoming him. You're five years away from being him.
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That's the idea of sonship. You're becoming like your father. So we're characterized by our sonship to God, likeness to our father in heaven, who shows mercy on all.
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If we don't evidence those characteristics, how can it be said that we've been adopted by him, that we have some measure of his spirit indwelling us?
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If we cannot love those who hate us, if we cannot pray for those who curse us, can it be said that we are children of the heavenly father?
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Well, you have to ask the question, what are the characteristics of God our father? And Jesus tells us, this is what
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God is like. He makes his son, please notice that, he makes his son to rise on the evil and on the good, sends rain on the just and on the unjust.
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That's how Jesus characterizes his father. He makes his son to rise on the evil and on the good, sends rain on the just and on the unjust.
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You see the whole point of that possessive pronoun. Jesus says, it's his son, it's his rain, it's his air.
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And he gives it freely and generously, even to those who hate him.
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That's what he's like. He spreads it broadly. He gives it generously to those who spite him.
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And so you're watching a video clip of some God -hater mocking Christ, leading others astray.
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And at some point you pause to realize, my heavenly father is giving you the air you need to blaspheme him.
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And he's filled your life with the industry to have cupboards full and a stomach full so that you have the energy to articulate your blasphemies.
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That's how merciful and patient and long -suffering he is. The sun shines and the rain falls, and behind it all we see the rainbow sign of a
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God so rich in mercy that he preserves the world from his just wrath even now.
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There's a day for his judgment to come, but until that day, the sun shines and the rain falls upon the fields, whereas Jesus teaches wheat and tares grow up together and in different ways in different times, they all glean both good and evil, faithful provisions and blessings that come from his hands.
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And Jesus says, when that day of judgment comes, those sons of God will be revealed.
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The wheat will finally be separated from the tares, the sheep will finally be separated from the goats. There will be no more blessings or mercies shown to the evil, not on the day of judgment.
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But until that day, we are to reflect his goodness even to enemies, that's the challenge.
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We're to be righteous toward those who persecute us, I love what D .A. Carson says, to be persecuted because of righteousness is to align ourselves with the prophets, but to bless and pray for those who persecute us is to align ourselves with God himself.
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This is what God is like. You see in verses 46 and 47, if you love those who love you, what reward have you?
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Don't even the tax collectors do the same? If you greet your brethren only, what do you do more than others?
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Don't even tax collectors do the same? You see what Jesus is after with that all important word more.
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Remember what he was saying before we even got to the antitheses. Your righteousness must exceed that, it must surpass what the scribes and the
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Pharisees do to be righteous. It needs to be more, and Jesus here is keying us in.
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What more are you doing than anyone would do? When you greet those that you already like, when you do good to those that treat you well, how are you any different than anyone else in the world?
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But if you want to enter the kingdom of God, your righteousness must be more. What more do you do than anyone else?
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That's the idea. Now this stands in line with Paul's teaching in Romans 12.
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Beloved, do not avenge yourselves. Revenge is mine, I will repay, says the Lord. Therefore, if your enemy is hungry, feed him.
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If he's thirsty, give him a drink, for in doing so you'll heap coals of fire on his head. I won't go into the fullness of that, but he's pulling from Proverbs 25, and the idea is you will bring conviction to them.
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They'll have pangs in their conscience. I've been treating this person so poorly, why are they being so patient and kind toward me?
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That's the idea, heaping coals in the head, on the conscience. Now that's a good reason.
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Just from Romans 12 itself, that's a good reason to love one's enemy. 1 Peter 2, something very similar, a very similar idea.
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That they will glorify God on the day of visitation. In other words, there's sort of this missionary hope that if we're patient and we love our enemies, maybe they'll be so convicted that they'll become converted.
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That's why we should love our enemies. Now that's a good reason, but it's not what
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Jesus has here in Matthew 5. The hope for conviction, the hope for conversion, is certainly a good reason to bless those who curse us and do good to those who hate us, but notice what
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Jesus says here in Matthew 5. We love our enemies simply because God loves his enemy.
