The Ancients Were Told 9

So this morning, we're coming to the sixth and the final section in the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus corrects the scribes and Pharisees' abuse of the law. This section of the Sermon on the Mount, these sermons I've entitled, The Ancients Were Told, and each section starts with Jesus saying something, if not exactly, very similar to, you've heard that it was said, but I say unto you. And what he's doing is correcting the misunderstandings, the abuse, the lies. that the Pharisees and the scribes have introduced to the people of God, to the Jews. And so as we work our way through this passage, my hope, as it is each week, is that God will help us to see how loveless we are toward those who sin against us or those that we simply don't like. This is very common for our fallen nature, but it's contrary to God's law to be so loveless and hard-hearted. And so I hope that God helps us to see the ways in which we've fallen short and failed to become like Christ.

to be like our God and our Savior. Now, before I read our text, I want to say each week, if you pay attention to my introductions, there's always a sentence that says, my hope is that God will help us, and then we fill in the blank. And usually it's something discouraging. It's usually something about our sin. I hope God will help us to see this area of sin in our lives. And as I say that each week, as I write it down, I think this is a strange thing to say to people every week. They come to church knowing that their pastor's hope is that they will see more of their sin and feel convicted about it. But it really is my hope. It's not the entirety of my hope, but it is the beginning of my hope. Because I'm convinced that if we don't come to see each week, and more frequently than that, but at least each week in church, if we don't come to see our sins, we will never come to Jesus. We will never repent.

I think it's common today to think that we'll come to Jesus because we see some benefit in this life, some ease, some resolution of the conflict or the tensions or the pressures that we feel. That if people come to Jesus, that stuff will be resolved. No. Many times those things are not resolved. Sometimes they're made even worse. What's resolved when we come to Jesus is the problem of our sin. And so how can we come to Jesus in faith and in repentance if we never see our sins? And you add to that that every one of us each day is, without even trying, making excuses for the things we do. I didn't mean it. I don't do it all the time. Well, you do this thing. I say these so often. We make excuses. We minimize. We discount our own behavior. I think it makes it all the more important that when we come to the Word of God, every time we come to the Word of God, we should be looking, have our eyes peeled to say, what does this have to say about my sins?

Because if I had to speak about my sins, the list would be very short and the sins would be very small. But when I read scripture, when I say, oh, there, let's see what God has to say here, I go, oh, Jesus is telling me to do something I don't do. And more than the fact that I don't do it, he tells me to do things I don't want to do. And even more than that, he tells me to do things that apart from his help, I cannot do. And I believe and am convinced that it's helpful for us to live. In a state of dependence on God to strengthen us and help us in the areas of our great weakness and need. And so our text this morning is Matthew chapter 5, verses 43 to 48. And I do hope that God works in our lives to show us, this chapter is about loving your neighbor. And what I hope is that God will do the spade work in our hearts of showing us how we don't love our neighbors the way we should. Not even close.

so that we understand with some clarity and with some urgency what we need to repent of. Because if we come to church and we leave church and we go, there's nothing I need to do differently, then either we didn't listen, or I failed, or you have a hard heart, or God's concealed his truth from you, and none of which are good things. We should go away saying, oh, I see now. an area of weakness, an area of sin, an area where I need God to change me and grow me. And so my hope is that he'll do just that as we read and as we study this text. Would you please stand as we read the word of the Lord? This is the word of the Lord, and it is eternally true. You have heard that it was said, you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. 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. For he causes his son to rise on the evil and the good.

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. You may be seated. as has been our habit at least some of the time when we come to these passages, we start out by saying, okay, where did that thing that the Pharisees are saying get said in the Old Testament? So there's two things that are said here. One is, you shall love your neighbor, and the other is, you shall hate your enemy. Love your neighbor, hate your enemy. Well, if we ask, well, where does he say you shall love your neighbor? I think if you've been a Christian and you've read your Bible, you're probably familiar with that phrase. It shows up quite often.

