Overcoming Evil with Good

SERMON: 2015-05-17--r1215c--overcoming-evil-with-good-part-3 SOURCE DURATION: 00:50:51.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 2 CONFIDENCE: 0.95 APPROVED: false REASON: The sermon begins with the introduction of the message series in segment [1]. The content remains expository and theological throughout, concluding with a point about the Holy Spirit in segment [853], before an interval of music starts. ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE: available ACOUSTIC MUSIC INTERVALS: none ACOUSTIC SPEECH OVERLAP: no ACOUSTIC BOUNDARIES APPLIED: none Inline CUT markers identify each proposed audio boundary after the relevant word. --- ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT WITH PROPOSED CUTS MARKED --- [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:00:00.000; remove through 00:00:03.240] [CUT] [air whooshing] [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 END at 00:00:03.240; resume after this marked segment] So the message this morning is part three of a little series that we have been doing on these concluding verses in the book of Romans, Romans chapter 12, the verses 17 through 21. We've been looking at four practical steps that the apostle Paul says God's people need to take if they are to live in relational harmony with each other. So far we've covered three of the four. This morning we wanna try to pick up on number four to make sure that we're all caught up. Let me just quickly review steps one, two, and three so that we're all on the same page. First of all, Paul says if we are to live in relational harmony, we need to resist the temptation to get even when we are wronged. Verse 17, do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everybody. And as we've seen, returning evil for evil typically starts a cycle of tit for tat which quickly gets out of control and which poisons our own souls. We are to resist the temptation to get even. Number two, we are to realize our relational limitations. Verse 18, if it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Try as we might, we will not always live in harmony with all around us. Many reasons for that, but one reason as we've been seeing in the past is that according to the book of Proverbs, there are three kinds of people. There are wise people, there are foolish people, and there are evil people. Wise people you can engage in meaningful conversation reach a conclusion. Foolish people tend to think they are wise in their own eyes. They do not listen typically to other people. They need to experience life the hard way. And evil people, they're just dangerous. They're out to do you. And the Bible says, stay away from them in as much as it depends on you if possible. Live in peace with all people. And then thirdly, we need to trust God to vindicate us when we have been wronged. Verse 19, 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. To take revenge is to take justice into your own hands. God doesn't want us to do that. He wants us, first and foremost, to trust the authorities that he has established to exercise justice. And when they fail, as sometimes, in fact, often they do, he wants us to put our hope and our trust in him, because at the end of the day, he is judge of the living and the dead, and he will even all the scores. I love the way the Lord Jesus puts it. In Luke chapter 18, when he says concerning the widow who is crying after the unrighteous judge who doesn't care about her needs, but then finally responds because she is troubling him so much, here is what Jesus says concerning the widow. He says, if we could have Luke 18, seven and eight up, and will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones who cry out to him day and night, will he keep putting them off? I tell you, he will see that they get justice and quickly. When there is nobody to look after us, God himself will take action. That's what faith calls us to, and that is why throughout scripture, God is known as the God of widows and orphans. The more helpless you are, the more keenly interested God is in stepping into the situation, and he wants us to learn how to trust him, and that brings us this morning then to the fourth practical step that he invites us to take, and that is that we are to overcome evil with good. Verse 21, do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. Notice it's not good enough just to not do the negative. It's not good enough to not be overcome by evil, but God wants us to go a step further. He wants us to overcome evil with good. Now, one of the advantages of being away on holidays for a couple of weeks is it gave me a chance to catch up on some reading, and one of the books that I was able to read is this book called Think No Evil, and it's the story of the shooting of the 10 schoolgirls in Nickelmines, Pennsylvania back in 2006. Some of you will remember the news story. It was Monday, October the 2nd, when a man by the name of Charles Carl Roberts entered a school building and heavily armed with three guns, and let the boys go, let some of the adults go, and then tied up the remaining 10 girls, barricaded himself in the schoolhouse, and then as the police was closing in, took his gun and he shot 10 girls. The result was that miraculously five survived. One is alive today with serious brain injuries, but five of the girls died, and you will have seen, you will perhaps remember the story. You'll certainly have seen some of these images. Here's a picture of the little schoolhouse as the helicopter was taking off, evacuating the wounded