Loving Your Enemy

SERMON: 2007-07-08--sm0726--loving-your-enemy SOURCE DURATION: 00:38:40.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 1 CONFIDENCE: 0.95 APPROVED: false REASON: Candidate 9 concludes the spoken sermon message ('for his glory'). Candidate 10 marks a clear transition into sung material (lyrics/hymn), indicating the start of non-sermon music. Acoustic segmentation found sustained music at the end edge and moved the boundary to the adjacent transcript segment. ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE: available ACOUSTIC MUSIC INTERVALS: 00:36:17.240-00:38:39.880 ACOUSTIC SPEECH OVERLAP: yes ACOUSTIC BOUNDARIES APPLIED: end Inline CUT markers identify each proposed audio boundary after the relevant word. --- ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT WITH PROPOSED CUTS MARKED --- Well, let me say at the outset this morning that the phrase "love your neighbor and hate your enemy" does not occur anywhere in the Old Testament. It is purely a rabbinical invention. And they arrived at that invention by taking the many admonitions in the Old Testament to "love your neighbor" and then blended with the occasional passage in the Old Testament that could be interpreted as hating your enemy. And the reason they did this, and I'll listen very carefully because it is critical, the reason they did this is because it justified the perfectly natural human impulse to love your own kind while rejecting everybody else who is different from you. And so as always in Matthew chapter 5, Jesus comes along and he takes the Pharisees to task and he says, "You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I tell you, love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you that you may be sons of your father in heaven." As we take a little bit of time this morning to look at those verses, I want to begin by asking the question, what exactly was wrong with the way the Pharisees interpreted the Old Testament? What was wrong with linking "love your neighbor" with "hate your enemy"? Because you see, the fact of the matter is they weren't completely out to lunch as we might be inclined to think. You don't have to read the Old Testament for very long or in a very deep way before you discover there are all kinds of passages in the Old Testament that can be interpreted as a command to hate your enemy. Even for example to what David says in Psalm 139, the verses 21 and 22, "Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord, and abhor those who rise up against you? I have nothing but hatred for them. I count them my enemies." So you can see they weren't completely out to lunch when they said, "We understand the Old Testament to teach us to love our neighbor, but to hate our enemies." And yet Jesus says they're wrong. So what's wrong with their thinking, well, three things. The first is that they defined the term "neighbor" too narrowly. They defined the term "neighbor" too narrowly. Because the word "neighbor" in scripture can refer to two levels of relationship. It can be narrowly defined as meeting my immediate family, my clan, my tribe, my blood relatives, so to speak. And it can also be defined more broadly as referring to anyone with whom I come into contact with and who lives in reasonably close proximity. Now in typical fashion, guess which of those two definitions the Pharisees and the teachers of the law tended towards? Well, obviously the former. They define "neighbor" as a person who was of their own kind and who was very similar to them. And the reason for doing that is that it simplified the commandment to love your neighbor because it's a lot easier to love your own kind than to love somebody who is very different from what you are. And in so doing what they did is they narrowed the biblical definition of what God intended by the commandment to love your neighbor. Because God's commandment to love your neighbor was never limited to love your own family or love your own tribe or love your own church or love your own kind. No it was intended to include everybody that lived in your neighborhood whether they were like you or not. And so already in the Old Testament God put it this way. He said when an alien lives with you in your land that is a stranger, somebody who's not an Israelite, you don't ill treat him. The alien living with you must be treated as one of your native born. Love him as yourself for you were aliens in Egypt. I am the Lord your God. And even as they defined the term neighbor too narrowly, they defined the term enemy too broadly. And the net result was that they were able to get away with having a hatred on for almost everybody who wasn't like them and they were circumventing the commandment to love their neighbor as themselves. Now just to show you this morning how deeply this runs for the people of Israel, let me invite you to think to one parable told by Jesus in the gospels that illustrates how deeply this ran. Do you remember the parable? It's the parable of the good Samaritan. And if you remember the context of the parable of the good Samaritan in Luke chapter 10, it has to do with the question of who is my neighbor. Because the teacher of the law had come to Jesus and they said good master, good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life? And in true rabbinical fashion Jesus responded to his question with still another question what is written in the law, how do you read it? And