When Jesus was asked what was the greatest commandment in all of the law, he said the greatest commandment is that you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength. And then he says, and the second greatest commandment is you shall love your neighbor as yourself. In other places he says the whole law is summed up in these two words, love God, love your neighbor. And we find that in the Old Testament time and time again. Love God. Love your neighbor. If we look into the Ten Commandments, we see these two things happening. The first four commandments teach us how to love God. The fifth through the tenth commandment teach us how to love our neighbor. And so there's no controversy or question about where this teaching came from. The Old Testament is full of it, and it's carried over even into the New Testament. Loving our neighbor is indisputable. But then you come to the second thing. You shall hate your enemy.

And if you go looking in the Old Testament, you're gonna have a hard time finding where it actually says you shall hate your enemy, those words. You could argue though, the Pharisees could argue and say, you know, sometimes when you think someone's wrong and you just think it's so obvious that they're wrong and they're lying. But then if you ask them like, why are you saying that or doing that? And you let them speak, they actually will tell you, well, I'm doing it because I thought this was the right thing. So while there's no... Direct passage in the Old Testament that tells us to hate our enemies. The idea of having enemies and the idea of opposing them or resisting them or fighting with them is all through the Old Testament. For instance, when the Israelites were coming out of the wilderness and they were coming into the land of Canaan, they were given a very severe task.

What was their task? They were supposed to go into the promised land, into the land of Canaan, and they were to exterminate all of the inhabitants. All of them. All the men, all the women, all the children, all the old, all the young, all the animals, all the everything. Kill it all. All of it. Why? Why did God direct his people and command them to kill all of the inhabitants of the Canaanites? Well, because they were God's enemies. They hated God and they didn't serve God. God also understood that if his people went intermingled with the unbelievers, that it was going to be a corrupting influence to them. And so he says, you have to go and you have to wipe these people out. They have sinned and they are my enemies and you as my people, they're also your enemies. And so there is directive in the Old Testament. We could multiply the enemies of...

throughout the Old Testament. We could talk about Babylon, or we could talk about the Assyrians, or we could talk about the Philistines. We see that all through the Old Testament, they had enemies. The concept of an enemy was not a foreign concept to them. And that many times they were told as a nation, go, kill your enemies. Go, resist your enemies. Go, fight your enemies. And so you realize it's not that far of a stretch to go from fighting, killing, resisting, exterminating your enemies to... hate your enemies. So the concept is not lost in scripture. But Jesus here tells us that this is wrong, this idea of hating your enemy. In the next verse, he says, you shall love your enemies, right? Pharisees say, hate your enemies, but I say to you, love your enemies. And so we're left with this question, and it's a legitimate question, what did they get wrong? What was the error in what they were saying? These people came to us, they tried to kill us. If we don't

If we don't overcome them, they will overcome us. There is no peace here. They are our enemies and we are theirs. And so we're left scratching our head. How is it that the Pharisees were wrong for saying, hate your enemies? Well, first of all, it matters who these things are said to, okay? When we talked about in a previous passage where Jesus was talking about the saying, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. One of the things I observed you and tried to impress upon you was that that was a judicial statement, that that was not a personal statement. That was not saying, if someone hits you, you're free and clear to hit them back. It was rather a statement that says, if someone has harmed you, they are able to be punished up to that level by the appropriate authority. It was not a, you are allowed to seek retribution, but that they will be punished for their actions up to this level.

This too, if you think of all the things I mentioned about the conquest of Canaan or about the Philistines or the Babylonians or the Assyrians or any of the enemies of God, they were not personal enemies. They were corporate enemies. They were not enemies of an individual. They were enemies of a nation. And so that means that they were altogether the enemy, not individually the enemy. And so what was being said here, the misunderstanding or the abuse, is that they were taking an Old Testament reality that there are enemies, that our people have enemies, and it was being applied on a personal basis. You realize neighbor is personal, right? It carries with it a natural individual context. When we think of neighbors, we don't think of Canada. We think of the people that live next door to us, right?

And the problem here was that the Pharisees were taking this concept of enemy from the Old Testament that was not a neighbor next door sort of enemy, but a neighbor next across the river sort of enemy and making it personal. Saying that those people that live next to you, neighbors and enemies are not the same thing. That's what the Pharisees were saying. Whatever we're required to do to our neighbors, we are not required to do that for our enemies. They are a different class of people and they deserve different treatment. from us. We're to love our neighbors, but we're not to love our enemies. We're to hate them. And Jesus corrects that and says, no, no, that's wrong. And so this question of who my neighbor is, is a real question. In fact, it's a question that was asked to Jesus by a lawyer who was seeking to test him. A lawyer came up to Jesus and it says this in Luke chapter 10. It says there was a lawyer that was wanting, I'm paraphrasing here, wanted to come up and he wanted to test Jesus. And so he asked him, what do I have to do to inherit eternal life?

