Good morning to you. My name is Brian. It is my joy and privilege to be an assistant pastor here at Grace, and I'm also a teacher at the school. So it's sort of bivocational. I'm 99% sure it's not double dipping. And there's nothing more exciting than knowing that when you preach, you're going to get to compete with the smell of food. And so please do, please do join us afterwards for the pot providence. It's going to be good. Now this is not a themed sermon. I think last year I preached the same service where we honored teachers and I preached sort of a themed sermon about teaching in particular. I decided not to do that this year. Not because I don't like teachers. I am one. I generally like most of you. But this is not a theme sermon. We've been in the middle of a series on Matthew, and we've finally come, it feels like finally, come to the end of chapter 5, and I really, really wanted to finish it. So, we're at the end of chapter 5, we're at the conclusion of Jesus' explanation of the law. And so the reason why I told you all that is to tell you that I didn't select the text, Love Your Enemies, for teachers. I didn't know if that'd be sending the best message. But after Chapter 5, Chapter 6 is going to move into teaching that's less about specific laws, as we've seen here, and more about sort of day-to-day life in the Kingdom of God. He's going to talk about prayer and fasting and money and anxiety. But here, just in this last part of chapter 5, Jesus is finishing the section that he began at verse 17, when he said that he came not to destroy the law or the prophets, but to fulfill them. And in verse 20, when he said that we must have a righteousness that exceeds that of scribes and Pharisees to enter the Kingdom. Now I do want to address very quickly, there is a textual variant in Greek manuscripts at verse 44. So what Robbie read might be slightly different from what some of you have if you're not reading from a King James Version or a New King James Version. The New King James Version at verse 44 reads, Love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you. That's in, hear me carefully, that's in the majority of manuscripts, what I just read to you, of the New Testament, but not the earliest ones. You see the distinction? It's in most of them, but not the earliest ones. In the earliest ones, we have the shorter reading, but I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. The longer reading is not in any of our earliest manuscripts of Matthew. It's also not found in letters and writings of early church fathers. And so there's some disagreement about whether it's better to take the majority reading or the earliest reading. I tend to tilt toward earliest readings. Other people tend to prefer what's called the majority text. So how did the variant get there? Well, most likely it was copied from Luke. The parallel text in Luke 6 is very, very similar to the longer reading. Why am I telling you all this? I'm telling you so that somebody doesn't go Da Vinci code on me and think somebody removed the verses. They took them out. No, nobody took them out. And if somebody was trying to take them out, they did a really crummy job because it's right over there in Luke 6. But whether you preach from it or you don't, the difference is not that great. The core teaching is still there, love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you. A command that is not hard, it's not even difficult actually, it's impossible. Apart from the work of Jesus in your heart and mine. So where did this teaching come from? Verse 43, you've heard it said, you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. Where is that from? Search the Old Testament all you want, you ain't gonna find it. So your guess is as good as mine as to where it comes from. We've seen this before though, how the Pharisees would add their own teaching to a law in the guise of an interpretation in order to lighten it. So how exactly did they hatch this one? How did they get away with this idea that you can love your neighbor but hate your enemy? Well, I want to show you an illustration here, using the screen. It's similar to something they had done with previous portions of the law that Jesus had quoted so far. It started with a question of emphasis, all right? All about the question of emphasis. And parents and teachers will know that you emphasize certain words for very specific reasons. Love your neighbor is originally from Leviticus 19. Okay, and I think most of you probably know what follows is love your neighbor as yourself. When Jesus said that he was quoting Leviticus. And we can assume from the text the emphasis is on the word love. I mean the whole bit in Leviticus there is about love. Let me read it to you. Starts in verse 17, you shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason frankly with your neighbor, lest you incur sin because of him. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am Yahweh, I am the Lord." And so you can already hear overtones there, you shall not hate your brother, you should not bear a grudge against the sons of your own people. What the Pharisees did with this was they said, this is not a command to love your neighbor, it's a command to love your neighbor. You see? So you can love your neighbor, and as long as you do that, it's okay if you hate everyone else. The emphasis of the text, though, is on love. Now, this is a really scary thing, though, because this is actually using the context to twist the text. The emphasis is on sacrificial love. The command is to love your neighbor, but the Pharisees had twisted it. They said, well, you know, it says you should not hate your brother in your heart, reason with your neighbor, and so rather than put the emphasis on love, they said, no, no, you can, as long as you're loving your Israelite, your Jewish brother, you can hate everybody else. And this is a reminder, I think, that one of Jesus' greatest acts of love was to correct bad interpretation. It's an act of love because bad interpretation of scripture leads us away from the God who inspired it. And it tends to legitimize our prejudice, or our laziness, or our selfishness. And it is so tempting. British theologian John Stott said, when he was writing about love your neighbor, hate your enemy, he said, the reasoning was rational enough to convince those who wanted to be convinced. It's a good reminder that we all have that kind of cognitive bias. We all read texts of scripture through our backgrounds, through our upbringing, and often through our pain. And so even though the text in Leviticus says, love your neighbor as yourself, that's where the emphasis is, in the same way you love yourself, they had put the emphasis on the word neighbor, saying that as long as you love your neighbor, you can hate your enemy. That's why, by the way, in Luke's Gospel, when the lawyer comes up to Jesus and says, and who is my neighbor, becomes a really important question. Story of the Good Samaritan. So how do we do this though? How do we love our enemies? How do we love our enemies? How do we pray for someone who's persecuting us? Jesus gives the answer in the very next verse. If you'll look there with me. Love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you. Go down to verse 45. That you may be sons of your Father in heaven. There's the reason right there. Be living this way so that you can be sons of your Father in heaven. In other words, loving our enemies is how we imitate the Father's love. And so how do I know that we can love our enemies? I've got three, I think at least three things, at least three ways we can see it this morning. First, because our Father is good. That's why we can love our enemies. Second, because our Father is loving. And third, because our Father is perfect. I think that's what Jesus lays out here in this text. So the first one, because our Father is good. that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. For, this is why, He makes His Son rise on the evil and on the good, sins reign on the just and the unjust. Jesus is acknowledging here that God has enemies. He's acknowledging in the text that you and I have enemies. It's not a sin to have enemies. There are people in the world who are enemies of God, pursuing evil things, hating God, hating His ways, loving their sin, loving their idols more than anything else. And what does God do with those people? Jesus says, they get a sunrise, just like everybody else. They get rain, just like Christians do. Now, I mean, given what's happened for the past day or two, that doesn't feel like a blessing, I know. In that culture, though, you live very close to the land. No rain means no food. No food means you die. And so Jesus is saying, yes, there are evil people in the world. God sees them. And he gives them his sunrise. Anyway. He gives them his rain. Anyway. Have you ever thought about that? We say things in Christian circles, quoting from the Psalms, this is the day the Lord has made. We will finish it. Rejoice and be glad in it. Yes, part of the wonder of what Jesus is saying here is that it's entirely appropriate for us to say, this is the day the Lord has made. Can you believe it? Can you believe it that for one more day, He has blessed our wicked city by allowing paradise to rise on us in the East? Can you believe He didn't wipe us out in our sleep last night? He would be just to do so. Why didn't He? Because He's good. So good, so patient, so forbearing, so merciful, so long-suffering that sometimes His people wonder if He sees the evil going on in the world. You see this in the Psalms. But have you ever thought about that? The fact that God's people, from the psalmist to our culture today, say, where is God when there's pain? Especially when there's abuse, when pain is being inflicted on somebody by someone else. A lot of psalms are dedicated to that very question. God, where are you? Don't you see what's going on? Can't you stop it? And while answers to that question could be an entire sermon series, for this morning I want to say, it does give us a picture of God's mercy. That our God who created all things, sustains all things, all things are upheld by the Word of His power, and He preserves the life, the heartbeat of sinful rebels who spit in His face and shake their fist at the sky. And until I come to terms with the twisted darkness in my own heart, I will never be amazed by the cross. I'll always wonder if it's really kind of worth all the fuss. Okay, I get it. This is the human condition though. Jesus says in verse 48, be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect. We're going to get there. But nobody ever claims to be perfect, right? I mean, saint or sinner, priest or publican, nobody's going to claim to be perfect. In our culture, even, I mean, you always hear that line repeated, well, nobody's perfect. Well, I'm not perfect, but who's ready to say, I'm not perfect, I'm the opposite of perfect, I'm hellbound and hell-deserving. Big difference. I'm hell-bound, hell-deserving. I lack the language to fully express how utterly amazed I am that God would rescue a wretch like me. I stand amazed at the God who doesn't strike me down when I sin. He would be just to do so. Instead, He gives sunshine. Such is His