girls. Here is an overview of what it actually looked like from the air. You see how small that school is, and you see all the emergency vehicles parked there, and in this image, you see the burial of one of the girls in Amish country, and it was a horrific story all the more because the Amish are a very peace-loving people. I've said before, last summer Michelle and I spent a week or so in Lancaster County, and experienced a lot of that life of the Amish community. It was a horrific, horrific event, and what do you do when you are confronted by that kind of horror? Well, the Amish have a long tradition of being pacifists, and they have experienced a great deal of persecution in the course of their life. In fact, one of their heroes is a Dutchman by the name of Dirk Willems, and they have a 1,500-page book describing the history of martyrs in the Amish tradition. The Amish, part of the Anabaptist tradition, and during the period of the Reformation, they are the ones who rejected infant baptism and adopted believer's baptism, and that caused a huge stir, and both Catholics and Protestants hated the Anabaptists and persecuted them viciously. Well, in 1569, a man by the name of Dirk Willems was captured by the authorities, imprisoned in a castle of some sort, but managed to escape by tying together the proverbial bedsheets, and he let himself down out of the window and crossed a moat which was lightly frozen over. He was a slight man himself. He didn't fall through, but when the guard chasing him came after him, tried to cross that same moat, he fell through the ice and desperately cried out for Dirk Willems to save him. Now, put yourself in that situation. What would you do? I know I'm sufficiently ungodly that I would've kept on running, but Willems didn't. He went back, pulled him out of the ice. The guard was inclined to let him go, but the burglary master was standing there watching this, and he was yelling at the guard, "You let him go. "Let me remind you of your sworn duty to uphold the law. "I want you to arrest this man." So that's what the guard did. So Dirk Willems was rearrested, tried, sentenced to be burned at the stake, and that sentence was carried out. Now, to his great misfortune, there was a strong wind blowing the wrong way when he was being fried in the fire, and it took forever for him to burn up on the stake. It was a terrible, terrible story. And so finally, one of the military people took pity on him and killed him so that he wouldn't have to keep on suffering. 70 times or something like that, he cried out to the Lord God for God to have mercy as he was being persecuted. That's the Amish tradition. And so with that kind of tradition and that kind of culture, they're firmly established in resisting evil, and so the Amish community of Nickelmines, Pennsylvania, not very far from Lancaster, made the collective decision that they would practice what the Scriptures preach, and they would not be overcome by evil, but they decided they would overcome evil with good. And that became a huge news story as time went on because it is so counterintuitive and so contrary to what most of us would do naturally. And that, of course, is God's exhortation for you and me. This isn't just for the Amish. This isn't just for people who are pacifists. This is true for all those who name the name of Jesus, do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. So the question, of course, is how in the world do you do that? Because if you've ever been in a situation where you have been wronged and who of us hasn't, then you know how tough it is, not just to resist the temptation to stew about it and to fret about it and to get agitated by it, but how difficult it is to return good for evil when you have been so wronged. So how do you do it? Well, there are really two steps biblically that we keep coming back to, and in the time that remains, I wanna talk to you about those, not because you haven't heard this before, but because sometimes it's good for us to hear it again and again and again until, by God's grace, we learn to practice these things in the nitty-gritty of everyday life. The first key, of course, is to practice the art of forgiveness. Now, forgiveness is releasing the other person of the debt they owe us. Jesus, in the Lord's Prayer, says, "Forgive us our trespasses or our debts "as we forgive those who have trespassed against us "or who are indebted against us." To forgive is to discharge what somebody owes us on the basis of what God has done for us in Christ Jesus, our Lord. Ephesians 432, "Bear with each other "and forgive whatever grievances you may have "against one another. "Forgive as the Lord forgave you." Ephesians 432, "Be kind and compassionate to one another, "forgiving each other just as in Christ God forgave you." Now, we've talked about this before, but one of the problems in Christian community is that we tend to short-circuit the process of forgiveness. We tend to say, well, I know that I'm supposed to give, forgive, and I will pretend that I have forgiven, but in the meantime, it lingers and it comes back, and we don't really get rid of that. It comes through in conversations, it comes through in the stories we tell the people that we talk to, the irritation that arises when we see certain individuals in a certain context. One of the reasons for that is that forgiveness isn't simply a single decision or a single step. Forgiveness is a process, and I know that we've talked about this before a number of years ago. It's also written up in a number of books that I wrote, but I wanna take