Matthew chapter five, please, if you would. Get your Bibles out there ready. Thank you for all those who do so much around the church, greatly appreciated. It takes many hands working together to serve the Lord. And so it is the Lord's house. It is the Lord's church. I'm just an under shepherd. We want to praise the Lord through our lives and through our actions. We are in Matthew chapter five, the end of that chapter this morning, verse 43. You have heard that it hath been said, thou shalt love thy neighbor and hate thine enemy. Just a moment, let me get my phone on just for a moment, please. By the way, if for some reason your, does not work, the blue light's not coming on, take off the app from your phone and reinstall it. Hopefully that will work. And if you cannot get on the little blue light, let you know that we're having live stream. Matthew chapter 5, 43, but you have heard it hath been said, thou shalt love thy neighbor and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, this is the sixth time, but I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you, that you may be children of your Father which is in heaven. For he maketh his Son, isn't that interesting, he maketh his Son to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? Do not even the publicans the same? And if you salute your brethren only, what, do ye more than others? Do not even the publicans so? Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father, which is in heaven, is perfect. May the Lord's blessing to the reading of his word, perhaps the greatest message ever preached, again, the greatest preacher. Let us pray together. This morning, Lord, I pray that you guide and direct my thoughts and words. We thank you so much for all those who have served our country and our military forces are serving now. Perhaps some will be serving in the future. We thank you for the freedoms we enjoy in America. May they continue on. Lord, for our message today, thank you for our visitors as well, but for our message time, I pray that you would help us to think about what you'd have for us today. Loving our family comes natural. Sort of kind of loving our friends comes somewhat natural, Lord, but to love our enemies is we can only do through you working in us. So Lord, help us to see what it is we need to possibly change in our lives. And if there be even one who does not yet know you as Savior and you speak to their hearts today, may they not put it aside, but may they respond and ask these things in Jesus' name I pray, amen. So this morning, the outline's right on the back of the bulletin there. First of all, we see children of your father, and there is the command. Command in verse 43. You have heard that it hath been said, thou shalt love thy neighbor and hate thine enemy. Now can I just tell you that that goes far beyond what Bible says. Matter of fact, the religious leaders of the day had this little quote that said, if a Jew sees that a Gentile has fallen in the sea, let him by no means lift him out. Of course, it is written, do not rise up against your neighbor's life, but this man is not your neighbor. And so they had taken what God had meant for good, and they put two and two together and got 27. They just had really just missed what God was saying. So They said, yes, God said, love your neighbor. He never said, though, hate your enemy. It comes from Leviticus 19.18, which says, thou shalt not avenge nor bear grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. I am the Lord. Isn't that part of the greatest command of all? Love Jesus first and then love your neighbor as yourself. We understand that. But this part about hating, hating your enemy, was not part of what the Bible said. Completely absent from the verse in Leviticus or even the context around it, no necessity of hating anyone at all. The Pharisees, they're revealing their heart and what they would do, well, who's my neighbor? Well, my neighbor are the Jewish people that I love and the Jewish people and everybody else is not my neighbor. And that's how they got around that, a twisted logic, an implied command. If I am to love my neighbor, then I'm to hate my enemies. They connected the dots. And sometimes I will say something to my wife, and she'll say, where did you get that? What dots connected to that? And I'll say, well, OK. It's a reach sometimes, but I see how you finally got there. We are to, we are to, that was the Pharisees logic. Now for transparency purposes this morning, I will tell you, the Jews in Jesus' day were very much racist people. I mean, they hated the Samaritans, they were. hated the Samaritans. Matter of fact, we, probably in this year Jewish heritage today, we'd be part of the Goyim. We're part of the Gentiles. If you're not a Jew by ethnicity, then you are a Gentile. It's probably 99.9% of us here, maybe perhaps 100%. We are Gentiles. We're not of Jewish