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That's it. He doesn't say you do this in the hope that they'll convert. You do this so that maybe they'll begin to change and become better, then you should love them.
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And if they don't, stop loving them. That's not how God operates. He gives his son to the just and the unjust.
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He gives air and rain to the evil and to the good. Do you see? That's the reason that Jesus gives us.
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It's simply the reflection of God. Now, of course, in reflecting God, we must remember how limited we are.
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We do not have the omniscience of God. We don't know all things as he knows. He knows each one of us in this room better than we know ourselves.
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Man is an enigma to himself, but God knows us perfectly as we really are.
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It's why there's no excuse on judgment day. There's no report, no retort, no response that can be mustered up.
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We do not possess God's knowledge. We know that even in the good things that he gives before the day of judgment, those good things will be a mockery when his condemnation falls upon those who resist and rebel against him.
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It renders them without excuse, but it also aggravates their offense. Look at all the good things, and yet still you refused.
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We can understand God's love and benevolence when we look at a man like Esau. Esau, this man with generations, with wealth, with the whole domain that he secured, and yet we recognize the declaration.
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Jacob, I have loved, Esau, I have hated. You're reading through Genesis and you're like, hated? Esau seems to be getting along pretty good, all considering horizontally.
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If that's what hate looks like, God is very merciful, isn't he? And we see that in our own lives, in our relationships with family members that are haters of God, and yet are given good things in this life.
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Blessings, some of which we don't even have as his children. Such is the mercy of God.
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Loving our enemy, of course, does not mean that we approve of evil doing. We recognize that God has a perfect nature.
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Our nature is prone towards sinfulness, therefore our anger is never pure. Our justice is never untainted.
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God's anger is pure. God's wrath is perfectly just. We can't even contemplate these things because of the tilt and the stain within ourselves.
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So, of course, loving our enemy is difficult for this reason. We don't want it to connote approval, and it never should.
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God still gives a place for the punishment of criminals. God still, as we saw last week, allows for self -defense.
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God demands protection and justice on the behalf of the weak and the defenseless. So Jesus' call is challenging, but it's not naive.
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We are told by Jesus to be as wise as serpents when we're dealing with sinful men. That's not beneath loving your enemy.
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But I love how Ulrich Loos, in his commentary on Matthew, puts it. He says, Jesus does not connect love to a purpose.
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The love of one's enemy is not a chance for the enemy to become something better or a test to pass before he receives anything.
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In fact, it's an expression of our failure with this command that so often we give it such a purpose. Love for the purpose of is not what
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Jesus taught. Love can only grow when it is the be -all and end -all, the very embodiment of faith and the gift of life.
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This is exactly what Paul means in Romans 13 .10. Love does no harm to a neighbor.
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Therefore, love is the fulfillment of the law. He says in 1
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Corinthians 13, though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I'm just a zilgin brass cymbal clashing about and waking up the neighborhood at 1 a .m.
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Though I have the gift of prophecy, understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and I have all faith,
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I can remove mountains. And I don't have love, I'm nothing. And though I bestow all of my goods to feed the poor, and I give my body to be burned,
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I make Mother Teresa look like Mao Zedong. But if I don't have love, it profits me nothing.
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That's how principal love is to Christianity. If we attain all that we could possibly attain in this life, but we do not reflect the love of God in our lives, it cannot be said that we know
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God. It cannot be said that we are children of God. It cannot be said that we are fit now to dwell with God forever.
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Notice also that love is how faith works. The argument of Galatians 5 is that no efforts, no achievements, no shibboleths, no grandstandings avail anything.
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Paul says only faith working through love. That's the real deal as far as Paul is concerned.
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It's not these false teachers and super apostles coming in to sow discord and divide the flock.
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What's the real deal? Faith working through love, not the shibboleths, not the tests. That's the real deal.