the teacher of the law replied, love the Lord your God with all of your heart, with all of your soul, and with all of your strength, with all of your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. And Jesus' response was you have answered correctly. Do this and you will live. Now who remembers the teacher of the law's response? Bible goes on to say wanting to justify himself as Jesus, who is my neighbor? Who is my neighbor? And it's in response to that then that Jesus tells the story of the good Samaritan where this man has been beaten and plundered by robbers and along comes a priest and along comes a Levite who are the religious people of Israel and instead of sticking out their hands and helping they bypass the man who is in trouble because well you know they're on religious duty and they don't want to get dirty or pollute themselves with the sins of the world. And so they go on by and then along comes the Samaritan and you've got to remember the Samaritans were sort of a half breed, they were hated by the Israelites because they weren't pure Jewish and they had a mishmash of religion because they went back to earlier captivity when they had married unbelievers and so on, that's the whole story. And along comes the Samaritan as you know in the story and takes compassion on this man and puts him on his donkey and takes him to the inn and pays his bill and all of this sort of thing and then Jesus sums it up in this way and he says which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers? And the expert in the law replied and you can just see how painfully this had to be pulled out of his mouth, the one who had mercy on him. Can't even say the Samaritan because that was an enemy and Jesus ends the story then with these words, "Go and do likewise." What was the pharisaical sin? They limited neighbor to their own kind because it's always easier to love those that you understand and that justifies treating everybody else as an enemy. We'll come back to that later because none of us apart from the grace of God is very far from falling in to this particular sin. So they defined the term neighbor too narrowly not only but they made personal, listen carefully, they made personal what was judicial and let me explain that in this way. As I said earlier, they weren't entirely out to lunch when they captured this Old Testament sentiment of hating those who hate God. I've already quoted Psalm 139, "David, I have nothing but hatred for them. I count them as my enemies." And that's only one example. There are many other examples. There are the imprecatory Psalms. Don't know if you've ever read any of them. Psalm 109 is one, Psalm 69 is another. The imprecatory Psalms are Psalms where the believer prays the judgment of God upon the enemies of God. Listen for example to this, "How would you like this to be somebody's prayer for you? May his days be few. May another take his place of leadership. May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow. May his children be wandering beggars, may they be driven from their ruined homes. May a creditor seize all he has and may strangers plunder the fruits of his labor. May no one extend kindness to him or take pity on his fatherless children." Now that's David praying that upon the enemies of God. And then of course you have the whole Old Testament example of Joshua and the children of Israel being instructed by the Lord to utterly destroy and utterly wipe out all the pagan tribes in the land of Palestine. And so you can say to yourself, "Well, you know, you can blame the Pharisees for thinking God says, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.'" Well how do you get around that? What do you do with the Purgatory Psalms for example? Well the key lies in not confusing the personal with the judicial. Nowhere in scripture are God's people ever authorized, commanded or encouraged to carry a personal hatred in their heart towards those who have hurt them, wounded them, offended them or who are otherwise their enemies. And when David says, "I hate those who hate you," he is not speaking out of personal animosity towards those who are his enemy. No he is speaking on God's behalf against those who are the enemies of God because he occupies a judicial position. It is his job as the chosen of God in this instance to carry out the judgment of God. That's also how you have to understand the commandment given to Israel in the days of Joshua to destroy all those tribes. God is Lord over all. God judges the living and the dead. God can say, "You live, you die because these are my standards and my standards have been violated." In the context of carrying out his judgment, he will often impart that authority to particular individuals or a group in society that in a judicial fashion carries out his judgment. And so the imprecatory Psalms are not an individual giving expression to, "I hate my enemy and God I hope you please strike them dead." No it is standing with God against the enemies of God inviting God to send his judgment because God has the right to judge the living and the dead. The Pharisees confused the personal with the judicial. Very important for us to understand that distinction because as I said a moment ago, nowhere in scripture, nowhere in scripture does God ever authorize his children to carry this attitude of anger, hatred, rebellion, resentment, and judgment on an individual basis. You let that into