ethnicity. And so they would say, if you're not a Jew, then we have the right to hate you. Remember the Samaritan story? That's why the good Samaritan story is such an affront to the Jewish people. The Samaritans were the outcasts. They were half Jew, half Gentile, and they were so hated. And here you find a good Samaritan, and he's the only one that goes the extra mile for the person who was beat up by the robbers. And so they struggled with that. When Commentator says, the Pentateuch will be searched in vain for any precept which required the Israelites to entertain any malignity against their foes. Thou shalt hate thine enemy was a rabbinical invention, pure and simple. What's a rabbi? A teacher of the Jews. And so they invented this. Now I have some things, and I will say to my wife, I'll say, well, you know, the tradition says, and I'll make up a tradition for that day, whatever, something like that. And it's something just out of the blue. my own making up. That's what the teachers had done. Indeed, they went so far as to suggest that it was their business, almost their right and their duty to hate all such people. Can I just tell you, a life of hate is no life at all. If you're so filled with hate, it's really you that you're damaging the most. The Bible says here we're to love our enemies. Bless them that curse you. Now, I'll have to say, that's hard to do. Matter of fact, I'm going to go out on a limb and say, we can't do it without God's help. To love your enemies, to bless them that curse you, that have it out for you, that take the job ahead of you. You've been working there three years and someone who just walked in the door gets the job you've been waiting for and playing. Man, that just doesn't seem fair. Now I'm supposed to treat that person who has to be actually working in an office next door, treat them nicely. I have a hard time treating them civilly, let alone nicely. But Bible says, Bible says we are to do that. In a wonderful book, Alfred Edersheim, who is a converted Jew, tells of a book called The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah. If you keep books, if you love books, you should add it to your collection. Two volumes, typically. I think the one I have is two volumes. It tells of a rabbi who always ritually cleaned himself when he returned from the market in case this Jewish rabbi inadvertently handled a loaf of bread that a Gentile had previously touched. The Sadducees went so far as to mock the Pharisees, saying that pretty soon the Pharisees would think it necessary to wash the sun since its rays shone on the Gentiles as well. The Jews had no time for the Gentiles. So in the idea of incorporating the Gentiles into the church, you know that's why it was such a difficult thing for the Jewish people to do. The church started out all Jews, and now Cornelius, Cornelius of all people who's a Gentile is going to be in the church. So God gave them signs and wonders. If you remember from the book of Acts to prove that God's message had gone through to the Gentiles. The sheep comes down from Frieda and says, what I've declared clean, go ahead and eat. Paul, the message goes out to the Gentile people as well as the Jews. And aren't you thankful this morning that the gospel has gone to the Gentile as well as the Jew? Aren't you thankful? I am sad they rejected Christ while he was here on earth and said no to his messiahship. But I am thankful that they did in a way because now the gospel of Jews have been set on the spur for a time. And we Gentiles, this is the times of the Gentiles. Currently, things like the time of the Gentiles are short-lived. I think now it seems like talking to a lady yesterday at Winterfest and she says, I just think the Lord's going to come back. Just look at everything. The Lord's coming back soon. I think he is. We don't know. It may be a long time, but lift up your heads. Our redemption is coming. And perhaps it even draweth nigh. Are you ready to go? It is sad when you talk to people about my lead in most often is now the most important decision you'll ever make is to receive Christ as your savior. Has there ever been an important time when you've done that? I said that yesterday at different times. Has there ever been an important time when you've received Christ as personal savior? And the one man said, yes, I was 12 years old. So yeah, praise the Lord. That is so important, and to see people just go on their way, graciously, but go on their way, doesn't that break your heart sometimes? We need to be a praying people, and not just loving in word and truth, as we find in 1 John 3, 18. Don't love in just word and truth, but love in deed, or love in word, but love in truth and deed as well. It's not just enough to see someone in need. Do something about it. They will know we are Christians by our love, by our love. So when this was a difficult thing for the