And Jesus asked him the same question. He asked the rich young ruler. He says, well, you've read the law. How does it read to you? And he says, well, it says that I'm supposed to, where the rich young ruler lists off some of the Ten Commandments, the lawyer says, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. And Jesus says, that's right, and that's good. Go and do that, and you'll inherit eternal life. And then the lawyer asks him this clarifying question, and that question is, who is my neighbor? If I have to do this thing, I want to know the boundaries and the definition of what you're telling me to do. Now, they're trying to catch Jesus in what he is saying, but it was a bad question. And so instead of Jesus saying, well, your neighbor is this person and that person, and they're related to you by blood, or they live within this boundary, or they agree with these theological beliefs, or they've never sinned against you, instead of all those things that we might think of in terms of neighbors, Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan.

There was a man on a road who was attacked by thieves and robbers, was beaten and left for dead, laying on the side of the road. And a priest walks by him, doesn't help him. Then comes along a Levite, doesn't help him. Then comes along a Samaritan. Now, that would have struck a nerve with the Jews. Because the Samaritans were enemies of the Jews. They were considered half-breeds. They didn't worship at Jerusalem. They had their own worship. They were kind of interested in the things of God, but they were not true, full-blooded Jews. And so there was a problem between the Jews and the Samaritans. They would go out of their way to avoid one another. They were enemies. That's how the lawyer or the Jews or whoever was listening at the time would have understood Samaritan. As soon as Jesus says, and then a Samaritan came by, and he stopped, and he helped the man, and he bound up his wounds, and he put him on his donkey, and he took him to the inn, and he fed him, and he paid for him, and he says, I'm going to come back in a few days. You take care of that guy, and whatever is owed for your service, I'll pay it to you when you get back. And so Jesus tells this story, and the priest, he ignored him. The Jewish priest, he ignored him. The Levite, the Jewish Levite, he ignored him. The Samaritan, he cared for him. And so Jesus asked the lawyer the question. He says, who was his neighbor?

And he says, well, the one, he didn't say the Samaritan. He said, the one who showed compassion. And Jesus says, that's right. Now go and do the same thing. And so in that parable of the good Samaritan, Jesus takes someone that they would have understood to be their enemy. And he says, that's your neighbor. Neighbor and enemy, personally, are not exclusive categories. Enemy is just one subset. of the type of neighbor you could have. You will have neighbors that you don't like and that don't like you. Sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not. But a neighbor and an enemy are not two mutually exclusive groups. An enemy is just a type of neighbor you could have. What other kind of neighbors could you have? Brothers? What other types of neighbors could you have? Friends? They're just different types of neighbors. And so the error of the Pharisees was that they took this idea of enemy corporate enemy, applied it personally and said, you don't have to love. In fact, you ought to hate people who are not your neighbors, who have this very definite boundary. The Jews at that time would have been committed to one another. They would have been committed to other Jews, to their nation, to Israel. But if you were from outside there, not only were you not a neighbor, you weren't even

an alien or a sojourner or a foreigner, you were an enemy. When you read in the Old Testament how the Jews are taught to interact with the sojourner in their land, if someone comes into your land, those instructions about how to interact with that person, is it ever kill them, ignore them, ostracize them, do harm to them? No, it's always welcome them, feed them, take care of them, teach them to do the things that you do. Bring them along. Say, if you're going to be here, then you have to do what we do. And if you're going to stick around long enough, you're going to actually have to get circumcised. You have to become one of us so that you're no longer an alien or a sojourner or an enemy, but a brother. The reason they needed that instruction was because of their natural inclination to resist or to push off or to reject anyone who wasn't like them. And so this is what Jesus is dealing with when he says,

You have heard that it was said, you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. This misunderstanding, this justification that we can take the people that we don't like, that we live around, and somehow be justified in hating them. Jesus says, no, no. There's no justification for you to hate even your enemy. Was it unnatural what the Pharisees did? Does it seem foreign or strange to you that they would have these impulses to not like other people? It's not foreign to me. There's plenty of people that I don't naturally click with, I don't naturally appreciate. And I know there's plenty of people who feel the same way about me. They say, hmm, hmm, don't like this thing or that thing about him or his family or his whatever. This is just part of living in a fallen world. You have people, you don't naturally have affection for other people and especially not those who are different than you.

