Matthew 5:43-48, November 3, 2024

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So this week, we are gonna be wrapping up a section of the Sermon on the
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Mount. We're gonna look at the last of these, what are sometimes called the six antitheses.
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Call this because what Jesus is doing, as you've seen through the last few weeks, is he's addressing teachings of the
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Pharisees, and he's showing the Pharisees, and he's showing his disciples, and he's showing all the listeners, and he's showing us how the teachings of the
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Pharisees were antithetical to, or were in opposition to the actual truth of Scripture, and the actual truth of the biblical law that was given to us by God.
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And this also wraps up the fifth chapter of Matthew, but this teaching, this set of verses is actually a pretty big one.
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And just for the sake of consistency, I'll go ahead and say that this is every bit as shocking, this teaching is every bit as challenging as everything else that's come before it, and in this case, possibly even more so.
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Because what this is gonna do is, in some ways, it's gonna kinda roll a lot of the other teachings all up into one.
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We're gonna put a bow on this, so to speak, or just cap this off. Because last week, we looked at how
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Christians were to respond to insults, to wrongs done to them, to legal judgments, to requests for assistance in similar things, and if you recall, all with an emphasis on dying to yourself, all with an emphasis on not worrying so much about you getting what you want or you need, but pursuing righteousness.
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And this week, we dive even deeper into how the Christian is to relate to other people.
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And in this section, Jesus is basically gonna launch just a full -on attack on the false righteousness of the scribes and the
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Pharisees and what they're teaching. And at the same time, as we have the opportunity to read it 2 ,000 plus years later, some of us may consider this a full -on attack on the way we live our lives and on the way we approach relationships with other people, but not just other people, especially the people that we don't like and the people that don't like us.
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It's gonna show us how woefully short of God's standard we come in these areas.
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And what we're gonna talk about today, it actually, believe it or not, it reminds me of a question that Mallory asked me earlier this week.
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Like, seriously, this actually happened. I can't remember the context, but we were in the car, we were driving back from dropping one of the kids off at soccer practice.
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And the question, I don't remember the context, but I remember the question because I had literally just been reading about it earlier that day.
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So what she asked me was if liking someone and loving someone were the same thing.
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And on the surface, this is a really simple question, right? But if you dig into it, it gets to a really, a very profound truth.
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And in just a bit, we're gonna talk about that because, again, it's directly related to these verses. So she was helping me prep my sermon and didn't even know it and probably doesn't even know it right now as I see the top of her head, but not her face.
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All right, so we won't take any more time with that. We'll get straight into our passage. So today we're in Matthew chapter five and we are looking at verses 43 through 48.
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Matthew 5, 43 through 48. You have heard that it was said, you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.
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But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you so that you may be sons of your father who is in heaven.
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For he causes his son to rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.
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For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?
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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? Therefore, you are to be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect.
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That's right, I heard someone say, whoa. So what we'll do today is we'll continue with our current model of looking at the
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Old Testament teaching that's being referenced. We'll look at how the Pharisees are twisting or perverting this teaching and then we'll look at what
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Jesus is offering as a corrective. So that's how we're gonna approach this passage today. And then of course, how that affects us in our lives as Christians.
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So as we dive into the original teaching, this is based in part on the words of Leviticus 19 .18.
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And at least part of this should be pretty familiar to just about everyone. So that verse says this,
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Leviticus 19 .18. You shall not take vengeance and you shall not keep your anger against the sons of your people.
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But you shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am Yahweh. So this is again one of the
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Mosaic teachings that was given by God. And the principle, and particularly that last part, love your neighbor as yourself, was so foundational that everyone would have been familiar with it.
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And it's so important that it comes back over and over and over again in the New Testament, not just here, but you'll find this verse referenced,
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Leviticus 19 .18 specifically, referenced in Matthew 19 .19, Matthew 22 .39,
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Mark 12 .31, Luke 10 .27, Romans 13 .9, Galatians 5 .14 and James 2 .8.
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All of those verses bring us back to Leviticus 19 .18. And as we looked at last week and we'll look at a little bit this week, the
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Old Testament is also full of concepts and principles that are designed to reinforce this idea of loving your neighbor, designed to drive the point home exactly as to what this means.
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So Israelites, Israelites were meant to help their fellow countrymen.
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And that's probably a no -brainer. This is something they all would have known too. They were all familiar with this concept, love your neighbor.
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So just one example of some Old Testament scripture that points this out is Deuteronomy 22, verses one through four.
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Deuteronomy 22, verses one through four. You shall not see your brother's ox or his sheep straying away and ignore them.
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You shall certainly bring them back to your brother. And if your brother is not near you, or if you do not know him, then you shall bring it home to your house and it shall be with you until your brother searches for it.