Gentiles to accept the Jews, Jewish rabbis restricted this word neighbor to his friends, closely related. But as one commentator said, it's much bigger than that. The word really actually means extremely broad, covering everyone from a lover, a close friend, an acquaintance, an adversary in court, and an enemy in combat. So it's much broader than just the family or people you like to hobnob with. I don't know if that's really a word, hobnob, but you like to run around with. And so you'll see pictures of people on Facebook, and typically it's the same people talking with the same people, fishing with the same people. Over and over. I'll tell you, if you want to fish, and Mr. McCarty and I had a good time a couple of years ago fishing together. I enjoyed his company, still enjoy his company. When you fish with people, you're not going to go with their worthless of enemies. Are you fishing? Well, maybe you should. Maybe you should. Abraham Lincoln said, the best thing to do with enemies is make them your friend. Only with God's help can we do things like that. But our neighbor's much wider. So really, our neighbor is pretty much anyone who's in need. So applying the standard to love our neighbor means I'm supposed to love whomever I meet. That's really the Bible way. But I say unto you, Jesus says, love your enemies. That covers, I am certain, anybody we're going to meet, because they don't even know them, how can they be your enemy yet? So God's intention and the original command in Leviticus 19 was to instruct those to show love to people we come in contact with on a daily basis. It most certainly was not, as the Pharisees had perverted it to mean, that we are to love only those of the same ethnicity or religion as us, and to hate everybody else, to view them as an enemy. The word there is agapao. The agape love, same word in 43 and 44. It's that self-sacrificing. What is a sacrifice? Talk about this in high school. What's a sacrifice? It's something that costs you something. Now, I could give you, I could go home into my fridge and give you a diet Mountain Dew. I'm not sacrificing because there's a whole lot more in there. Now, if I gave you every single one in my refrigerator, upstairs, downstairs, in the basement, if I gave you all those, Then I would be, well, I'd sacrifice for a day and I'd go out to the store and buy me a whole load more and bring it right back in. So sacrifice is something that costs me something. It's the two mites the widow had. It's your time. It's your time. It's probably, the time's like my most, almost my most, I'm not trying to say it egotistically or arrogantly, but the time. or your listening ear. Charlie and I were talking about a listening ear. Do you have a listening ear? Most people today are given to listening, talking mouths rather than listening ears. Are you willing to listen and empathize with people? To love? To show love? But I say unto you, love your enemies. Can you imagine the people's drawl? He said, love my enemies. They're saying, hate your enemies. Well, who's right? I can just tell you who's right. Every time, it is God. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. This is the Word manifest in human flesh. I'm thinking he knows what the Bible is supposed to be. I'm thinking, and in fact we know. Spurgeon, a bit wordy, I like it though. In this case, a command of scripture had a human antithesis or baggage fitted onto it by the depraved minds and this human addition was mischievous to hate your enemies. This is the common method to append to the teaching of Scripture a something which seems to grow out of it or to be a natural inference from it, which something may be false and wicked. This is a sad crime against the word of the Lord. The Holy Spirit will only father His own words, His own precepts. Thou shalt love thy neighbor, He says, but he that hates the parasitical growth of hate thine enemy he loves. love thy neighbor, but he hates, hate thine enemy. We attach things, and so we make a statement, and we assume, and people assume things, and we could say, my wife could say to you that Tim, oh, he loves cats. It's a love-hate relationship, and they could think, somebody could hear that and say, I wanna be a part, I saw this called the Cat, oh, the Cat Rescue Mission, I forget what it was. It's like, in one picture, it's like 200 cats, it's gotta be so many cats, I'd be like, Oh, I can't handle it. And my wife says, bucket list. Bucket list. She wants to go to that place at a bucket list. I'm just thinking. So we can infer a lot of things. Not to put it, no inferring a lot of things, but no pun intended there. But they have taken love thy neighbor, and now we're going to connect the dots, and somehow we're going to turn all this way, and now we can hate our enemies. Not so, Jesus say, but I say unto you. So there's a command. Secondly, in your outline, there's the