Good morning. We are in the Sermon on the Mount. If you're new with us, we've been walking through the Gospel of Matthew and we're coming to the sixth and last you have heard it said statement. As we come to the conclusion of this particular section, I just want to remind us of where we are in Matthew. Jesus has called his disciples, they are the primary audience, the crowds are there. It's significant to remember our king is teaching us how to live as citizens of his kingdom, how to live in this world, how to be obedient to him and to know what he expects of us. The crowds are there, they're hearing these things, but this is primarily for those who know Christ as their savior, those who would believe in him. It's interesting, we look at the different laws, he is, he's not correcting the Old Testament, he's correcting a misunderstanding or a misinterpretation of it. He sometimes cites a command, he sometimes cites a misstated command or a misinterpreted command, but we, he began with You've heard it said that you shall not commit murder, but it's even your anger and your insults that make you culpable. He's correcting how we treat others as if enemies, as if we hate them. It ends with loving those who hate us. Think about just the completion of all of life. God has given us all we need to live, to understand what his goodness is, what he expects of us. One of the most significant things I wanna draw your attention to is how he begins this section of six. Notice verse 16. I'm sorry, not verse 16, verse 20. Your righteousness must exceed that of the scribes and the Pharisees. Then verse 48, you therefore must be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect. That's the book ending. They're tied well with the first and the last here, but we must have a righteousness that exceeds the Pharisees. That at least means it must be internal and external, not merely external. But the one he ends with, which is clearly tied much more to this love your enemy, it wraps up the whole thing. Be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect. We're called to be like our heavenly father. We're called to be sons of God. This morning, we're going to look at one of the more significant commands of Christ that are unique for Christians, unique for Christianity. We're to love our enemy and our neighbor as sons of God. We're to follow the pattern of God our Father who loves even his enemies. As we look at this text, we're gonna focus on three things, who we love, why we love, and how we love. We're asking three questions of our text. Our text gives us three answers, who, why, and how. First, we look at the who. That's just verse 43. Jesus says, you have heard that it was said, you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. This last command, he's stating a clear command in scripture, love your neighbor, and I believe he's quoting what the Pharisees would say as well, but there is no command to hate your enemy in all of scripture. Love your neighbor comes in Leviticus 19. A section that is making it clear that with a rehearsed and repeated, I am the Lord Yahweh with every command to make it clear, because you are my people, you are to live a certain way. As citizens of Israel, they are to love their neighbor. That would be fellow Israelites. The Old Testament also makes it clear that includes the alien and the sojourner who were with them and among them, the God-fearing Gentiles. The reason God says love your neighbor, those who are next to you, those who are with you, is that there's too much of a temptation for us to figure out how to disregard certain people and not love them, even though they are our neighbors. The Parable of the Good Samaritan is a popular parable that we all have heard. It's saying in parable form what Jesus is teaching here. Be careful of the loopholes we make to find ways to say I'm not going to love that person because of this reason or that problem. A big question, who is my neighbor? The pressing question for us, who is the neighbor I want to not love? Who's the neighbor I find it too easy to come up with excuses not to love them? This instruction is challenging our tendency toward loopholes. A neighbor love. Love your neighbor as yourself is what Jesus will say is one of the two great commandments. Your neighbor is a person next to you, beside you, near you. So all you gotta do is look this way and that way and you start seeing who your neighbors are. Those who are near you. You're supposed to love them as yourself because you're same same. You're both made in the image of God. You both have the same dignity, worth, and value. We love our neighbor as God has declared us to because of who he is and how he made us the same. The neighbor we really want to think about is the one who is nearest to you. We live in a world that's strange in that we know it's happening all over the world all the time because of our technology and communication. And I think a danger for us is it's too easy to think I'm going to love abstractly a people way out there that I know about, but not love concretely the people who are actually next to us. It's too easy for us to think I'm going to put compassion on and I'm going to show kindness, I'm going to love way out there in a way that doesn't demand much of you, rather than focusing in right here and loving those who are nearest to us. It's too easy to have a heart full of empathy for an abstract people everywhere. And let's be honest, it is hard to love real people right next to us that might not always be so easy to love. Jesus has these two commandments of who? Your neighbor and your enemy. And I don't believe he's correcting them in the way they love their neighbor. It seems as if this culture would have had a strong emphasis on loving your neighbor. It would have included hospitality. welcoming people into your life, welcoming