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Then you shall give it back to him. Thus you shall do with his donkey and you shall do likewise with his garment.
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And you shall do likewise with anything lost by your brother, which he has lost and you have found.
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You are not allowed to ignore them. You shall not see your brother's donkey or his ox falling down on the way and ignore them.
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You shall certainly help him to raise them up. Now, this obviously is about a fellow
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Israelite, about somebody maybe that you know, or even if you don't know them, you know that they're of your people. So you're to take care of them.
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Again, probably a given for just about all of us. But we can't leave out the fact that they were also commanded to help people that weren't their friends.
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They were commanded to help people that weren't their countrymen. We look at Exodus 23 verses four through five.
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It says, if you meet your enemy's ox or his donkey wandering away, you shall surely return it to him.
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If you see the donkey of one who hates you lying helpless under its load, you shall refrain from leaving it to him.
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You shall surely release it with him. Now, let's just take the oxes and the donkeys and stuff like that away from what we're talking about right now.
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Don't let us, don't let that distract us from the overall point of what's going on here.
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This is telling us that we're to be kind, we're to be caring, we're to take care of other people, we're to take care of our friends, we're to take care of our enemies in this way.
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It's not just about the people that you like or the people that like you. And like a lot of the other antitheses or all the other antitheses that we looked at, we have to note also that this is, these apply to your personal relationships and your personal life, personal interactions.
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So when we talk about an enemy, in the context that we're looking at in these verses, this is not like a combatant on the battlefield.
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This is not somebody who is trying to kill you on behalf of another country. No, this is something that's a lot more relatable to all of us.
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This is the person that you don't like, again, or the person that doesn't like you, the person that you just don't care for.
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Now, in the context of one's personal life, John MacArthur explains it this way.
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He says, God never had a double standard for righteousness. His commandment is exceedingly broad.
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And in the fullest sense, an Israelite's neighbor was anyone in need whom he might come across in his daily living.
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His neighbor was anyone in need whom he might come across in his daily living. Again, we're not discriminating based on who this person is if it's a person in need.
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Now, Jesus elaborates a lot on the concept of a neighbor, who a neighbor is, what a neighbor is in the parable of the
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Good Samaritan in Luke 10. And I'm not gonna read that one this morning because I'm pretty sure that we're all familiar with that one.
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But this was his answer to somebody who said, teacher, who is my neighbor? So he tells this story.
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Now, another example of this principle in the Old Testament comes up in Job. Job chapter 29, or excuse me,
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Job chapter 31, verses 29 through 30. Job says, if I have been glad at the upheaval of the one who hated me, or exalted when evil found him, but I have not given over my mouth to sin by asking for his life in a curse.
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It would be sin to take joy in someone else's suffering or sin to ask for his life in a curse, according to Job.
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One more example from the Old Testament in Proverbs. Proverbs 24, 29, do not say as he did to me, so I shall do to him.
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I will render to the man according to his work. A lot of us think that is the principle that we should live by.
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Scripture says it's not. Proverbs 25, 21, if your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat.
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And if he is thirsty, give him water to drink. But all of this stuff, all of the
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Old Testament, stuff that I read, stuff that we didn't read, it's abundant in there, it all comes back to this
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Leviticus 19 .18 idea of loving your neighbor as yourself. But not only that, it comes back to the idea that everyone is your neighbor.
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And we'll get into this a little bit more as we get further into the verses. But now what we wanna look at is what the
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Pharisees were teaching. So in contrast to the idea that everyone is your neighbor and that we're to love your neighbor, the teaching of the
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Pharisees that we see in verse 43 is that they've perverted it in two specific ways.
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So what they've done is first, they've left out an important part of the verse, and two, they've perverted it by teaching something that's not in the
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Scriptures. So basically what we're saying is, they've misled people by subtracting from Scripture and they've misled people by adding to what
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Scripture says. And this is a very significant misapplication of this verse.
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But let's look at the subtraction first. So we read Leviticus 19 .18,
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and we talked about how this verse would have been very familiar to everybody, the concept fundamental to everyone.
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But if we look at verse 43, and I'll turn back to that one now, it says, you have heard that it was said, you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.
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Do you notice anything that was left out of that teaching? You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.
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You left out two words that are very important. As yourself, and that was probably intentional.
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In fact, we've seen on a number of occasions that it's common for the Pharisees to reduce the scope of a
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Scriptural teaching so that they could turn it into something that was easy for them to follow, easy for them to live by, something that they could accomplish through their own effort.
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So we see two things happening here with this. The first is that the
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Pharisees absolutely loved themselves. And because of the degree to which they loved themselves, it was really hard for them to consider loving their neighbor that much.