correction. And this actually has a couple of bullet points with it. The correction, verse 44, the people love your enemies. Missionary Amy Carmichael said, you can give without loving, but you cannot love without giving. Love is more an action to be learned than a feeling to be felt. Very few quotes I would tell you over and over. But that truly is one of the best I've ever heard. I've heard a preacher up from Canada say that once, love is more an action to be learned than a feeling to be felt. And that is so true on so many fronts. Marriage, your family, your work relationships. So is people, love your enemies. Secondly, the pronouncement, we've covered that already. Pronouncement, bless them that curse you. Tell them how to love your enemies. Well, here, to bless them with favor. Ask God to prosper them. The idea is not so much that you're magnanimous so that you ignore your enemies or refusing to debate with them when they goad you. The idea is not even that you treat them with the same fairness and common decency you would anybody else. The idea here is you actively seek to do them good, more good than you normally would do those you meet. Not only are you to treat them normally and not give them some kind of verbal tongue lashing, you are to treat them better than that. You're to do something for them. That neighbor whose cats come over to your yard and use that for a litter box all every week. that neighbor, take him some cookies. I found out this week that you can get those bag of cookies, and you buy those bag of cookies, you put them in the mat, and you melt the butter first. By the way, if you're making those cookies, melt the whole stick of butter first. You put your egg and your butter in there. Get your pan out, and just mark them with a B if you want, and put them in there. And put them on the pan, and away you go. And they taste great. Now, you need to also put that stuff on the pan, parchment paper. Man, that helps with the cleanup. You put your cookie on there. They're all kinds of ill-shaped, mine are, but hey, they taste good and it's quick. So, bags of cookies, the cookies in the bag. I tell you, melt your butter first. I've learned that is the thing to do. We're supposed, and you take those cookies over to the neighbor whose cats get in your yard all the time. By the way, one of the greatest problems in all our five counties, feral cats. Every city in these, there's like 14 to 17 cities in the five counties have a problem with feral cats, and they don't know what to do with them. The shelters are all full. Your neighbor. Do something nice for them. So people pronouncement. How about provision? Do good to them that hate you. Provide for them. It's ingrained in our human nature to treat people how they treat us. You're running me off the road. Well, you just wait and see because I'll get ahead of you. And then they go on and on and on before you know it, someone gets hurt or even possibly killed because of road rage. What a term, road rage. I tell you, when the mules were on the road down in McLaughlin County, they just didn't want to get bit by them. That was a road rage. You stayed out of their way from their mouths. That was a road rage. It was kept out from under those metal wheels or those big wheels that ran on, you know. Returning good for evil. Robert E. Lee one time said something very kind about a fellow officer and someone heard it and said, General, do you know that that man that you just spoke so highly of is one of your worst enemies and that he misses no opportunity to slander you? And General Lee said, yes, but I was asked for my opinion of him, not his opinion of me. Not his opinion of me. Lincoln said the best way to destroy your enemy is to make him your friend. With God's help, therefore, let us love our foes, bless them, do good to them, and pray for them. Now, please don't get the mindset, let's go to pastor's house and dump all our cats on there, so I'll become his enemy, so then he'll have to love me. I love you without doing that, so please don't think about doing that, please. People, pronouncement, provision, and prayer. Verse 44D, pray for them that despitefully use you. I tell you, it's, oh, pastor, I'm gonna pray for that person. I'm gonna pray for a fireball from God out of heaven to knock that person's house over and put a sinkhole under his car, and he'll say he'll fool with me again. Man, that guy's got power with prayer. I better leave him alone this time. That's not it. Praying for somebody, you pray for people. I trust that you do. I can honestly say, except for our visitors, I prayed for every single person in here today already. Every one of you. And that should be us. Now you don't have to pray for, that's not your responsibility, you're not pastoring the church, I feel it's mine, but there are people you need to be praying for. Perhaps divide all of us up and some for each