And I would extend it further and say, especially those, even if they are similar to you, who've sinned against you. What does it take from someone to move from being a friend to being an enemy? Does the color of their skin have to change? Nope. Does your socioeconomic status have to change? No. All that has to happen is you have to spend enough time together to get sinned against and get angry about it. I think as Christians, we have this sort of thin facade of like, we're supposed to forgive the people who sin against us. and be gracious with them and sort of absorb that mistreatment. But every one of us has a limit, and the limit is not much beyond the beginning of being sinned against. We might make it, in a very important relationship like in a marriage, we might make it a few years of playing nice, but at some point the marriage is going to have a turbulence in it.

And that turbulence is going to be rooted largely in one or both of the spouses saying, I'm done acting like a Christian. I'm done being nice to people who are mean to me. You see this with siblings, don't you? They try, kind of, sometimes for a little while, and then they just get sick of it. And they decide that they don't have a brother but an enemy. So we do this, just like the Pharisees used to do this. The difference may be that we're not honest enough to call them our enemies. But our attitude and our treatment of them, even the people in our own house, really isn't any different than those that Jesus was speaking of. The Jews might have hated the Samaritans. They lived over there. Are we really so naive as to think that the Jews didn't hate one another? Do you know that their hatred for one another, Paul used it to save his own life one time? He knew that the Sadducees and the Pharisees had a big disagreement about the resurrection of the dead. And he's on trial and he's about to get killed.

And what does he do in the midst of this conflict as he's about to die? He says, I know these people hate each other. I'm going to play on it to save my life. And he stands up and he says something about the resurrection of the dead. And the Pharisees say, yeah. And the Sadducees say, no. And then they start fighting each other and he's off the hook for a time. And so you realize there's no demilitarized zone. There's no place where this idea of enemy isn't present. Even amongst our own people, even in our own homes, we have enemies at times. And any one of us could justify why our contempt of our neighbor, our brother, our spouse, our sibling, our child, our parent is our enemy. Why treat them that way? Because they like this. They did that. I'm tired of it. How many times? I know it says 70 times 7, but it's been way more. I haven't really been counting, but I know it's been way more.

I had someone say that to me in the last week. They're like, I'm tired of forgiving my spouse. I'm tired of it. I don't want to do it anymore. And did I look, did my jaw hit the floor and go, what do you mean? No, I went, yeah, I know that's how it is, isn't it? Do you think you're so easy to live with? That's what I said to him. Our natural impulse is to make enemies out of just about anybody. When we become bitter, when we get angry, when we become aggressive, when we make it our life's mission to find fault, with those around us, these are expressions of our hatred. They're not helpful. They're not justifiable. They're just the manifestations of our hatred, of those who've become our enemies. As much as we might say, no, no, no, that's not what's going on. I'm not angry because, you know, this is a righteous anger. This is a justifiable anger. I'm trying to help them. I don't buy it. I'm sorry. You're lying to yourself. And so I'm going to stand here and tell you so.

You're lying to yourself. And I don't want you to lie to yourself. When you get angry at somebody, when you become embittered, when the sight of them makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up, or you won't want to make eye contact, you ever had that? You get frustrated with somebody, you're all smiles and everything else, and then you see the person and you're like, hmm, you know? There's that thing, just that quick. You're like, I'm not going to look at them. That's hatred. That's the thing Jesus is condemning here. And yet we're justifying it. Well, they did this to ourselves or to anyone who saw us, you know, snarl our lip. So Jesus asked some questions later on in this passage. I'm going to skip over his instruction to his reasoning. He says, So, Tax collectors and Gentiles are given as the example of people who are capable of behaving like you are behaving. And to the Jews, both of those groups of people were repugnant. They were distasteful. They were not the kind of people that the Jews would have said, those are our brothers. They hated the tax collectors because the tax collectors were Jews that they felt were traitors because they had taken up work for the Roman government taxing their people.