abundant, extravagant, seemingly indiscriminate love. And so when Jesus makes this statement in verse 45, He's beginning to answer the question, what does it mean to love your enemy? He's already given the primary answer, so you can be sons of your Father in heaven. What does that look like? Well, our Father is good. And so, it looks like that kind of goodness poured out indiscriminately on the person who deserves A break in life on the person who's been kind and on the person who deserves to be punched in the face. Be like your Father who pours out blessing on the just and unjust. That doesn't mean you have to like them. Truly. And it doesn't mean you have to like what they are doing. But it does mean that part of imitating the goodness of our Father, being sons of our Father in Heaven, is setting aside all of the very good reasons we have to withhold love. So he continues the same idea, verse 46 and 47. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even tax collectors do the same? And if you greet your brethren only, What do you do more than others? Do not even the tax collectors do so? So, what does love to our enemy look like? It's going to look like our Father's goodness, and the second point now, it's going to look like our Father's love. That is, not only does He send His blessing on the just and the unjust, I mean, I think, we could probably conceive of how you might do nice things for people even while you hate their guts, right? But make a comparison here. He says, if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even tax collectors do the same. Now, tax collectors as a group of people have never really been particularly popular. Then or now, right? It was especially true then because Jews were living under Roman occupation. Tax collectors could come knocking on your door and maybe the tax was, I mean, let's just say $50. And they said it was $100. I mean, they get to your door and they say $100. Why would they do that? Well, so they can pocket the extra money, of course. And so it was the tax collectors who were the instruments of Roman oppression, and they could make it worse to line their own pockets. And sometimes one of your fellow Jews would take the job. A traitor. Tax collectors were banned from entering the temple. This was serious business. And so, Jesus says, you love those who love you, big deal. The lowest scumbag you can think of manages to do that without a problem. Even presidential candidates have friends. So the point is that Jesus has called His people to live in a new kingdom. And our lives ought to look different. He is the one who calls us to prize our holiness, remember, above our right eye and our right arm. The one who calls us to offer the other cheek when we're struck. To walk the extra mile. Why? Because that's how our Father loves. If our Father only loved those who loved Him, we'd all be dead. We'd all be dead. And so you see, this is a love that lets go of the paradigm of retaliation and recompense. Retaliation is gone. That was last week's sermon. Turn the other cheek. And recompense is gone. This arrangement whereby we constantly owe each other for good deeds done. Did you know Jesus wants to build a community right here of people who are doing good to each other without any concern for who owes whom for what's been done. Why don't we care about that? We'll look at what Jesus says in verse 46. What reward have you? We're in this for something so much bigger than an I-scratch-your-back-you-scratch-mine kind of arrangement. If you do something good for someone and they say, hey, you know what? I owe you. You should get mad at them a little. Tell them I'm working for a heavenly reward, a heavenly treasure. I will not let you steal it. by putting yourself in my debt. Let me try to bring this down to talk about how it plays out in day-to-day life. The text actually has to do... Pray for your persecutors. I'm going to leave you to draw those conclusions. We're not in an age where that text, in terms of obvious outright persecution, is easy to apply. At least, I don't think we're there yet. But, here's what's true. I'm going to reason from the greater to the lesser. If that's true, then certainly the lesser things underneath it are true. I think we all know this scenario pretty well. All right? Come back here for a second. What makes you angry? I mean, just think for a minute. What makes you angry? Because we've all got buttons that people push that make us angry. Maybe for you, it's when somebody spouts off, let's say, political nonsense. Somebody says something fundamentally opposed to everything you believe. Gets you really angry. And so you kind of hope that they get like, I don't know, victimized by the very policies they're sticking up for. And then you can say, yeah, how's that working out for you? Or maybe it's stuff done by complete strangers that irritates you. You're in Compton Park and somebody just tosses their Gatorade bottle in the grass. Oh boy. I mean, is there any better exposition on the depravity of man than shameless littering? Or maybe it's good old-fashioned road rage. That idiot, that low-life scumbag, that, you know, words I can't say in church, he cut me off. Whatever it is that really irritates you, really makes you angry, Here's the tendency. Here's the whole point of putting out the stupid pictures and talking about this. We have a tendency to kind of have a category in our mind for the sort of people who do these sorts of things. We set up this little fenced-in area of our mind where that's where we're going to kind of put. And that is what justifies me in getting really, really mad. Because, oh, it's