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For them to love their neighbor as themselves would be extremely difficult. And of course, our culture today, not much different, right?
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We don't really have much ground to stand on because self -love is a really big part of our culture.
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Self -love, self -esteem, it's even prevalent in the church and in Christian culture. This is reflected in our desire to do things only that we like, to do things only when they don't inconvenience us, to do things primarily for our comfort, primarily for our pleasure, primarily for our security, for our money, for whatever it is, because we don't wanna sacrifice any aspect of our life.
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And this is important because when you love yourself first and you love yourself more than anything else, then you don't really have the room or the desire to love your neighbor in a similar way.
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And that's because doing so will inevitably take away from your own comfort.
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It means you might have to give up something of yours. You might have to give up some of your time. You might have to give up some of your money.
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You might have to sit through something in church that you don't like. You might have to be the one that actually starts a program or starts a group or starts a community that you wanna be part of instead of just plopping yourself in and landing on something that's already existing that you can take advantage of.
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So the Pharisees, the point being the Pharisees love themselves more than anything else.
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And the second thing that we see the Pharisees had done was that they had substantially reduced the amount of people that could be considered their neighbor.
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Basically what they did was they boiled it down to the people that were just like them. They looked down on sinners.
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They considered them unworthy of consideration. I mean, it wasn't, it didn't even cross their radar to consider these sinners, the tax collectors, the
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Gentiles as part of their community or as their neighbor or even consider them at all.
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And we see this in verses like Mark 2, 16. And when the scribes and Pharisees saw that he,
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Jesus, was eating with sinners and tax collectors, they were saying to his disciples, he is eating and drinking with tax collectors and sinners.
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And in Luke 7, 39. Now, when the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, saying, if this man were a prophet, he would know who and what sort of person this woman is who is touching him, that she is a sinner.
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So what we see here in just these two short examples, these are times when Jesus was out interacting with people that the
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Pharisees considered to be lesser. And the Pharisees just couldn't understand why on earth
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Jesus would interact with them. Went to dinner at a Pharisee's house and some sinner came in, you know, and was praising
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Jesus and doing all these nice things for Jesus. And he said, how on earth would he let this person touch him?
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She is a sinner. So this is just a window into the way that they look at other people. Now, nowhere else are these ideas, both of them brought to the surface more clearly than Luke 18, verses nine through 14.
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We see an example of both of these things coming together in this parable. Luke 18, nine through 14.
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Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood and was praying these things to himself.
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God, I thank you that I am not like other people, swindlers, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.
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I fast twice a week. I pay tithes of all that I get. But the tax collector standing some distance away was even unwilling to lift up his eyes to heaven, but was beating his chest saying,
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God, be merciful to me, the sinner. I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other.
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For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.
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And we'll come back to the idea of tax collectors, especially. But as you all probably know, the tax collectors, they were folks who were
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Jews, but they had essentially sold out to the Roman government. So what they did was they were contracted to collect local taxes.
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They were allowed to collect as much as they wanted and anything in excess of what they were required to give to the government, they could keep.
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So basically what they were doing was they were getting rich off the back of their own people. And as a result, their own people hated them for it.
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Matthew is an example of somebody who did this. So as a result, the
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Pharisees, the scribes, people like them especially, considered them just the lowest of the low, considered them subhuman, not worth consideration, and certainly not their neighbors.
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So these are a couple of ways that we see that the Pharisees have subtracted from the true teaching of Scripture, taking out the word as yourself.
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They changed what the definition of neighbor was and they changed the idea of loving your neighbor as yourself. Now, now that we've looked at how they twisted that by taking away words, what we're gonna see next is probably, probably even more egregious than that.
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So what we're gonna do is we're gonna focus on the words that the Pharisees added to the teaching that misled their people.
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The teaching, hate your enemies, is one that doesn't show up anywhere in Scripture.
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At no point are we commanded to hate our enemies. But the fact that Jesus even made this statement at least implies that this teaching is something that would have been familiar to the people that were listening to them.
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They wouldn't have questioned, yes, we've heard this often, love your neighbor, hate your enemies. But we've already looked this week and last week at just a few passages at least that gave us a lot of information on who one's neighbor is and how we're to deal with our neighbor.
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And based on that, it's hard to imagine how they could even come up with this teaching. Because again, clearly it's not taught in Scripture.
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It's not anywhere in the Bible. But we have to recognize that there are some passages, there are some stories, there are some instances that could lead us to believe that this is true.
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For example, there's a number of times when God ordered his people, when
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God ordered the Israelites to just completely eliminate a group of people, to wipe them off the face of the earth, right?