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It's a proof of the Spirit of God. It's the first fruit of the Spirit of God, love. Paul doesn't say that faith works by angst.
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He doesn't say faith works through might. He doesn't say faith works through zeal or belligerence. He says faith works through love.
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It's proof that it's born of the Spirit of God. Because God's people are meant to shine like lights in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation.
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And so whatever we do this morning, what we cannot do is walk away from Matthew 5 with a painted
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Christian veneer over the same crooked and twisted ways of the world's cruelty. Jesus says to his followers, love your enemies.
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Now what will compel this kind of love? What will compel this kind of love?
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It all begins and it all crescendos in the love of Christ. It all begins and it all ends.
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It resolves in the love of Christ. Paul was once an enemy of Christ.
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And the love of Christ struck Paul on the road to Damascus, cast him into blindness, and slowly nurtured him into salvation.
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And Paul ever since then was a changed man, a man now compelled by what?
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2 Corinthians 5 tells us, 2 Corinthians 5, 14 and following. He says, well, the love of Christ compels us.
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That's what compels his people. It's the love of Christ. Faith is begotten by love, faith works through love, but we're compelled by the love of Christ.
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And notice what he's connecting this to. The love of Christ compels us because we judge this. If one died for all, all died.
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He died for all that those who live would no longer live for themselves, but for him who died for them and rose again. Do you see what the move he makes there?
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The love of Christ compels us because when we go to the cross, the very center of our faith, we recognize what he did for us.
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We're compelled to do the same thing for others. Paul never forgot. That's why in Acts three times, it's like Luke, we know the story, stop repeating it.
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Three times Paul has to tell us how he was converted when he was once a despiser and blasphemer of Christ.
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And he never forgot it. It's why even the most petulant, sophomoric, rebellious congregations he could greet as saints beloved of the
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Lord. He knew what it was to be belligerent and sophomoric and incredulous in all the things you are not.
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Praise God. So we remember first and foremost that we too are enemies of God, Romans 5 .20.
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How did God respond to us when we were enemies along the way? That's why
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Paul will get stoned and dried out of a city and pick himself back up and go back to the city.
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He's compelled by the love of Christ. What if God responded to us when we were his enemies in the way that we so often respond to our enemies?
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We would be ruined forever. So love for enemies then, being sons of the
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Father, all begins and ends with recognizing that love for enemies is compelled by the
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Son of the Father. He's in the position to help all of us.
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And in our moment of need, he did just that. It cost him his perfect life to bless those that cursed him and tortured him and spit upon him.
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But he endured our mockery, our spite, our hatred when he prayed for us.
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He was in the position to show mercy. And so rather than hating his enemy, he loved even at the cost of his own life.
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Remember Luke 10, certain man went down from Jerusalem, fell among thieves. They stripped him of his clothing, wounded him and departed, leaving him half dead.
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He was now needing mercy. But what about the Son of God? Jesus went down to Jerusalem, raised between thieves, stripped of his clothing, wounded, left dead.
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In all of that, he was giving mercy. When Jesus' disciples wanted to see
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God's judgment fall on the Samaritans, even though he was utterly rejected by all men, not just by the despised
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Samaritans, he was a man full of sorrow, still he rebuked them and said, you don't know what spirit you have.
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And if we're hearing Matthew 5 clearly, there's a lot of would -be followers of Jesus that still don't know what spirit they're of.
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When his enemies come with clubs and swords to seize him and Peter jumps in to start slicing and dicing, what does
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Jesus do? Put back that sword. It's like the absolute moment of discouragement.
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Have you learned nothing? Did I not tell you that the
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Son of Man did not come to destroy, but to seek and to save those who were lost?
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And when he was hanging on the cursed tree, surrounded by this executioning mob, hurling insults and spit upon him, in between flits of gasping for air, what does
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Jesus cry? You'll get what's coming to you? I know wrath is imminent.
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What does he cry? Father, forgive them. Perfect love for enemies.