one of those again. And meanwhile, of course, we're on the outside. We're never the ones who do that sort of thing. Now, I know what you're expecting me to say at this point. You're expecting me to say, but really, we're all inside the circle of miserable, wretched, selfish idiots. And that's true. I'm not saying that isn't true, but I don't think it goes far enough. Because to some extent, look, there is, to some extent, a real division going on. between the Christian and the world. There is a sense in which we are really and truly living in a different sphere of life. Okay? However you want to sort of understand that. But we really are living in a different sphere of life. It's called the Kingdom of God. The problem comes in when you and I decide that people who behave in a certain way, people who do things that really set us off, they're less worthy of our love, less worthy of our kindness. I cannot be the only teacher who struggles with this. Jesus wants to utterly wreck this tendency in your heart and mine. To view other people as distant from us because they're in that group or whatever. And instead, to transform the way we view other people. To say, wait, it's not that kind of person. What I'm looking at, what I'm observing, what I'm viewing, what I'm seeing, are people broken by sin. Whatever is going on in their life and however it's expressed in their actions and their words, that's what I am seeing. Broken sinners in a broken world. How does our Father react to broken sinners? He forgives them. He loves them. In Luke chapter 19, Jesus is going up to Jerusalem to face His death. And when he sees the city, he stops and he weeps over it. Even as he speaks in the next couple of verses of a judgment to come, he weeps. Henry Light, a 19th century Scottish hymn writer, he wrote a hymn that perfectly captures this idea. It's actually one that Matthew Smith has recorded. He sang it while he was here. I'm only going to read you the first line. It's one of those hymns that absolutely levels you with the first line. Did Christ over sinners weep, and shall our cheeks be dry? See, it's not enough to stop here. If we stop here, we're only going as far as we did last week, recognizing that people are messed up. The negative command, don't react. Yes, see them as broken sinners, but then you move forward and you serve them. Confound them with your kindness. Follow after your Savior who took one look at a wicked city and He wept. And because He did that, we will not presume that our cheeks will remain dry, but that we will love relentlessly and pray for those who persecute us. And so our Father is good, our Father is loving, and finally, our Father is perfect. Look at verse 48. Jesus says, Therefore you shall be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect. Oh, I'm sorry. I skipped ahead. I apologize. Sorry. Verse 47. You greet your brethren only. What do you do more than others? Do not even the tax collectors do so. Notice how he just moved from loving people to greeting people. What's that about? I just want to make a quick comment about that. I mean, do you really mean to say this kind of neighbor love goes down to the depths of, like, when I say hi to people? I just want to mention real quick, some commentators have thought that Jesus is making a reference to the common Jewish greeting, which is Shalom, which means peace. And so he's saying, as it were, that when you pass the peace to people, I mean, really think about what you're doing. And that's legit, I think. But I also think that what's happening here is Jesus is saying, when we're talking about loving your enemy, we're talking about your actions, verse 46, and your words, verse 47. what you do and what you say. So this concept of loving our enemies, in other words, wraps up all that we do, all of our interactions with co-workers, with bosses, with family, with friends, with strangers. If you're a teacher, with children and with adults that act like children, this encompasses everything. All of our lives and all of our interaction with people, that we freely give our love, our service, our prayer, our compassion to people who do not deserve it by any earthly measure. Because it's a call to leave those systems of measurement behind. To figure out whether or not they deserve it. But how on earth do we do that? This is how. Verse 48, Therefore you shall be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect. What do we do with that? because I'm sure many of you are thinking or perhaps hoping that I'm about to do something like super cool with Greek and show you that it doesn't actually mean perfect. Yeah, I got nothing. No, I'm actually lying. I have one thing to say about the Greek term that's used here for perfect, but I also want to quickly add that Jesus's entire reason for speaking about this whole issue is that a group of religious teachers was telling people that the Bible didn't really mean what it said it meant. And woe to me if I get up here and do that with the words of Jesus. Alright? The statement lands with a weight when you hear it, and it's supposed to. It's a reminder of who we are called to be. It's a reminder of the one with whom we are dealing. There is no sin in the presence of God. And that means, apart from the blood of Jesus, no presence of God for you and me. The cross showed us both the depth of God's love and the depth of my sin. And so Jesus is saying here, this is the standard of life in God's kingdom. It couldn't be anything else if it's God we're dealing with. And at the same time that the text is a command, I do think it's also a promise. That is, you will be