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This was the case for the Canaanites, the Amorites, the Moabites, the
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Midianites. So at various points in history and various points in the Old Testament, God himself commanded his people to destroy someone else.
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Now in 1 Samuel 15, Saul was instructed to do this to yet another group of people.
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Saul was instructed to do this to the Amalekites. And if you recall that story, he did not follow through completely.
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He did not completely destroy them. And that was part of the disobedience that led to Saul's downfall.
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So that's one thing that we see. We do see God eliminating people. We also have a handful of psalms that are known as the imprecatory psalms, if you've ever heard that term.
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These are some of the psalms that appear to call for violence against people.
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And they're hard to read and they're hard to understand. And as a result, a lot of Christians just kind of wanna ignore them.
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We just wanna shy away from them. We wanna pretend they're not part of the Bible because they're hard to explain away. But we can't do that.
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We can't disavow them because they're part of the Bible. So we have to at least come face to face with them.
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Now, a brief example is in Psalm 69. And to set the stage for this a little bit,
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David writes this in verse nine. He says, for zeal for your house has consumed me, and the reproaches of those who reproach you have fallen on me.
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So I read that passage just to give you a little bit of an idea of David's mindset, where he's coming from when he writes this.
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Because he's gonna go on to say in verses 22 through 24, may their table before them become a snare.
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And when they are in peace, may it become a trap. May their eyes darken so that they cannot see and make their loins quake continually.
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Pour out your indignation on them and may your burning anger overtake them. And in verse 28, he goes on to say, may they be blotted out of the book of righteousness and may they not be recorded with the righteous.
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Now, that's probably not even the most violent one of these imprecatory psalms. But it just gives you an idea that one could theoretically make the case, based on some of these instances and some of the writings in the psalms, that it's okay to hate certain people.
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I mean, it sounds like David hates them, right? Sounds like he is trying to exact judgment on some folks.
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How do we reconcile this? Is it ever okay for us to hate our enemy?
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Is it ever okay for us to try and call judgment down on another group of people?
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It's not. It's not. So these examples, they do all relate to God's judgment on wicked people.
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So the idea of destroying a people, as difficult as it is to consider, is part of God's righteous judgment.
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God, and God alone, has the ability and the authority to make this kind of righteous judgment.
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We certainly do not. These were people that had completely, well,
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I don't know that they even turned away from him as so much as they never turned toward him. And the concern was that they would cause
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Israel to turn away from God. And when they weren't completely eliminated, that's exactly what they did.
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So again, these instances are all part of God's judgment on wicked people.
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And we also see, looking at David, that David never actually persecuted these people.
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He might have called for judgment in a moment of emotion or in a moment of anger or in a moment of desperation, but he's not persecuting them.
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And we see this when he decided not to kill Saul. David had the chance to kill
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Saul. Clearly, he was about to be king, but he did not do it.
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So he's calling for God's judgment, because as he said, zeal for his house had consumed him. So let's return once again to the fact that the principles that we're talking about, the things in the antitheses, the
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Sermon on the Mount, these are for individual application. And they're not for countries or people groups.
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And once again, if you go back to the idea of who our neighbor is, it's everyone, and particularly anyone who's in need.
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And that's exactly what Jesus is gonna elaborate on in his corrective teaching. So let's move forward to the first half of verse 44.
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Now, he says, but I say to you, love your enemies. So that's the first half.
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Now, let's just briefly highlight here the fact that Jesus says, but I say to you.
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And as we've seen with all the other examples, this refers to his deity. This refers to the fact that Jesus has the absolute authority to make this teaching.
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Jesus has the absolute authority to correct the false teaching of the Pharisees. But we start out with this first command.
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But I say to you, love your enemies. Now, William Hendrickson, a commentator, said this.
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He was referring to the animosity that this kind of teaching had created between Jews and Gentiles, but also between Jews and other
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Jews. Hendrickson says this. It was in the midst of this intensely narrow -minded, exclusivistic, and intolerant environment that Jesus carried on his ministry.
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All around him were those walls and fences. He came for the very purpose of bursting those barriers so that love, pure, warm, divine, infinite, would be able to flow straight down from the heart of God, hence from his own marvelous heart into the hearts of men.
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His love overleaped all the boundaries of race, nationality, party, age, sex, et cetera.
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When he said, I tell you, love your enemies, he must have startled his audience, for he was saying something that had probably never before been said so succinctly, positively, and forcefully.
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And we've already said that the Old Testament clearly taught to love your enemies.
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Now, we've reached the point where we get down to the distinction between loving and liking people.
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I referred to that earlier. Now, I think it's useful to just briefly discuss four
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Greek words that are commonly translated as love in Scripture. The first is phileas.
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That's friendship or brotherly love. Philadelphia, city of brotherly love, that's where that comes from.