day of the week. Take our missionaries, I pray for all our missionaries every day as well. Pray for our missionaries. We need to be a praying people. Pray for our leaders, et cetera. But this praying for, be praying for someone, what does the Bible say here? In verse 44, it says first here, we are to pray for them that which despitefully use you and persecute you. That's a hard thing to do. But I tell you what's probably even harder is when you start praying for someone and then not start liking or loving them. It's hard to pray for people and then not start having, see this prayer that I'm praying for, say Mr. Calvin has done to me, he's not been very kind to me, he's done something terribly wrong to me. But I start praying for him and guess who changes? He's the same gentleman he's always been, it's me. The prayer is not for Mr. Calvin, it's for the pastor to get his heart right, because I'm praying for someone, or perhaps, you know, we've just blown something a little bit, have you ever blown something out of, you know, made a mountain out of a mohill? I think I've done that before. Perhaps you have too. And so the prayer changes me. Someone says, it's nearly impossible to go on praying for another without loving him or her. Those for whom we truly pray will become objects of our conscious love. Are we praying for enemies? In 1983, Russell Stendhal was taken hostage in a jungle in Columbia, South America by a band of guerrilla soldiers. For nearly five months, this Russell person, Mr. Russell Stendhal, learned what it was that really means to love one's enemies. He wrote a letter home to his wife and said, I am in danger only of losing my life. They are in danger of losing their souls. Through kindness, Russell befriended his guards. One day, the commander said, we can't kill you face to face. We like you too much. So we're going to have to kill you when you sleep. God enabled Russell to forgive these captors. But for the next 10 days and nights, he couldn't sleep at all. A submachine gun was repeatedly thrust on his face from under the mosquito net, but the guards could not bring themselves to pulling the trigger. On January 3rd of 1984, Russell was released. And when he said his goodbye, tears filled the eyes of some of his captors. Pray for them that persecute you. despitefully use you." Command, the correction, finally the calling, starting in 45. Children of the Father, you may be children of your Father which is in heaven. Now this must not be construed, says John Butler, to mean how one becomes a child of God. The verse is not speaking of the effecting of salvation, but the evidencing of it. Our verse is not speaking about becoming children of God, but being like the children of God. Here is a confirmation of a relationship with God. We're showing by our actions. You can say all these kind of things, well, I love you, and I love you, and I just want to help you. But if that's all you do is just say things, I'm going to start doubting it. You meet someone out visiting, talking to people. Well, I got saved 40 years ago. Ever been in church? Haven't been in church in 40 years. And I'm just thinking you missed something along the way. And I remember a guy over in Souderville that exactly hadn't been in church for 40 years, but he knew as a child. I'm struggling with that. You're truly born again, but you have no concern for God and His house after 40 years, and you're okay with that. I'm not okay with that. And you shouldn't be okay with that either. You should be wanting to be with people of like faith, children of fathers. Secondly, charting the fairness. charting of fairness for he that he maketh his son to rise on the evil and on the good sendeth rain on the just and the unjust for if you love them that love you what reward have you do not even the publicans the same and if you salute your brethren only what do you more than others do not even the publicans so so here's an example hey we're trying jesus picked the absolute lowest job on the totem pole and that was a publican In that culture, they would buy the rights, let's say to Greenup County, and they would buy the taxation rights, and you have to receive from the recipients $5,240 every single month. Okay. So I would go out and I would go around and I would strong arm some people. And by the time I got done, I got $10,542. I take that extra $5,400 whatever it was money and put that in my pocket and give the Romans only the $5,240. I pocket the rest because I may charge double taxes. If you don't pay it, I'm going to twist your arm. I don't know if they had those or not. I'm guessing they did, probably, to stay alive. Zac Chias was a wee little man. A wee little man was he, but he was a tax collector. I'm guessing he had some big, big goons he walked with. I'm just guessing. Stay alive. And so this publican was like the absolute worst. And I looked up yesterday, I