people into your home, providing for those you know have needs, providing for those that you know and love and care for, who you embrace as your neighbor, partnering together for some big project, building a barn together. I appreciate this past weekend, my neighborhood, Folks who lived in a different section that didn't have trees down came to our section to cut down the tree or cut up the trees that were blocking the road. That was very neighborly. Those trees weren't blocking them, but they were blocking other neighbors. That's an example of what it means to love your neighbor. The first rule when you want to think about who your neighbor is, it's those near you. We must think about the concrete, real people who are next to you, near you, in location. The second rule I want to put forth is your covenant relationships, those who you've made certain promises to, those who you're bound to, not just because of location, but because of covenant, a marriage, a family, a church. If we think about the love commandments, love your neighbor as yourself, we'll love one another as believers, as Christ loved you. I believe that second command is greater than the first. There's a covenant nearness we must think about. We think about those two rules together, the family and the church should really order our lives as priorities. There's another rule. Those who are in the greatest need. Thinking of the widow and the orphan. I give you these different ways in which God has commanded our love, our neighbor, which includes our enemy, Our covenant membership and church relationships and other Christians, nearness and farther, you want to talk about in concentric circles, but also those who are in need, we all tend to dismiss one of those commandments for the others. Augustine says a wise life is one where the loves are properly ordered. Well, we all need to recognize we all have some tendency to dismiss some group of people for some reason. Lesson with you about love your neighbor. Now, the real emphasis is that you are to love your enemies. But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. The command, the, the, what he says is you've heard said, love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But he says, no, you love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. He's got to be more clear that he's contradicting what the Pharisees have taught, what these people would have believed. Again, there is no commandment to love your enemies, but we kind of almost appreciate how they would assume this from other texts. God does send Israel in to destroy a people who hate him and are treating each other in a completely horrible way. They're full of idolatry and hatred towards one another. But there is no command to hate enemies. There are commands to go to war with them and remove them from the land because they're polluting it. There are prayers called the imprecatory prayers where you're praying for justice that God would destroy his enemies. And even Psalm 139, the prophet there says, I hate your enemies in the same way you hate your enemies. How are we to reconcile that particular behavior described in the Old Testament with this command of Jesus to love your enemies? I'll come back to that. Love your enemies. Who are we talking about? Someone who opposes you. Someone who's against you. If we just go back one of these statements in Matthew 5, look at the law of retaliation, someone who insults you, someone who seeks to harm you, someone who dishonors you, who demands much of you in a dehumanizing way, someone who is malicious, destructive. In our own text, someone who's unjust. We see there he compares what you should be doing over against the tax collectors and the Gentiles. A tax collector would have been seen as an enemy. There were Jewish people who worked for the Roman government to take taxes from the Jewish people, and they usually took more than they were supposed to. The Gentiles, that represents the Roman occupation of Israel and Judea in their own land, imposing laws on their people. Your enemy is someone who opposes you, is against you, who hates you. Not dealing with someone who's not like you or is just kind of difficult and complicated. No, someone who's truly opposed to you. Here, in school, it's someone who spreads rumors and slanders. Someone who tries to leave you out intentionally. A bully. Sadly, it could be a professor or teacher who seems to have it out for you. At work, it's somebody who takes credit for your work or is opposed to you and working against you. If you think about your physical neighborhood, maybe someone who doesn't pick up after their dog. We can debate if that's an enemy or not. But an enemy is someone who resists, who's actively working against you. Here it's love your enemy because they are your neighbor. There's a great warning against our tendency to make a big divide between people who are neighborly and we love enemies who seem to be against us. The most foundational truth about every human being, no matter what they do, say, or think, is that they are made in the image of God. They are equal in dignity, value, and honor. What we must understand about every human being is the most foundational truth about every human being is they're made in the image of God. That's why we do not murder other humans. That's why we don't entertain anger against other human beings. We don't insult other human beings. We do not entertain anger in our hearts that would lead to insult and murder. We don't just resist them. We don't just receive the insult. We actively love them. There's a way in which this command really helps us understand the retaliation command. The reason you turn to their cheek is because you love them. The reason you would go that extra mile is because you love them. The reason you're willing to absorb insults and mistreatment with