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So phileas, that's one. Storge is a second. That's familial love, love for your family.
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Eros, romantic, sexual love. And then the fourth one is agape love.
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This is the one that's most common. This is the one that is most often translated love, particularly where Jesus is speaking.
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And what agape love is is a love that seeks and works to meet another person's highest welfare.
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So what we see here is that you don't have to like somebody to show them that agape kind of love.
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This is why at least having some sort of resource where you can go to look at what the
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Greek means because there's four different words that get translated into one
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English word, but they mean very different things. So there's a lot of distinction there. But again, you don't have to like someone to show them that kind of love.
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In fact, that kind of love is more like a verb. It's something that you do less than it is something that you feel.
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And agape love, that kind of love is what Jesus is referring to here when he says, love your enemies. This is also the type of love that God demonstrates for us.
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This is the type of love that God demonstrates for all his children. And if we needed any other example of the fact that someone doesn't have to be a reserve, excuse me, a deserving recipient of this love, it's us and God.
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But where we tend to be prideful, we tend to be self -seeking. Agape love is humble.
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Agape love seeks the good of others. Now, an example of this in Scripture is John 13, 34.
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Jesus says this, a new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another.
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Again, that idea of agape love is what's being translated there. But he said this right after he had given them a perfect demonstration of humble servanthood.
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This was right after he had washed the feet of the disciples. Again, an act that seeks to meet another person's need or the highest welfare of another person.
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But it doesn't even stop there because what happened not too long after that was
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Jesus showed that kind of love that sought their best interest or sought their welfare by dying.
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He gave up his life for his disciples and indeed for everyone else as well, just to give us a perfect example.
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So again, I'd have to say that you don't actually have to like someone in order to show love to them in this way, but it's really hard unless your heart has been changed by the
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Holy Spirit. It's a difficult thing to do, to seek the welfare of somebody that you don't like if you haven't fully grasped or understood through the power of the
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Holy Spirit what has been done for you or the love that has been shown for you or what has been given for you.
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Because otherwise, you're still gonna seek your own best interest before someone else's.
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So this all returns us to the beatitudes.
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I never get tired of saying that. I've become so enamored of the beatitudes after reading and studying them because of the way they influence your approach to everything.
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And again, as we've said over and over, all of this is building on the beatitudes because it's simply not possible for us without that foundation.
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So that's the first half. Love your enemies. And the second half of that is just gonna build on that teaching.
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The second half is pray for those who persecute you. Now, one thing that we should all know if you've been paying attention, especially to what we learn in the beatitudes is that you should be prepared to be persecuted for your
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Christian beliefs. Matthew 5, 10 was that beatitude. Blessed are those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
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Now, as a Christian, this is the irony of this. And this is kind of how you'll know that this is true because you'll see it play out this way.
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As a Christian, you could do anything in the world for a person. You could be as nice, as generous, as friendly, as whatever to them.
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And they could still persecute you for your Christianity. I know that sounds like an odd thing.
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You're like, no, no, no, no, no, I'm nice to them. Well, there are groups of people that have ideas about what
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Christians are. This is the kind of thing that we see on social media or the kind of thing we just see out in the world where someone, a homosexual person, will look at a
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Christian. They won't see the person or what they do, but they'll see that they're a Christian and they'll say, well, that person wants me dead.
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I mean, I've seen that kind of statement directly made. Well, you're a Christian, so you want me dead. You want me to go to hell.
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Well, that's not the case. But because you're a Christian, they're not gonna look at anything that you are or anything that you do except for that fact.
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You will be persecuted for those beliefs, believe it or not. So that's hard to take because you can love someone, you can be kind to them, you can actually want something good for them, and they can throw it back in your face.
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So what do you do? Do you get mad at them if they insult you, if they say something mean to you?
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Do you clap back at them? If you were here last week, you know that you don't.
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And if you weren't here last week, you can see what we said about that or just go a few verses back. That's where the turn the other cheek concept comes into play.
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But Jesus takes us a step beyond that now. He says, we're commanded to pray for these people.
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Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. Charles Spurgeon said this, prayer is the forerunner of mercy.
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And that's one of the biggest reasons that we are to pray for other people. Now, even though we see
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David calling for persecution, we see David calling for righteous justice from God, I would still suggest that that's probably not our job.
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That's probably not what we should be doing in these situations. We should be praying for these people.
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We should be praying for people that persecute us to know God for a couple of reasons. One, we should want them to be saved.
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We should not want them to go to hell. We do not pray that sinners are destroyed. We don't pray that sinners ultimately come under judgment right now.
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We pray that sinners repent. We pray that sinners have the opportunity for salvation.