your heart. The spirit of the evil one gets into our hearts when that happens and that process will always lead to hate, to anger, and to destruction. Most of us have tasted enough of that to know what a destructive and powerful force that is. Instead scripture says, "If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat. If he is thirsty, give him water to drink. And in the Old Testament, if you come across your enemy's ox or donkey wandering off, be sure to take it back to him." That's the attitude that already in the Old Testament God was looking for in your life and in my life. So did you find the term neighbor too narrowly? They made personal what was judicial and in that process what they ended up doing is they misrepresented God. They misrepresented God. Now again listen carefully. When in the name of God you limit loving your neighbor to your own kind and you allow yourself to hate everybody who is different from you, then what does that say about your God? Well it makes your God just as narrow-minded as you are. And once you define your God just as narrow-minded as you are, that in turn gives you the right to love only your own kind and to hate those who are different from you or who oppose you. And the process of making God as narrow-minded as they were themselves, they were misrepresenting God because fact of the matter is throughout scripture while God has a uniquely dedicated kind of love for his own people, the people of Israel in the Old Testament and the church in the New Testament, he doesn't just love his own people to the exclusion of all the rest of the world. God is not a God who just has this little love affair with the church and doesn't care about anybody else. No, his love affair with Israel and his love affair with the church was for the purpose of saving and reaching the world because God so loved the world that he didn't wish that any should perish but that all should have eternal life. And that doesn't just mean that God turns a blind eye to everything that happens in the world, no. What it means is that God's heart towards a suffering, broken, sinful world is that he desperately wants to reach out to them and to bring them back to himself. And that's why misrepresenting God in the way the Pharisees did becomes such serious business you see because wherever you misrepresent God in the fashion that the Pharisees were misrepresenting God, I can guarantee you two things are going to happen. The first is this, you become arrogant and proud. We are God's chosen people. We have a special inroad with the Almighty. He likes us better than he likes everybody else. Ya, ya, ya, isn't that wonderful? Don't ever think that spirit was exclusive to the Pharisees or exclusive to the Jewish people because history has been full of good church people who secretly pride themselves in being just a touch better than everybody else, wouldn't you agree? That's pride and arrogance that flows out of this pharisaical spirit of reducing the commandment to love your neighbor and expanding the commandment to hate your enemy. Not only that, wherever that spirit takes root, you become exclusivist, oh, big word. You begin to exclude everybody that is not your own kind. And so now you limit your attention to just your own people and you don't want to get your hands dirty with other people who are dirty and you look down your noses at everybody else because you see, well, they're just the Gentiles. They're just people who are steeped in sin. They don't know the commandments of God. Look at how they live together. Look at how they fornicate. Look at how they drink and look at how they carry on. And before you know it, your spirit is more like the spirit of the Pharisees than the spirit of Jesus. Because the Pharisees, they washed their hands of dirty people, didn't they? What had nothing to do with them because they didn't want to be polluted. Why do you think the priest and the Levite passed by on the other side? They didn't want to get dirty with the sins and the brokenness and the pollution of the man that had been beat up. But Jesus leaves the glory of heaven, steps into the messiness of your life and my life, the messiness of this world, and He says, "I've come to seek and to save the lost. I've come to lay down my life so that other people might come to salvation and might come to know you." And so Jesus, in this passage then, as He always does, not only corrects the misinterpretation the Pharisees have given to these Old Testament commandments, but He takes us back to the original spirit. And what is the original spirit? You have heard that it was said, "Love your neighbor and hate your enemy." But I tell you, He says, "Here's what God meant to teach you from the very beginning. Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes the sun to rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous." Notice, there are two things there that He says was always God's intention in the Old Testament, and that is that His people should love their enemies and that secondly, they should pray for those who persecute them. Let's take a few moments and look at each one of those. Love your enemy. Can you see how far this is removed from the pharisaical definition of a neighbor that limits my neighbor just to who I am and gives me the right to look down my nose at everybody who is my enemy? It was Tacitus, an ancient Roman historian, who said concerning the Jews, "They readily show compassion to their own countrymen, but they bear all others the hatred of an enemy." Jesus says, you know what God was really teaching you in the Old Testament? He says He wanted you to love your enemy. Now an enemy is the opposite of a friend, obviously, and an enemy is a person who actively opposes you or is hostile to your interest. And that can be anybody from, you know, the kid down the block who steals your toy, to the teenager who steals your girlfriend, to the rascal out there who seduces your wife, to the person who disappoints you in this area or in that area. And what happens naturally in every one of our hearts outside of the saving grace of Jesus is what, resentment, anger, disappointment, and bitterness. And if you've never had any of those emotions, you've probably never really had an enemy. Because I tell you, when you have an enemy and you know they're gunning for you and they want to do you in and there is no love whatsoever in their actions, every little bit of Adam and Eve that is left in our flesh rises up and wants to fight back as we've seen earlier. And Jesus in this passage says, "It's not only not good enough not to give in to those negative emotions, no," He says, "I want you to go further than that. I want you to learn to love your enemy." And that means by both your outward actions and by your inward disposition, you are kindly disposed to your enemy and you want to see your enemy as blessed rather than cursed. Because Scripture goes on to say, actually one of the, I'm getting ahead of myself, I need to come back to that in just a moment, but Scripture puts it this way, "If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat, if he is thirsty, give him water to drink." And Paul quoting that in the New Testament, he says, "Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God's wrath, for it is written, 'It is mine to avenge. I will repay,' says the Lord." You want to test your spirituality this morning? You want to test just how mature you are in Christ and try to find, think back to the one person who has done you the most harm, the one person who most deeply disappointed you, the one person who skewered you in places that has left you reeling. And you can't live very long in this world before somebody has done that to you somewhere along the line, and then you ask yourself the question, Lord, how can I love this person? How can I want what's best for that person? How can I not only get rid of the negative feelings that I have, but how can I really bless that person, encourage that person, and really rejoice when they do well? Because that's the real test, you see. The real test of forgiveness and the real test of loving your enemy is whether you can rejoice when they do well, as opposed to secretly hoping, "Well, God's going to get you, and I'm just going to wait and sit around until God does you in, so I can feel good and vindicated." I mean, am I only talking about me here, or is that an accurate description of most of our hearts? Yeah? Do you see why we need Jesus? Because short of Jesus and apart from Jesus, folks, this ain't to be had. It is not a natural way of living, which is why Jesus goes on to say at a few moments, "If you love those who love you, what more are you than the sinners and the publicans?" Everybody can do that, but only God and the power of God can change the human heart in that fashion. Love your enemy, says Jesus. And then he goes on to say, "Pray for those who persecute you. Pray for those who persecute you." Now it's a very interesting thing. Earlier manuscripts, not as dependable as the ones that have been used to translate the New International Version, go on to add the verses, "Bless those who curse you and do good to those who hate you." Likely some scribe who got carried away and added those verses, which expand really on what it is that Jesus is talking about when he says, "You've got to pray for those who persecute you." Now to be persecuted is to have somebody pursue you with the intent of making your life miserable or doing you harm. And again, it can be any number of people. It can be any number of situations. And thank God, most of us live in a country where we're not persecuted for faith. But there are, and there have been throughout the course of history, multitude of believers who have been tragically persecuted because of their faith in Jesus, anywhere from being robbed economically to being dispossessed out of their houses and homes and their businesses and having been put in jail and tried unjustly and executed. That's persecution. Now if you've ever tasted even a touch of that, you will know that again, the perfectly natural human reaction is to do what? Angry? Bitter? You know, that's when you want to start praying the imprecatory Psalms, don't you Lord? I hate those who hate you. Send fire from heaven, oh God, I hope they burn in hell, and turn it up, you know, seven times higher than what it's running now. That's the human heart. But Jesus says it's not good enough to put away those feelings. No, He says, I want you to learn to love your enemy. I want you to pray for those who persecute you. By the way, do you know why Jesus says to pray for those who persecute you? I believe the reason is this. Persecution comes out of narrow hearts and lives. That is to say people who are struggling and who are unhappy and who find life difficult and painful, and