a thick skin is because you love your enemy. The way you're able to love them is that you have a tender heart desiring their blessing. The key idea is you love your neighbor and that you need to remember your enemy is also your neighbor. Okay, so how do we reconcile the Old Testament that never commands hate your enemy, but seems to describe people doing it? Here's my best answer for how we wrestle with this. The psalmists who are praying in Precatory Psalms, or the prophets who are leading people into war against God's people, they're doing so because God has already revealed who is an enemy and what he's going to do. Those were right prayers and right actions because God declared these are my enemies and they are your enemies and that's why they knew they should and must pray and act according to God's will. I believe what Jesus is saying here is you do not have the freedom to decide who is your enemy outside of God's revelation. The difference between the Psalm 139 prayer, I hate my enemies, David was, he knew who his enemies were because God had told him what would happen. The danger we have is we think we decide who are enemies that we should hate in our own will. Let's think about this for a moment. We can too easily flatten out the word love, right? We love certain people certain ways. There's a way in which a love marriage is the most unique human love. There's ways in which we love one another that's supposed to be a more significant love. Here, as we think about loving a neighbor and loving an enemy, I want to give you two kind of ways of thinking about loving your neighbor. A true good neighbor love assumes the best and hopes the best. You're seeking to interpret everything as best as you possibly can, and you're hoping for their well-being. A neighborly love assumes the best and hopes the best. When someone is clearly opposed to you, you are called to hope for their best. Absolute, no qualification. You might not always assume the best. You might actually not try to interpret something wrong in the best way because they are your enemy, but to love your enemy means you are always hoping for their best. This is why prayer is so important in the practice of loving your enemy. It is the key essential tool for loving your enemy. You're lifting them up to God. Second, there shouldn't be enemies among the church. We think about the different commands of love. You love your neighbor, and that includes your enemy. You love one another. Your one another's could be neighbors, Enemies could be neighbors, not all neighbors are enemies or one another's. But one thing that can't be in the church is the practice of being enemies. We're with one another, we're for one another. There's things happening in our own country and our own government that might make us feel like there's enemies because our political parties are so divided. That not ought be among us Christians. We can't let these other issues that we have strong convictions about separate us in the way we love one another because our first allegiance is to Jesus Christ our King who loves us and calls us to love one another. The great way in which we will be a witness to this world is by loving one another apart from every other difference we have because Christ has come to show us his love. That the church must live out this love here first, not among enemies, but among people who are different and have strong opinions about different things. But first and foremost, we're committed to loving Christ. We're committed to loving one another under him, for him, and in him. So Jesus says who you should love, it's your enemies, those who persecute you. Let's look at why. Why Should we love our enemies? This is our second point beginning in verse five. So that you may be sons of your father who is in heaven. That's quite a surprising purpose clause. Love your enemies so that you may be sons of your father who's in heaven. That reason is worthy of your meditation for the rest of the week. Just memorize that simple phrase, so that you may be sons of your father in heaven. And wrestle with why that would be your motivation for loving your enemy. What an incredible truth of who God is, how we relate to him, and how that then leads us to relate to others. This is one of the most significant revelations in all of scripture. We can know God as Father. It's a new revelation of the New Testament. We'll see that especially when we get to the prayer of Jesus, because we get to pray to him in a new way, our Heavenly Father. We take that for granted, but that's new in Jesus and because of Jesus. Our King is telling us We're citizens of a new heavenly kingdom. And that means we're part of a new heavenly family, where we know God as our heavenly Father. What's amazing is that in this sermon, he just kinda like throws this in there as if that makes perfect sense. Is that the first time we've seen this? You can go back to the blessing of Matthew 5, 9. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. Being a son of God assumes there's a father. God the Father has revealed himself. And we could go back even further to Matthew 3, in the baptism of Jesus, where a voice from heaven says, this is my beloved son. With whom I'm well pleased, well who's speaking? It's the father. We now know God as father because he has sent his son and we know the father through the son and the son through the father. What's amazing about the doctrine of God the father and the way he's revealed himself is that the father and the son have shared a perfect mutual love for all eternity. It's a perfect mutual love for all eternity. And when the father sent his son to save us, he's promised and committed himself to love us with the same love he has for his true and perfect son. The doctrine of adoption tells us that there is a divine family, a father and son, and we are invited