was looking up the most, the least revered and the most ill-thought-of jobs in America. Pastors were one of them. Number five on one was pushy megachurch pastors who have airplanes and then expect us to do this, that, or the other. Members of Congress was one. Car salesman was another. Managers who'd never been an underling before, and they think everything they know about everything, and they've never done the basic work before, jobs like that. If you were to pick people in the Jewish era, it would be a publican. Imagine an IRS agent on steroids, and pay them a commission, and double the negative reaction, and you have the idea of what a publican was like in the culture. They weren't at all. Matter of fact, one of them was a disciple, Matthew Levi. One of them, Got right with God and gave a lot of his stuff back to those he had winked. Eight times in scripture, you see the phrase, publicans and sinners. I mean, we all know that sinners are the worst of the worst of the worst of the worst. And not publicans, it'd be like pastors and sinners. Well, pastors are sinners. And sadly, there's been pastors who have sinned, gotten a bad reputation. Jesus' point in referring to them is that even a publican can love people who love them back. Even publicans are kind to those who are kind to them back. It was Joseph Stalin who was this terrible, murdering, dictatorial leader in Russia, and yet he had one person he loved, his only daughter, whose name was Svetlana. And he loved her and she struggled for decades until her death in Wisconsin in 2011. She struggled that such an inhumane, murderous father could love her. A struggle. A struggle. Everyone, even publicans and sinners of all types love people that love them. I offer you no congratulations when you love somebody that loves you back. You're not being congratulated for that. What we want to see from us Christians is to love those who do not love us in return. It's only in loving the unlovely that we become like Christ. Might be the heartbeat of this whole passage. Why are we to love the unlovable? Because that is what God does, and we are to be like him. You say, God loved? Yes. God loved you so much, he came. Not only did he create us, but he came into the world to redeem us back. If I were to ask you the most famous verse in all of scripture, you might say John 3.16, you might say Psalm 23.1, you might say Genesis 1.1, or the phrase, judge not that you be not judged. Everybody knows that phrase. Do unto others as you have them do unto you. There's a golden rule in scripture in some way, in the gospels, not exact wording. But John 3.16. We're to love as God so loved. God so loved the world that he gave. And so what is it that we are giving and back to him? He gave all for us. We are to love the enemies. How radically different than the humanities traditionally treated his enemies. One of the most disturbing things you come across in the study of the life of Christ. If you read the books about by Josephus and the other historians, the siege of Jerusalem in 70 AD, The crosses were, according to Josephus, the historian, the crosses were so close that the arms touched and they encircled Jerusalem. Six months siege, a million Jews, a lot of them crucified. Can you imagine that? The whole city encircled with crosses with Jews on them dying. And then he would allow them to come into the city, but they couldn't bring their food. So soon there was mass starvation. This is the Passover time when they did this. And so it went from 200,000 to maybe 2 million people. He forbade them to bring in their food. It was terrible. It was a horrific thing they did, the Jews. In fact, it was when Herod built the temple, he built this trough, if you would, all the way down to the Valley of Kidron. So when it sacrificed these tens of thousands, Josephus says it was 220,000 lambs on the Passover when Christ died. All the gunk and all the entrails went down this trough all the way down the Kidron Valley. So when the siege happened, the rich, they would crawl through that trough with all of the entrails and all the dirty things that come out. And they crawled all the way down to the bottom trying to escape Jerusalem. And when they got down there, the Roman soldiers were waiting for them. And they would cut open their stomachs because they thought they had swallowed gold and jewels to finance their escape. So what they thought was an escape was actually a crawling to their death. Man is very good at being inhumane to man, are we not? We are. What about our God? Our God, what an amazing difference it is. It says, for he maketh his son to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust, those in Hezbollah and Hamas and ISIS. God is still giving them breath today. God's still giving you breath today. But these people hate God. He's still rising the sun for them. He's still giving them air. He's still