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So that, we pray for their sake, but we also pray for our own sake. Prayer is the forerunner for mercy.
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If you can cool yourself off long enough to actually pray for somebody that's mistreating you, it's gonna change how you feel about them.
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It's gonna change how you think about them. So give yourself a little time.
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If you've been hurt, again, this goes, we're using all these like secular sinners and people that hate you, but this goes every bit as much for people that are in the church that have wronged you in some way.
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Your response, along with turning the other cheek, should never be to hope for something bad to happen to somebody.
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It should be to pray for them. And I'll add this too, because part of our nature is to pray for what we want to happen, right?
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We're like, God, this person insulted me. I pray that they see how great
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I am. No, like those aren't the prayers that we pray. We pray, God, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, right?
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We pray that you have your way with that person, that your will is done for them.
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But that idea, it just shows us how closely those two things are tied, loving your enemy and praying for those who persecute you.
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And also, by the way, like these are not suggestions. These are not something that, hey, maybe you try if you feel like it.
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These are commands. These are commands of Jesus. And obviously, it's not easy to do.
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But despite how difficult it is, the best thing you can do is pray for your enemies. Pray for the people that persecute you.
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You're not asked to like them, but you're asked to show love for them.
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Now, as we move into verse 45, we see the actual reason that we're expected to do these ridiculous and difficult things that are in verse 44.
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That we see the reason that we're supposed to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. Verse 45, it says, so that you may be sons of your
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Father who is in heaven. For he causes his son to rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.
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So the reason we're to do these things is so that we will be seen to be sons of God, children of God.
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Because these are the types of actions that provide evidence that we are who we say we are as Christians.
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It's one thing to say that you're a Christian, and it's another thing to truly live like it. It's one thing to go to church, and it's another thing to turn the other cheek to somebody who insults you.
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Have you ever heard people say, well, I don't wanna go to church because Christians are hypocrites?
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Just a building full of hypocrites. Well, what they mean is that they know people who claim to be
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Christians, who act exactly like the people that absolutely make no claim to be
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Christians. They're every bit as nasty, every bit as spiteful, vengeful, yet they claim to be
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Christians. So when these people say, I don't wanna go to church because they're no different than me, in some ways, they're right.
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You have to honestly assess that. You have to honestly think about whether or not there's some truth to those things.
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As these teachings, what they're designed to do is drive home the point that we're not to conduct ourselves the way that unbelievers do, no matter how those people treat us.
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If someone starts to insult you, to cuss you out, calling you stupid, a hypocrite, or whatever, by this point in Matthew, you should already know that your response shouldn't be to do the same thing back to them.
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Because if you do, then you're proving them right. You're showing that they are pretty accurate on their assessment.
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Proverbs 26, four says, do not answer a fool according to his folly, lest you yourself also be like him.
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But again, this goes beyond, showing that you were a son of God, showing that you were a
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Christian goes beyond just remaining stoic. If somebody's standing there insulting you and you just take it, that's one step, but it's not enough.
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John 13, 35, just after what we read earlier, by this, all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.
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In 1 John 4, 16, and we have come to know and have believed the love which God has in us.
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God is love and the one who abides in love abides in God and God abides in him. It's not enough just to not retaliate.
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You have to show love. Like this is where things get really difficult.
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It is not enough just to take it. You have to respond with love.
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But there's more, there's even more. God doesn't just expect us to do this, right?
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God doesn't just expect us to do this because he says so. Like look at the second half of that verse says, for he causes his son to rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.
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So there's a concept that's referred to as common grace. And what common grace is is exactly what this passage exemplifies.
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This is the fact that there are things that God provides, that he gives to everybody regardless of what they believe, regardless of what they say about God, what they say about him.
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We know that God makes the sun rise. We know that God causes the rain, but he doesn't withhold it from people because they're not
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Christians. God shows these forms of love to everyone despite them.
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We see this in verses like Psalm 145, 15, and 16. The eyes of all wait on you and you give them their food in due time.
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You open your hand and satisfy the desire of every living thing. So we see that despite people being in complete rebellion against God, there are certain things that he still gives to them, that he still, ways he still shows them love and grace.
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So by the same token, when you do that as well in your life, you're showing that you truly are a child of God.
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Now we move on to verses 46 and 47. 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? So these verses, they have a pretty obvious message for us, but we don't wanna lose sight of the fact that this was probably the ultimate insult that he could be giving to the scribes and the
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Pharisees. You see, as we mentioned earlier, tax collectors were the lowest of the low.
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They were some of the most awful people in society. I don't even know what the equivalent would be, but they were absolutely unworthy of the attention or the consideration of the scribes and Pharisees because they were so terrible.