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And the world sees Jesus, therefore, as a great pacifist. They wanna view his death as the ultimate example of pacifism.
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They wanna see Jesus as the great moral teacher. If only we could love like this and form the sort of global kumbaya circle, then there'd be no more wars.
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There'd be more no starvation or famine. But it's not pacifism that brings salvation. It's not pedagogy that brings reconciliation.
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It's the death of the Son of the Father that brings salvation. And so this is not a philosophy.
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This is not a mere example. This is our faith. This is our joy. This is our worship.
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This is the gospel. And you, Paul says to the
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Colossians, once alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now he reconciled in his own body through death.
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So in order to love like the Father, we have to behold the love of the
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Father. It must begin and end with Christ and his love. That's what compels us.
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In order to love like the Father, we behold the love of the Father. He sent his only begotten, holy, beloved
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Son into this fallen, crooked world, boiling in rebellion, seething in hatred, and while, that's the key word,
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Romans 5 .20, while we were enemies, he spared not his own son.
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He delivered him up for us all. While we were enemies, he loved us with a wondrous love.
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What wondrous love is this, O my soul? As the hymn puts it, it caused the
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Lord of bliss to bear the dreadful curse from my soul. Another hymn, love so amazing, so divine, demands my love, my life, my all.
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So Christians are rooted and grounded in love for Christ, rooted and grounded in the love of Christ, comprehending it, knowing it, compelled by it, transformed by it.
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This is what Paul prays in Ephesians 3 .17, that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, that you, being rooted and grounded in love.
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Don't you love that language? It almost deserves to be spoken with a Scottish brogue. Rooted and grounded, it's so powerful.
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This agricultural imagery, roots descending, spreading in all of their rhizomatic glory, burgeoning, leafing to fruitfulness, rooted, grounded in love, do you see?
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So that we can just begin to comprehend, with all of the saints, the width, the length, the depth, the height.
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You start to pity those astronomers in all of the exploratory labs, and you realize, you think seeking the borders of the ever -expanding cosmos is difficult.
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Try to get the measurements of the love of God. That's truly fathomless. Paul says, to know the love of Christ, which passes knowledge, so that you can be filled with the fullness of God.
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How are you gonna start reflecting the characteristics of your heavenly father? You have to be filled with the fullness of God.
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How are you gonna be filled with the fullness of God? By knowing the love of Christ, comprehending it, dwelling upon it, being rooted in it, grounded in it.
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That's how you begin to reflect it. That is how you can reflect and be like your heavenly father, rooted and grounded in his love to such a degree that you can love even your enemies to the praise of his glorious grace, amen?
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Let's pray. Father, we are amazed at your love,
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Lord. We feel like carpenter ants trying to understand a symphony. And yet,
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Lord, our own ignorance and callousness, we regret,
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Lord. We ask that you would give us the capacity to be rooted and grounded in such a way we can begin to comprehend and with all the saints of old, the depth and breadth and height and width of your love, that no one would leave this room unchallenged, unscandalized by what it means to bear your cross, to love those that hate, to bless those that curse, to pray for those that persecute.
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Lord, we desire to be your disciples and we desire to make disciples. And Lord, we can do neither of those things if we don't meet the demands of this challenge, if we don't respond to the depth of this teaching, for this is what it means to be your disciple.
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And this so often is how disciples are made, evil being overcome with good, hate being overcome with love, the benevolence and goodwill and long -suffering mercy of you, our father in heaven, displayed perfectly and pristinely through the mercy and grace of your son and granted to us by your own spirit.
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And so, Lord, give us these things, we pray. Is there a stranger to grace in this room this morning? Lord, lay captive their heart.
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Let them be stunned at their sinfulness and yet more amazed by your mercy.
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Draw them as a captive to Christ, we pray. And captivate our hearts, Lord. May we as a church be compelled by love to do the things we have not done, to bear relationships and directions we have not, to seek and to save the lost, even as a savior in whose name we pray, amen.