into that family. We are given the same love. We don't become God like the Son, but we are loved by the Father like the Son. Our Heavenly Father, who is love, he loved us while we were enemies. Our Heavenly Father loves us and has provided everything we need for salvation. He also loves all of his creation because he created his creation good and for a good purpose and for himself. He loves all human beings. Not as his son, but he loves all human beings and provides for them. We see that there in verse 45. He makes the sun rise in the evil and the good human beings and sends rain on the just and on the unjust human beings. To know God as Father is to know His love. As we're going to go forward in this room of the Mount, we're going to continue to see a rich doctrine of God's love. A rich doctrine of God the Father who sees us, He hears us, He knows us. He gives generously, you know, rewards obedience. We have to capture something of the gospel here. God sent His Son to become like us, to die for us so that we can be forgiven. God sent his son to show us his love and so that we could be brought to the family of God and rejoice in the adoption. God sent his spirit of adoption in our hearts so we can cry out of a father. To know God as father is one of the most important and personal ways we know who God is. As we look back to Matthew 5, 9, to be a peacemaker is to be a son of God. Well, peacemakers love their enemies. You see, the whole idea of Christ being the son of God is he's like his father. He says what his father says, and he does what his father does, and we're adopting that family so that we would also be like sons. We would start to be conformed to the son's image. We would be like the father. Peacemakers, absorbing evil insults and dishonor. proactively loving those who hate us, just like our Father does. Now, that purpose clause could be confusing. Love your enemies so that you may be sons of the Father. I need to be just very clear here. You are adopted into the family of God because he chose to love us in his own mercy and grace. You're adopted because of his grace, not because of anything we've done. We aren't adopted because we loved our enemies. No, we're adopted so that we will love our enemies. Adoption is this wonderful embracing and receiving, embracing by God and being received in the family of God to know his love and to participate in it. The way we participate in that love is loving God. Loving the other siblings that God has adopted, and he's adopted some rascals. And even loving our neighbor and our enemy. To be part of the family of God means we seek to love him and have all our loves ordered under him. We love him because he first loved us. To be loved by God is all grace, and we respond by faith. The reason God gives us this measure, we are to love our enemies as sons. We like to apply the measure of love we want on people. And we have to be honest with ourselves. Our heart has dishonest measures of love. We have too many reasons for loopholes. So the first reason is really an incredible unpacking of God and his love and what adoption means. That's going to be played out further as Jesus will teach us. Let's jump down to two other reasons, 46 and 47. Notice there's three lines, or there's two questions he asks, and these are rhetorical. There's an if-then question and then do-not-even question. For if you love those who love you, What reward do you have? Don't even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Don't even Gentiles do the same? He's doing something similar that he does in The Good Samaritan. See, the Samaritans were despised by Jews, and what he did was choose the person that they would despise and show that he's the one who really is loving. The Pharisees, they would despise the tax collectors, the Gentiles, and he's making it clear that they're doing externally what you do. How are you any more loving than the tax collectors that you hate? How are you any more loving than the Gentiles that you hate? If you only love those who love you, what reward do you have? If you only greet others that are your brothers, what more are you doing? There's something important here we'll see throughout the gospel. God loves the unlovely. God moves his love towards those who have nothing to give back. The whole idea here is you're not just loving people who love you or that you find lovely. You're loving the difficult. You're loving those who have nothing to give back. We have a tendency to love for selfish reasons. That's called manipulation. When we're only loving people because of what they do for us, that is not Christ-like love, that is not fatherly love, that is selfish love. We decide who is worthy and what we're gonna return. No, God loves to bless the other one who receives that love. Love is vulnerable, love is difficult, love is putting us in an awkward position to give ourselves over and they might not give back. If we only love based upon what we calculate we'll get back, we will not be loving. A key part of what it means to love is from 45, it's impartial. The evil and the good, the just and the unjust. We must love to bless those who do not love in return. We must love those who would even return it with evil. We love them because of our father and for our father. Now in 46, he's not introducing this for the first time, but we're gonna see it more and more, this idea of reward. We're called to be obedient to Christ for a reward. Now, we must have a theology of reward. Whatever we're thinking of what we're doing and how we're doing it and why we're doing it, the reward is regularly taught by Jesus himself in the Sermon on the Mount. It's throughout scripture when we're actually looking for it. It's important, you are not rewarded salvation for your obedience. You are saved by grace through faith. We're saved by God's grace alone. We are