And so to be a tax collector like Matthew the Apostle is to be hated by the Jews because you've taken up on the side of the enemy to oppress your brethren. Don't even the tax collectors, don't even those people you hate behave the way that I've just described? Or the Gentiles, the unbelievers, the people who are not the people of God, aren't they capable of being nice to the people who are nice to them? Aren't they capable of smiling at the people who smile at them or loving them? These attitudes of fault-finding, of hatred, of rejection of people, these are the markers of an unbeliever's life. That's what Jesus is saying. Even the unbelievers act like this. So how are you actually any different than them?

You remember when Jesus was arguing with the Pharisees and he says, we have Abraham as our father. And they are in essence saying, this is the difference. And he says, no, no. You are not Abraham's children. Your father is the devil. And it was so controversial because they're like, we are different. And he's like, no, look at your behavior. You're as bad as an unbeliever. You're going to hell. Made them angry because they thought they were special. And so here he argues, what's special about you when you act just like an unbeliever? What, tell me, is special and different about you when you do the exact same thing? By now, we should be seeing how common and how awful it is for us to hate those around us. It's how unbelievers behave. And it's nothing that Christians should do. And I don't say that to tie a heavy burden around your neck.

and to say, bad, bad, bad. I say it simply to acknowledge that Christians do behave this way. We all behave this way. None of us is perfect like we should be. If we could simply love our enemies, we would be perfect. At the very end of the passage when he says, therefore, you are to be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect, the thing he has in view is simply loving your enemies. If you could do this one thing well, You'd be just like God. We don't. And so in this regard, we're not like God. In this regard, we need to grow. It's very difficult. The directive is simple. The accomplishment of it is extraordinary. That we would love those who don't love us. That we would love those that we don't like. You know, sometimes we make these distinctions between loving and liking.

I've always been uncomfortable with it because I'm just like, man, it's just tense because the fact is there are people you don't like. Sometimes those people are in your house. Sometimes it's one of your siblings. Sometimes it's your spouse. Sometimes it comes and goes, and sometimes it's constant. You're just like, that person, every time, they just grate on me. I don't like them. Christians feel that way. And so you say, okay, well, I don't have to like them to love them. And I'm like, okay, well, I hope in the long run that we come to like the people that we love. Or maybe another way to say it is the best way to come to like somebody is to love them, to learn to love them, to learn to like them and appreciate them. But as I was preparing and as I was reading, I read Martin Lloyd-Jones on this passage, and he talks about this very thing. And he just says, you know what? I don't give a plug nickel if you don't like people. The Bible doesn't say anything about liking people. It talks about loving people. And the fact that you don't like them is no excuse for you not to love them. I'm paraphrasing. He said that over the course of a couple paragraphs. I found it helpful.

He said, I don't care if you like people. The Bible doesn't address that. Jesus commands you to love them. That's what you need to be about. And so I think this whole distinction of liking and loving or too much attention being given to it can be a distraction. It can be unhelpful. So I only bring it up to say, if there's someone you don't like, it's no excuse not to love them. And it may be, if you will love them, it may be the path towards you coming to like them. When we love our enemies, as opposed to hating them, In this, we become just like God. This is what he does and has done. Romans 5.10, it says, for if while we were enemies of God, right? For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his son, much more having been reconciled, we shall be saved by his life. And we can multiply examples of passages of scripture that talk about us being God's enemy, how we were opposed to him, how we were...

fighting and rebelling and digging in our heels and saying no when we should have been saying yes, not to one another, but to God, like Jonah. Which one of us hasn't been like Jonah at some point? I ain't gonna do it. I'm supposed to, I ain't gonna do it. You know, I think if we read the story of Jonah, we look at him and we say, you know, when that fish swallowed him up, it was good all the way around. It was good for those unbelievers on the ship. That was God's mercy to them. And it was good for Jonah because that's what he deserved. It is what he deserved. He deserved to have the big old fish swallow him and drag him down to the bottom and die in there. And we look at that and we're like, yep, that's what he deserves. The reason Jonah was down in the belly of the fish in the bottom of the sea is because he said, what about God? What did he know was true about his God? Why didn't he want to go preach to Nineveh? I knew that you were a merciful and forgiving God.