they see somebody else prospering and flying, and the spirit of Cain in them wants to bring them down to their own level. And you'll find in your own life that when life is hard and painful, that's when you become most critical of other people. You become jealous of their prosperity, you become jealous of their success, and you wonder why they're favored and you're not. Isn't that true? None of us is immune to that. And that's when even we can turn nasty as the children of God. What's the antidote to that spirit that says, I hate you because you've got life and freedom and liberty in a way that I don't? Well, you pray for God to bless them. Because a person who is blessed, a person who is successful, a person for whom things are going well, is too busy doing life to be bothered by the difficulties or the pleasures or the joys of somebody else, do you understand what I'm saying? People who are doing well and who are successful for all the right reasons, they don't have time to look down their noses at everybody else and stick their nose in everybody else's business wondering, you know, why are you doing what you're doing? No, they're just busy serving God and doing their own life. And so when somebody's hot on your tail, if for no other reason, instead of praying God judged them and cursed them and make life miserable and bring them to repentance, bring them to the... No, just pray God bless them, pour out your grace upon them. Because nobody can long experience the grace of God without coming to repentance and without falling on their knees. Still want to be Christian? Still understand why we need Jesus? Now notice again then, Jesus says, "Love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you." What's the ultimate reason He gives us? He gives us this reason, that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. He causes His son to rise in the evil and the good, sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. Why love your enemy? Why pray for those who persecute you? Because that's what God's like. A lot of people think God is this narrow-minded person who is just sitting in heaven waiting to strike somebody dead. No, no, God so loved the world. Does God exercise judgment? You bet your bottom dollar that He does. And will God allow sin to go on indefinitely? No, indeed He will not. But He isn't some mean, vindictive person who has personally been injured and feels offended and therefore, you know, I'm going to get even with you because you haven't done what I wanted you. I mean, if anybody had the right feel that way, it'd be God now, wouldn't it? That's not what motivates the judgment of God. When God exercises judgment, it is because of His love and His passion for creation, all has to be destroyed, even as a surgeon has to destroy cancer so that the rest of the body might be saved. And He says, if you call yourself a Christian, if you want to be a son or a daughter of your Father who is in heaven, then what God wants to do is reproduce His character in your heart. The test of that, says Jesus, is not how much you love those who love you, because even the pagans can do that. No, the test of that is how much you can love those who are even your enemy. And a lot of you have heard the story and you've heard me tell the story of Cory Turnbull, desperately mistreated during World War II, in a concentration camp, saved through a clerical error, lived to tell about it, eventually developed a ministry whereby in post-World War Europe and then later on in America, could share the story of God's amazing grace and His power to forgive. And you've heard the story how speaking to, I believe, a crowd of Germans at one point, about the power of forgiveness, a man came to the front after her presentation, extended his hands towards her and said to her, "Isn't it wonderful how God in Christ forgives us all our sin?" This man she immediately recognized as one of the SS officers who had made their lives hell during that time in the concentration camp. And as she describes the story, you can read about it in some of her writings, the turmoil that went through her soul, because all of a sudden she was confronted by this stark reality, "I've got to make a choice. Am I going to hold on to the anger, the pain, the bitterness because of how I have been treated during the war, or will I extend forgiveness even as God in Christ has forgiven me?" And it was only after what seemed like an eternity, that battle of the soul, that she could then finally reach out and take that man's hand, extend forgiveness in the name of Jesus, and recognize him as a brother in Christ. That's the power of the gospel, and that's the invitation Jesus has for you and for me for his glory. [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:36:17.240; remove through 00:38:40.000] You are my strength when I am weak, You are my change in heresy, You are my all in all, Seeking you as a precious jewel, Lord to give up my vehicle, You are my all in all. You are my strength when I am weak, You are my change in heresy, You are my all in all. Jesus, well of God, Worthy is your name, Jesus, well of God, Worthy is your name, Jesus, well of God, Worthy is your name, Jesus, well of God, Worthy is your name, Jesus, well of God, Worthy is your name, Jesus, well of God, Worthy is your name. [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 END at 00:38:40.000; resume after this marked segment]