perfect because your Father in heaven always finishes what He starts. Perfect in this life? Certainly not. But this is your new pattern of life that you're never content with your sin. That you are never content to categorize that person over there as unworthy of love. Because you're a child of the one who loved you. when you were beyond hope. He loved you before you loved Him. But as soon as you make that decision and say, well, that person over there is really unreachable, they're really an impossible case, you forget that you were an impossible case before the grace of God came in. There are no hard cases, only impossible cases where God moves. That's it. There's no other category. And so if your father loved you when you were lost and without hope, then you love the lost and hopeless. We must love the lost and hopeless. We must pray for the hurting. We must not just feed the hungry, but feed the hateful. Feed the rebels. Feed the Republicans. Feed the Democrats. Feed the Bernie Sanders supporters. Feed your enemies. Pray for those who hate you. Pray for those who are against you. This is how we change the world. The Kingdom of God will prevail. The Kingdom will advance because of this kind of love. There's a lot of talk in Christian circles, there has been for a number of years, about the concept of being separate. It's often applied in a cultural context. Paul's words in 2 Corinthians 6, "...come out from them and be ye separate." Okay, so we have to be separate from society. Let me make something perfectly clear. You can wear special dresses, you can wear special suits, you can wear special underwear, you can abstain from coffee, you can abstain from alcohol or carbonated drinks, you can cut your hair high and tight, or you can let it grow to the floor, but we will not be separate until we start loving our enemies. Praying for those who hate us. Until we're there, we've not obeyed one step in the command to be separate. This is the primary way God intends for us to be separate from the world. That we love people, love all people, when loving all people looks like insanity at best and death at worst. Persecutors, you caught that. And in the moments when we're doing that, we will be making visible, the sin-conquering, steadfast love of our Father. Because the rest of the story on the word perfect, alright, here it is, it can also mean complete. It's from the same root, it shares a root with the word that Jesus used on the cross when he said, The word finished and the word perfect here both have the same root in Greek. And so I think we can get closer to what Jesus is saying if we realize that for the last 30 verses in this chapter, Jesus has been explaining what it means that He's come to fulfill the Law. He's come to complete our understanding of it. He's come to complete its true purpose. And when we arrive here at verse 48, Jesus says, I'm telling you all of this, the last 30 verses, Because I'm coming to complete you too. I'm coming to make you into the person you were always meant to be. You're meant to be a child of your Father in Heaven. You're meant to love like He does. Freely and joyfully and extravagantly and fearlessly without the need to keep a record so that you can make sure that you get your due. The revised English Bible actually translates verse 48, There shall be no limit to your goodness, just as your Father's goodness is limitless. That's pretty close. But there's a problem. You live in a broken world and so do I. Things are not how they should be. And God says my very own creations made in my image are an all-out rebellion. And so that means as long as you live here, as long as you're Wrestling with this dual citizenship, earth and heaven. Imitating the love of your Father is going to mean loving your enemies. Because that's where you are. It's okay to have enemies, otherwise Jesus wouldn't have commanded you to love them. That's a natural result of the Gospel. If you can't think of anyone in your life who is in some sense opposed to the new person you are in Christ, you have cause to wonder if you're a new person in Christ. Because this kind of love sets you apart. Makes you weird. It's going to mean blessing those who persecute you. It's going to mean leaving people dumbfounded by the seemingly careless extravagance with which you love. Because that's the kind of love the Father's lavished on you. He loved us first when we were His enemies. He didn't love us because there was anything good in us. He loved us because, wait for it, because He loved us. That's it. Not because we find our enemy's activities good, do we love them, but because Jesus is keeping His promise to make us like Him. To make us sons of our Father, who love without a system of reward or recompense, but because, because we serve a God who rescues rebels like us. Let's pray. Father, how much we need this love in our own hearts that we might give it to others. How much we want to see this kind of love in the world by the power of Your Spirit. How aware we are that we don't love this way. Our need is great, and praise God, our Savior is greater. There is grace for this too, so I ask that you would draw near to us and teach us how to love. Let us love fearlessly, that you might be seen. that people might look at us and see you, because it is the kind of love that in worldly terms doesn't make sense. Grant that this would be true in our relationships to strangers, in our family, with our friends, with all we meet. Grant that you would be seen. Grant us opportunities to share your love and your gospel with those around us. We ask these things in your name and for your glory. Amen.