And I knew that if I went and told them that you were going to wipe them out, that they'd repent. I didn't want it. Until he got to the bottom of the fish, and then all of a sudden he wanted the mercy that he didn't want to give to them. And God was merciful both to Jonah and to Nineveh. And to you. While you were his enemy. And still, while you resist him as a Christian, because you're not what you will be one day. He's still merciful to you. And kind and patient. And so it really is awful when we behave like a tax collector or a Gentile, like an unbeliever. We're only loving toward those who love us. That list, I will tell you, that list, if that's how you operate, as you go through life, the list of people that you love will just get shorter and shorter and shorter. Because you will run out of people who haven't sinned against you or that you're willing to forgive. And you'll become bitter and alone. And so when we love our enemies, we become...

Like God, we do the very thing for others that he's done for us. We love, as John tells us, because he first loved us. And our love should take the same shape as his did, loving our enemies. Now we come to where Jesus says what we should do. He says, you know, it says, you've heard that it was said, you shall love your neighbors and hate your enemy, but I say to you, and here he says the difference. He says, but I say to you, do two things. Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. So here's a question. Should Christians have enemies? Tim says yes. But Tim is the kind of guy who likes to fight. If you know him, you know that's true. Do you like having enemies? No. None of us like having enemies. And I'm afraid that many of us have grown up in a church or in a culture that says that having people that don't like you is bad. And if you're a Christian, it's especially bad.

Actually, the definition of being a Christian is being thought well of by everyone. And that you have no one who's ever upset with you. And if you do, you have done wrong. Now, to be fair and honest, every one of us has people in our life that don't like us because of what we've done. And it wasn't the Christian thing we did. It was the unbelieving, it was the sinful thing we did. And then it was the sinful... hardness of heart, we wouldn't go repent of it. We have people who are upset at us who have, like, if they were to be able to say, this is why I'm upset at you, we'd be like, okay, yep, that makes sense why you'd be upset at me. Not that it's appropriate, but that it's understandable because we've sinned against them. But for Christians, we're not supposed to have enemies. We're supposed to placate anyone who's upset with us. We're supposed to accommodate their judgments and agree with them.

So how can you obey what Jesus tells you to do here, which is to love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, if you don't have any enemies? I mean, like enemies for good reasons, not enemies for bad reasons. If you have an enemy because you've sinned against them, if you've caused your brother to stumble, then what Jesus told us just earlier in this passage is, if your brother has something against you, stop what you're doing, go to him and repent and ask for forgiveness. So let's set aside the category of people who have a good reason to be upset with us, and let's talk about people who don't have a good reason to be upset with us, but are. What are you supposed to do with them? Well, in a word, you're not supposed to do with them what a tax collector or a Gentile would do, or an unbeliever. You're not supposed to say, fine, be that way, which is what we want to do. How many of us didn't want to go to holiday functions for this very reason? Fine, be that way. I don't want to be with you anyway.

Maybe no one stormed out in anger, but I bet many of us have been at family functions where there has been fireworks of a kind. And even because of someone being a Christian or being faithful, causing conflict by wondering about the truth or wondering if we shouldn't believe the truth and obey it as opposed to just kind of tip our hat to it while we do what we want. It's very difficult. nowadays, and I think uncommon for us to have enemies and to be okay with the fact that you have enemies, people that disapprove of you. If you're faithful to God, you will have people throughout your life, and sometimes people very close to you who hate you as a result of it, who don't want anything to do with you, who make it their mission to upset your life. So we're all going, well, how do I love that person? You tell me that I have to love that person.