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And in a similar category were the Gentiles, the people that weren't Jews, the people that weren't considered to be God's people.
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They were basically subhuman. They're outside of the grace of God. Absolutely no reason to associate with them or to do anything that would imply that they were worthy of your thought or your time.
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So imagine how insulted they would be when Jesus directly compared them with some of the people that they hated the most.
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It was like if Jesus came up to Madison County and was like, if you love those who love you, what reward do you have?
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Do not people from Greene County do the same? So what he's telling them is that by showing love to the people that are exactly like them or the people that they have narrowly defined as their neighbors, they're no better than the people that they hate.
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They're no better than the people that they think are so much lower than them. And the point, of course, is not to affirm the
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Pharisees' views of tax collectors and Gentiles. Whether they're sinners or not, God loves them all the same and Jesus came to help correct them and help bring them up out of their sin.
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But the point is to let us know that citizens of the kingdom of God are held to a higher standard of love and a higher standard of righteousness.
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The point is that Christians should stand out as different from all the people around them.
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This is how you're the salt of the earth and the light of the world. There shouldn't be an opportunity for people outside of the church to look at you and say,
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I don't wanna be a Christian because all the Christians I know are no better than anyone else.
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In fact, they're worse because they're hypocrites. People outside of the church should look at you and even if they don't immediately wanna come into church, they should say, but they're different somehow and I don't really understand it.
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But they're not like other people that I know or hopefully they're not even like other Christians that I know.
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Now, these concepts culminate in what we see in verse 48 and verse 48 is one that's caused quite a bit of confusion.
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So we're gonna take just a minute to look very closely at it. Verse 48, therefore you are to be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect.
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So this statement, it sums up a lot of what we looked at in the Sermon on the Mount so far. It goes back to what
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I said at the end of last week's sermon, Jesus was crucified so that we would be more like him.
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Jesus was crucified so that we would grow in holiness. We would grow in sanctification through the power of the
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Holy Spirit. But we see that word perfect. And surely, surely that doesn't mean perfect, right?
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It's gotta be one of those Greek words that has a little bit of a different meaning that's not the same in English. Does it mean that we're to be perfect?
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It does, it does. We have to be careful of excusing a lower level of obedience to Scripture.
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Because that's what the Pharisees did. We have to be careful of excusing a lower level or just a lesser degree of obedience to what we see in the
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Sermon on the Mount. Because they were changing the plain meaning of Scripture. They're saying, well, we can't be perfect, so we'll just change perfect to mean something that we can actually accomplish.
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So I would ask you in light of what we've studied so far, how you could think that it would be acceptable for you to love others, your friends, your enemies, your persecutors, any less than God loves them.
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How's that acceptable based on what Jesus has taught us, based on what we've seen in this passage? What excuse would you give to justify that?
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If you were standing before God, knowing that you're supposed to love these people perfectly, if you decided to change perfect to mean something else, how would you defend that before God if you were standing before Him on the day of your judgment?
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But what you would be justified in is asking, how is it possible for us to be perfect? Isn't it impossible?
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It is impossible. It is impossible for us to be perfect. So I wanna remind you of something similar to what
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I've said a bunch of times here. The demands of the Sermon on the Mount are exactly the standard that we should be aiming for.
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Now, they're also a standard that we can't meet under our own effort, right?
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How do we deal with that? It's because the teaching of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount and the teaching of Jesus here drives us straight back to the cross.
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It takes us straight back to Jesus. The demands of the Beatitudes will consistently return us to Matthew 5, 3.
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It'll remind us of our spiritual bankruptcy. It will remind us that we do not have the capability of saving ourselves.
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We can't make a decision. We can't do things and we can't take actions that will save us.
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It's all to remind us of our need for that Savior. It's to remind us of the need for the work of Jesus, for the power of the
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Holy Spirit, and the fact that you can't possibly meet
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God's standard under your own power. So yes, you are to be perfect, but you can't be perfect.
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But let's see what Jesus says in Matthew 19, 26. With people, this is impossible, but with God, all things are possible.
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Perfection is only possible through the work of Jesus. We're not perfected now, but we will be perfected, assuming you believe in the work that Jesus has done on the cross.
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And there's one more thing that I wanna reiterate here before we close, and that is the difference between the natural man and the spiritual man, or the
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Christian man. I shouldn't say spiritual, I'm gonna say Christian. I've mentioned this before, but we're all familiar with this.
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As Christians, we probably know non -Christians, atheists even, who are every bit as kind, every bit as generous, every bit as loving of other people, maybe not loving of Christianity, but loving and accepting of just about everything else as any
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Christian that we've ever known. And we look at those people, and we say, why does this person who doesn't believe in God treat me better than some of these people that say they do?