given salvation. It is not a reward for what we've done. But if we've been saved by grace, we commit ourselves to good works. If we've believed God, we're going to seek to do good works. These good works of love towards enemies are what he would reward. The wrong way to respond to this text is to think, how do I muster up enough love for that enemy, that very difficult person that seems to oppose me? How do I muster up within me enough love to get a reward from God? The first focus, if we feel the burden of having a heart that does not love someone that we perceive as an enemy or that is an enemy, isn't to figure out how to muster up enough love from within. The first response is to lean in towards the God who loves you as a father. The only fuel you have to truly love your enemy, like the father loves an enemy, is to know the father's love. The first response is not how can I be more loving, it's how can I know the God who is love? How can I know more of his love and how can I love him more? And how can that then be an overflow to those who I find so difficult? Last week, I prescribed that the Christian life regarding retaliation requires tough skin, which means you're not easily offended, and a tender heart, one who still loves. There's no room for insecurity in this command to love your enemy. To love is vulnerable. To love your enemy is dangerous. There's no room for insecurity here. The right way to respond to this is to grow in absolute confidence in the God who loves you, who's given you himself in love, who has given you love inside of you by the Holy Spirit, and to grow in Christian kindness because of his love. If you're not a Christian this morning, God loves every human being with a love for those who made in his image. He does not love every human being as if they're his son though. God cares for every human being he made in his image, but we've all rebelled against God and we've made ourselves enemies of God. We've refused to honor him. We refuse to worship him. I want you to hear the good news of Jesus Christ, that God so loved the world that hated him, he sent his only begotten son to save whoever would believe in him. Now this is pretty remarkable. God has revealed his love by sending Jesus to die on the cross for your sins so you can be forgiven. God has revealed himself as father by sending his son so that you would be brought into a right relation with God again. You would know him as not just God, as a good God, but God is your loving father. What amazes me about that is God says I love you and he doesn't require you to say I love you back to be saved. He simply requires you to believe he loved you and sent his son to save you. He doesn't say I'll love you when you love me. He says, just believe I love you. What an incredibly generous God he is with his love. He doesn't say if you love me back rightly, I'll love you and I'll save you. No, he, just believe I love you. And I've sent my son to save you. Just receive the truth that I love you. You will love him because you'll be amazed by his love the more you believe he loves you. But to be saved, you just have to receive the message. He loves you. To believe he loves you. To long to know how he truly loves you. By forgiving you of your sin. By restoring you to himself. If you're not a Christian this morning, believe the good news of Jesus Christ. God loves you and will save you. You must believe in him. Our last question, how do we love our enemies? How do we love our enemies? First, we must have a high view of God who loves us. Love towards God is the love that must rule you in all your loves. We must order our loves and practice. We must love God with all of our heart, our mind, our strength, and that love must then determine every other love. We love one another as Christ loved us. We love our neighbor. We love our enemy. I wanna think about that order because if you just go out and think, well, I'm not really loving my neighbor or even my church, but I'm gonna go start loving my enemy, Let's take some steps by steps. Love God who perfectly loves you. Love one another if you're a Christian. First practice by loving difficult Christians who also love Jesus and has been washed by him. And we're working towards the same kind of goal of love as defining our culture here as a church. Love your neighbors who don't hate you. Start putting into practice the kind of loves give you the confidence in God's love and the beauty of how these commands play out in our lives. Second, it really does start with what we think about somebody and how we feel about them. If you have a tendency to hate someone because they are enemies or they oppose you, remind yourself regularly they're made in God's image. If they're a believer, remind yourself they've been washed by the blood of Christ. They've been adopted into the family. But if someone is rightly opposed to you, remember, they're God's image bearer. Love starts with what you think about them. It can't just be what you think about them. It can't just be some abstract empathy. Love in Jesus has to be a show-me love, just like faith has a show-me faith. It does have to have action. It does have to have activity. Love must be a thought and a feeling, but it can't only be what you think and feel. Third, if we look at our text directly, love impartially. That's what's emphasized in verse 45. So that you may be sons of your father who's in heaven, for he makes his son to rise in the evil and the good, He sends rain on the just and the unjust. There's an impartiality that provides and cares for those who love God and those who hate God. Our love has to have some impartiality. There's a way in which we're seeking to provide and care for and show love to every human being God has created as we love them as we love ourselves. Fourth, love them and pray for them. Look at verse 44. This almost