giving them food. God is doing all that for His enemies. Now what are we doing for ours? Example is set. When we love our enemies, we are acting like God. Children everywhere naturally resemble their parents. as we reflect their lives in us as children of God, we should do this. Is there a reflection? Do I resemble that? And please don't answer that question out loud, but that's what we should be doing. Do I look like the master? Is there a resemblance? Children of the Father, charting of fairness, and finally, there should be choice to follow. Choice to follow. Be you therefore perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect." Mature. It is the maturity of an adult. It is not the immaturity of someone who is underdeveloped as children. A significant consummate soundness, the idea includes being whole. What God commands and demands, he empowers and enables. Someone said it this way. He never said you could, but he can, and he always said he would. I can do all things through Christ, which strengtheneth me, the Bible says. Wiersbe says the word perfect does not imply sinlessly perfect, for that is impossible in this life, though it's good to strive for. It suggests completeness, maturity as the sons of God. The father loves his enemies and seeks to make them his children. So perhaps we should say it's not let go and let God, but more like let God and let's go. Let God work in our lives and let's go and serve him this week. Love your enemies. Mr. Womack's family, I believe is the Boston Marathon in April 15th, 2013. I think some of your family was. That was the year of the bombing. 264 people were injured, three lost their lives. And an ensuing police chase, one of the perpetrators, Tamirin Zarnev, I can't pronounce his name, Zarnev, was shot several times and run over even by his own brother, Gagarzar. I can't pronounce his name either. When the dust finally settled, the Boston Funeral Home that volunteered to keep this perpetrator of the bombing, one of the perpetrators in their funeral home, they had to have armed guard all the way around the funeral home because so many were so angry at that person. They tried to find somewhere to bury him. Not one cemetery in all of New England would take that body to be buried. And so the Boston Police Department started appealing to the public. In rural Virginia, Martha Mullen was sipping her coffee at Starbucks and heard the appeal and said to herself, somebody needs to do something about that. She decided that somebody was going to be her. And through her efforts, this one of the bomber's bodies was finally buried in a little loving little cemetery at the end of a little quiet gravel road in Sadie Lane in Doeswell, Virginia. Well, when the community heard that they were going to have this person's body in their cemetery, of course, they were quite upset. Some of the family members who had people buried at cemetery got quite upset and heard that this body was going to come and be in their cemetery. Finally, by phone, the AP finally got a hold of Martha and said, ''Now, what in the world? Why did you do this?'' She simply said, ''Jesus said.'' love your enemies. And there's a Muslim family somewhere that got some closure because somebody was willing to love their enemies. That took some doing, didn't it? But I don't think anybody's gonna ask us to do that tomorrow, this week probably. but they may ask us to show God's love to them in some way. We're okay with loving our neighbor, well, most neighbors, we're okay with that. But loving our enemies? The bar's been raised. Now how are we gonna respond? Let's pray. Lord, we just thank you this morning that you are the consummate example of all the things you ask of us, you are going ahead and showing us how to do it. Lord, you so love the world you gave. Lord, you're even giving rain, which we so much need. You're giving sunshine, you're giving air, oxygen on the just and on the unjust. Those who are standing in such defiance of you this morning, Lord, are still living by your grace. Those who would love to and say you don't even exist, those who mock and blaspheme your name every few moments, you're still giving them, son. You're still giving them life. So, Lord, help us this week as there are those who get on our nerves, those who do us wrong, to start praying, and then Lord, change us so that we can be children of our Father, not in salvation, but in evidence that people say, wow, there's something different about you. What is it? So Lord, give us this week your strength. And Lord, if even one person this morning does not yet know your Savior, They've never confessed and repented of their sin, believing that you died on the cross and were buried and rose again. They've never made that decision. Would you help them, Lord, if you've spoken to their heart, they'd respond. Lord, be at their invitation time, in Jesus' name I pray, amen.