We've acknowledged that we don't want to love that person. How do we do it? Well, I think first, Nicodemus, would you stop that? That's very distracting to me and probably other people. Thank you. I think we should start by answering the question of how to love our enemies by asking how God does it. Because our passage actually tells us. He causes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust. Meaning he extends mercy to people who don't deserve it. You can imagine if you had a Christian farmer and a wicked, unbelieving farmer's farms right next to each other, how extraordinary it would be if the rain fell on the one, and then when it went over here, just went away, and then the rain just all the soil. There's something instructive about in this. Some people, especially those who like theology, like to talk about common grace or natural revelation and how the interplay.

between those things and special revelation, how do people get saved? What can the unbeliever, how far can they get towards salvation from just observation of the world God's made? I think a better question is, what can Christians learn from common grace? What can we learn from God putting rain on our farm and our neighbor's farm, our enemy's farm? What we can learn is something about the kindness and the mercy of God and realize that we ought to be like that. Because our God is like that. That one day there will be a reckoning and the difference is between the righteous farmer and the unrighteous farmer will be accounted for. We won't be the judge personally, but there will be a reckoning. But until that time, God is merciful to both and we should be too. And so the first answer to the question about loving our enemies, well, how do I do it? What does it look like? The first answer is treat them like they're not your enemy.

Treat them like they're not your enemy. And you're like, but they are because they did this thing and they said that thing and they meant it and it hurt and they do it all the time. And it's just, you know, the answer of how to love your enemy is to set all that true as it may be, set it off to the side and ignore it and deal with them as though none of that had happened. And you think, well, that's not very discerning. That's foolish. It seems like we might get taken advantage of if we behave like that. And I go. But God does cause the rain to fall equally on both farms, right? For a time. Is God being taken advantage of through doing it like that? Some people might perceive it as so. And maybe it's true for a time. But in the end, when all the things that really matter come to bear, the answer will be no. God was merciful in his holding back his judgments.

was his kindness to them for a time. And it was their call to repentance. You should think that wicked farmer at some point should go out there and he should work in his field and he should look over at the guy he knows next door who's farming his field but who loves God and he should say, I'm plowing the same and I'm planting the same and we're harvesting the same. What is the difference between the two of us? Because his marriage is good or he's kind to people, he's appreciated in the community, but me, I'm just this... This outcast, this grump, this curmudgeon. What's the difference between the two of us? The difference is that man loves God and you don't. And if you don't respond to the kindness of God in giving both of you reign for now, if you don't repent and go over and ask that guy, hey, what in the world? At some point, the opportunity will expire. Now, the unbeliever is not going to draw those conclusions because those are spiritual conclusions.

He presumes that he deserves the reign as much as anyone else, and he's got justifications for all of his actions. Wicked and wrong as they might be in God's sight, he has them. He won't conclude what I just said. But a Christian will, or should, and as a result of that conclusion should love his neighbor, his enemy, his neighbor. Martin Lloyd-Jones said about this on this point, he said, God is entirely detached from the actions of men. And what he meant was not that he's far off and disinterested, doesn't care or weak. What he meant was God's disposition toward us and toward his creation is not affected at all by the behavior of men. He's entirely detached from it. And that's true of the Christian and the non-Christian. He doesn't love the Christian because they're good people. And he doesn't hate the unbeliever because they're bad people.

He set his affection on some, and he's withheld it from others, and he's determined how to love each of them until the end. And what they do or don't do has no bearing on it. His love is ignorant of, deaf to their behavior. That's how you love your enemies. And you realize, well, then I'm just going to be taken advantage of, and I'm never going to be able to Get my revenge and get my, you know, tell them what they did wrong. And I'm never going to be helpful to them. Depends on what we understand to be love. If we understand Christian love to be the sort of Christian love that is generally in vogue right now, then you're probably right. Because generally, we don't tell anyone we love things they don't want to hear. Because that's not considered to be loving. But it is a Christian thing to do, to tell people.

with love and with kindness and with humility, taking the log out of our own eye first. It is loving to tell somebody what the differences are and who God is. That actually is loving to do. But I think too often we look at the prospect of going to somebody who doesn't know God and speaking to them about God as being an adversarial, difficult, tense thing. And sometimes it is. Oftentimes it is. But what we have to learn is how often we're the ones who make it that way. We should learn and ask God to help us learn how not to make it that way. So much as it depends on us, we should live at peace with all men, including our enemies. And we should speak the truth to them. Now, you might be saying, okay, well, I don't like that answer. Tell me what the next one is on your list of how to love my enemies. And I'd say, what I just told you is going to take you the rest of your life. It's going to take me the rest of my life. I'm so hateful toward people.