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And I think it goes back to part of what we saw in the second half of verse 47.
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So I'll try to make this something we can follow, but this idea of the natural person versus the
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Christian person. On the surface, they can look the same, but in verse 47,
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Jesus said, what more are you doing than others? So if we return to these ideas, or these terms, natural and Christian man, the natural man, when he's facing a trial, or when he's stoic, or I'm sorry, when he's insulted, he can be stoic, he can control his emotions, he can resist the urge to retaliate, resist the urge to fight back against someone, and he can handle himself in a way that's respectable.
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But at the risk of impugning that person's motives, I would suggest to you that that's done in a way that's kind of calculating, and I don't really mean that to be as insulting as it sounds, but they're acting that way out of self -preservation.
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If you start to argue with somebody, or if we're talking something physical, if you start to fight back, there are gonna be repercussions.
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There could be legal repercussions, like if somebody struck you and you struck them back, someone might call the police.
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So they avoid these things out of self -preservation. That's not to say that that's a negative thing, or that it's not good that they're restraining themselves, but you have to look at the reason why.
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Or if we look at some of the other things in the six antitheses, they follow the law, they go that one mile so that they don't get in trouble.
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The natural person is probably even willing to admit that they're not perfect, but they're not gonna go so far as to say they're bad.
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They'll admit simply that they're not perfect, and we could go on with more examples of this, but we'll stop there and look at the
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Christian, because in contrast, what more do you do? In contrast, the
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Christian faces all the same situations and scenarios, but they face them with a different perspective.
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You face them with a different perspective. I said that the natural man admits that he's not perfect, but the
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Christian man recognizes that he's a sinner. Not only is he not perfect, but he's a sinner, vile, depraved, unworthy, and saved only through the grace of God.
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The Christian, when insulted, doesn't just not retaliate, he offers this torment or another opportunity, take another shot, and then what does he do or she do?
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He loves that person and prays for them. Not only does the
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Christian go the first mile to remain in obedience to the law, but they go a second mile for the sake of righteousness.
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The natural man does good things, but probably often keeps a record of those things just so they know what's been done, so people know what they've done.
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The Christian, and this is another thing that we struggle with a lot, the Christian doesn't need to keep a record of the good things they do for people.
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You don't need to shout to the world all the things that you've done to help others, because what's been done for you is so much greater than all of those things, you should be doing them as a response to the grace that's been shown to you.
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So just reflect on all the things we've discussed over the last few weeks.
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The Christian is different or should be different. The Christian should be special, and that should be obvious to everyone who sees them.
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So why do I say that? Why is this the case? It's the case because the Christian understands sin.
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The Christian understands their true nature. Not only do they understand sin and their nature, they understand that they're guilty of that.
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They're guilty of the sin, they're condemned by the sin, but they've also experienced the free gift of grace, the grace of God and His Son, Jesus Christ.
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Martin Lloyd -Jones says this, he says, the Christian knows all this has happened for him, and it has changed his whole attitude towards God and his fellow man.
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He has been forgiven when he did not deserve it. What right then has he not to forgive his enemy?
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We think that because we're Christians that we're not enemies of God, but before salvation, we were enemies of God.
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We were absolutely enemies of God, and he forgave that. We should forgive our enemies.
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We would also ask, what right do you have to withhold the same kind of love that was shown to you from someone else?
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And to close, we'll just bring this to a finer point with another question that you can ask yourself.
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So if given the fact that a Christian has a life that's different, a life that is observably different, a life that's special, a life that is not the same as every other person,
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Christian or not, whether it's with your family, whether it's at work, whether it's with any person, any sinner, any unbeliever that you interact with, if people are looking at you, ask yourself this.
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Is there anything special about you? Will people see anything different or special about your life?
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As you go about your day to day, is there anything special about you?
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Hopefully people see it in your actions. Let's pray. Father, as we reflect on the grace and the mercy that you've shown us, we pray for your
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Holy Spirit to empower us. We pray for the change in our hearts that gives us the ability to show that kind of love to other people, to do things that don't come naturally to us, to reflect your love to the world in a way that everyone can see when they come in contact with us.
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God, as we sit back and we reflect on what it is that you've done for us, the way that you've loved us and the grace and the mercy that you've shown us, we ask ourselves, how is it possible that we could not do the same to other people, not just the people that we love, but to all the people that have been created in your image?
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Lord, thank you for the grace and the mercy that you've shown to us through the cross, and thank you for the love. God, we pray that we can continue to give it back to you and to the world as we love everyone around us, friends and enemies, and we pray for all of them as well.
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Lord, thank you for the opportunity that we have, and thank you for our gathering today. We love you, and we pray all this in Jesus' name, amen.