functions like a Hebrew parallelism that Jesus is teaching in. Love your enemy, pray for those who persecute you. Those aren't two different groups. Those are two connected activities. To love your enemy means you're at least praying for them. I would actually go so far as to say you can't love your enemy if you're not praying for them. To fulfill this command to love means you are praying for your enemies. And you're praying for God to bless them. To curb the danger of their own sin. You're praying for God to help them. You're praying for God to save them. You're praying for God to bless them. It's kind of interesting, we want to have power over our enemies, but our enemies usually control us when we're letting hatred towards those who hate us be our drive. The most powerful thing we have is prayer. We're lifting up our enemies to the great God who was able to save and to bless Prayer is a powerful way of protecting your own heart from going into bitterness. Prayer is a powerful way to protect your own heart to remain tender, praying that God would bless them, change them, save them. This is why we ask, Christian, how is your prayer life? If you have an enemy, you must be praying for them in order to love them. Another implication we can have from this passage will love those who love you. We love those who hate us but greeting in verse 47 Greet greeting here is also paralleled with love and what a low bar Greet welcome This means we're not shunning turning a cold shoulder pretending they don't live We're not avoiding, we're proactively pursuing, we're saying hello and trying to treat them with kindness and dignity even though they aren't treating you the same way. Treat them like a human. Treat them for who they are. A human being made in the image of God. These two are the most practical. Pray for them, greet them. lift them up towards God and lean towards them in love, greeting them. Verse 48, you therefore must be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect. I believe a lot of the correction here is over against the Pharisees who would only greet those and show kindness to those who who returned love or were like them, they would not love those who were enemies. They only had an external love, not a true internal love. They didn't have a love like God because they didn't know God. So you must have a righteousness that exceeds the Pharisees, but here it's not just you gotta be better than the Pharisees who are merely external. Oh, what a calling, be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. We've got to go back to that doctrine of adoption. God is calling you to live up to what he's already done for you. The great God and Father who is love and has shown you love and has given himself over to you in love, he's really calling you to live out the love he's already provided. He's not asking you to add love and things to yourself. We don't staple fruit to a dead tree here. No, God has brought new life by his love. God has given you his love. He is the very source for why you can love others. You cannot be perfectly holy as God is perfectly holy. I believe we're gonna put a significant qualifier on this. We're to be perfect in our conduct of love as our Heavenly Father is perfect in his love towards us. The parallel here would be 1 Peter. Be holy in your conduct. I believe here it's be perfect in your love as your heavenly father is perfect. We're to live out the love he's given us. We're to lift others up in love as God has lifted us up in love. We're striving to know his love so we can love him. We love him because he first loved us. We're seeking to order our lives according to his love because he has given us such clear commandments of love and he has shown us such great love. We're seeking to honor our heavenly father who loves us, who shows us how he loved us as enemies, who shows us how he loves all human beings. We're to honor him with the way we love. If you're a child of God, you belong to the God of all love as a son. You've been shown the great love. The Holy Spirit indwells you with this love. Again, this isn't something we're adding to ourselves. It's something God has given us that we're seeking to live out. And you can only live this out if you are united with Christ in love. You're seeking to love the Lord with all your heart. You're seeking to practice this love. The most important thing You must have in order to love your enemy and your neighbor and your fellow brother and sister in Christ is love for God. As we conclude, everything hinges upon, everything depends upon the father who loves us. Christian, do you believe that? How often do you doubt if God truly loves you? How often are you leaning in to know the Father who loved you even while a sinner, who loved you even while an enemy, who demonstrated His love by sending His Son to be abused by us, the Son who came down and laid down His life for us, the Holy Spirit who testifies to that very love so that we can call God Father. The first and foremost application of this passage is to know the Father who loves you. To pray that you would grow to love the Father who has loved you. Will you pray with me? Father, we thank you for the clarity that your word has provided that while we were hateful, hating one another and hating you, your love appeared. You made promises in love and you sent your son in love. You've given us your Holy Spirit because you love us. Lord, may we know how to walk in that love and participate in that love and enjoy that love Loving you because you first loved us. Learning how to love one another as you have loved us. Even learning the difficulty and joy of loving our enemies as you love enemies. We thank you that you have not punished us for every sin, but you chose to love us and restore us. grow in our love for you. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.