And it takes so little for them to just drive me nuts, for me to think that they just don't deserve to have any rain fall on their land. Not from God and certainly not from me. That when we can honestly come back and say, I have truly done this, we'll get our next marching order. But the truth of the matter is that we'll spend the rest of our lives trying to do this thing, to love our enemies. How many of you haven't taken someone you've been upset about, felt like, ah, I need to not treat them that way? Maybe you're driving home from work. Maybe you're anticipating your spouse coming home from work. Maybe you're going to get out of school and you're going to go home and deal with your parents or your children. You think, I'm going to try. And really what we're saying is I'm going to try to love my enemy. They've really bugged me, so I'm going to try. How long does that last? How much strength is there in you for that effort? Are we counting it in weeks?

Are we counting it in days? Maybe if they're playing their part, maybe. Are we counting it in hours? How much strength do you have? Can you tolerate it for hours? Probably minutes. Certainly minutes some of the time. You come home with the best intentions of being nice to the person that doesn't deserve our kindness, and within minutes, we're like, nope, you don't get any more niceness. You spent all of it real quick, you know? You took it and you put it all out there and you pulled the lever and you lost. So now I'm going to tell you what I really think. That's how much strength we have to do it. How long has God borne with you and been merciful to you and been patient with you and withheld his judgment from you? Your whole life. And he'll continue to do it for the rest of your life. And that should be our aim. So I don't have another way for you to love your enemies other than to say,

Treat them like they're not your enemies. Stop caring about yourself and how inconvenient they are to you, how much work they make for you, how frustrating they are to you, how expensive their stupidity is to you. Whatever it is that you do with them, once you've forgotten all of that and your only concern is their good and how you can contribute to it, there's not another step to move on to. The only other thing God tells us here, he says, love your enemies and do what else? Pray for them. Pray for them. It's about the last thing you want to do for someone you're mad at, isn't it? Take your relationship with them. Because you realize, you realize if you pray for your enemies and you're a Christian, that you have some, the Holy Spirit somewhere inside of you is being like, it's not all their fault. Like as much as your words might say, it's all your fault. You know somewhere, once you calm down a little bit, it's not all their fault. Like you did do the thing.

And then God, so Jesus says, go and pray for them. And you're like, okay, so now in prayer, I have to sort out what I've contributed. And I might have to go to them and I might have to tell them, I'm sorry for what I did. So we just don't want to pray. Pray for those who persecute you. Pray for your enemies, love them. Don't think about it. I think this is what I would say to you as a pastor. Stop thinking about it and just do it. Just do it. Just pray for them. Pray for yourself. Pray for the relationship. Pray for resolution. And do things that are loving. Love is practical. Love's not a feeling, guys. Do things that are loving. Right now, today, not once they earned it, not once you've calmed down, just do it. That's how Christians ought to live. That's how we ought to live. God doesn't look at us and say, oh, I had all these blessings I was gonna give to you, but you put those back in my pocket until you do a little better. Thank God for that, amen.

Like, have you not had God be merciful to you and you'd be like, I don't deserve this kindness. I've been awful. Have you not had your spouse be gracious to you when you know you don't deserve it? You're like, I've been baking the recipe for conflict and here they are being sweet. Just being Christians. Love your enemies and pray for them. If you'll do this, this is the closest you'll come in this life to being perfect as your heavenly father is perfect. This is our highest calling. It's a very costly one. But it's a Christian one. And therefore, it's something that you and I should be striving for throughout our whole lives. It's easy to keep a record of the things people have done wrong. But it's ungodly. Love those who are hard on you. Love those who mistreat you. But they mistreated me. Sure they did. I know. Love them anyway. This is what Jesus is saying. He's removing our disposition to hate those who've been...

mean or nasty or rude or whatever to us and saying, do what I do. Do what I'm doing for you. Love them. Stop worrying about how they treated you. If Jesus had worried about how he was treated, where would we be? Even as he's dying on the cross, naked and bleeding and with spikes through his body. Father, forgive them for they know not what they do. When you see Stephen being stoned and Paul standing there holding the cloaks, what's Stephen cry out? The same thing Jesus said. And we're like, oh, well, that's too high of a calling. And I say, no, Stephen wasn't any different than you. Be like Stephen because he was like Jesus. He was perfect in that moment. Like his heavenly father was perfect. And that's what we ought to aspire to and not make excuses for anything less than that. Let's pray.