a few moments and walk you once again through this chart that outlines the process of forgiveness. It's one of the most brilliant expositions of the process of forgiveness that I have ever encountered. I can say that because it's not original with me. I borrowed it with permission from somebody else, but it outlines to a T what happens and what needs to happen in order to really come to the point where forgiveness is a reality. So let's just walk through it as quickly as we can. It begins, of course, as it always does with an offensive event. You step on my toes, I step on your toes. We create hard feelings. In the Nickel Mine story, what was the offense? Well, 10 young girls, age seven to 13, were cruelly shot by a 32-year-old man, a married man, the father of three, a man who killed himself after he had shot the girls. That was the offensive event. What happens when somebody sins against us? We experience hurt, and hurt produces anger, and the degree of hurt and the degree of anger that we experience is conditioned by two sets of factors, one on the part of the offender, and the other on the part of the person who is being offended against. On the offender part, just quickly, severity, acknowledgement of wrong intentionality, frequency. What made it so difficult for the Amish community following that shooting was that this was a man who was known in the community. He wasn't part of the Amish community, but he was a milk truck driver. And so he went around from day to day to all the farms, gathering milk for the dairy, and he was extremely well known. What made it also very difficult is that that this was carefully planned. This was not just a spirit. This guy had been planning this for weeks. Nobody had a clue at what was happening with him, and clearly his intentions were very wicked. So that's one aspect. The more severe the things are that are done against us, the more often they happen. I mean, it doesn't get much worse than having your girls shot and killed. One family lost two girls in that shooting, and another family now lives with a girl that is brain-damaged for life because of the shooting. That's bad. I mean, that would make you have nightmares, wouldn't it? So the other factor that enters into the picture then is, as I said, the factors on the part of the person who is sinned against. And I said earlier, the Amish community has a long history of pacifism, that is turning the other cheek. They don't believe in military engagement. Their conscience is objectors when it comes to the military. There's a long history to that. They've had a long history of persecution. They've been driven all over the world, trying to find places where they can live in peace to pursue their particular lifestyle. We may agree or disagree with that lifestyle, but they are a godly people who seek to walk with God as best as they know and how they understand it. So they have a lot of community support, and that helped in that whole grieving process because you can imagine the pain coming out of this was just incredibly intense. They have this long tradition of turning the other cheek. They have this long tradition of knowing that God is sovereign. Nothing happens outside of his at least permissive will, and they know God is on his throne, and he's going to use it for their good and for his glory. So offensive event leads to hurt, leads to anger, and then leads to information gathering. What happens whenever there is a natural disaster or an accident of a major proportion? They bring in the investigators and they begin to examine what really caused this. We have a very difficult time living in a world not knowing what caused a particular thing because it fills us with uncertainty and fear. Just this past week down in Pennsylvania, ironically, a train wreck, you heard about that perhaps. Train flew off the tracks going 170 kilometers an hour in a bend where the speed was 80 kilometers an hour. They're trying to figure out what happened. The engineer has no recollection. Now the news stories that are coming forward is that three trains were either shot at or had rocks thrown at them, and now the question is, is that part of what caused this particular accident? We don't know yet, but there's always an investigation. There's always a searching, and you can appreciate it in this Amish community, there was a tremendous amount of soul-searching about what's really going on here. First of all, why did he do this? Why did he go to the lumber store and get all kinds of boards and two-by-fours and two-by-sixes? He had 600 rounds of ammunition with him. Why did he barricade himself in this schoolhouse? Why did he let the boys go, and why did he hold on to these girls? Well, more likely than not, and this is the strong suspicion, is that he had actually planned to sexually assault one or more of those girls, and when they fought back and he knew the police were outside, he lost his cool, and that's when he shot them. But a terrible situation. But then again, what brings him in to this particular place in life? Well, it turns out that nine years earlier, his baby girl had been born premature, and she died, and it was a death, though he had three kids later on, it was a death he never got over, and in his suicide note to his wife, or in his note to his wife describing what he was planning to do, he referenced the fact that he could simply not get over the death of his girl, and before he shot the girls, he said he was gonna make them pay. Imagine that, he was gonna make them pay for the death and his sense of loss, historically. A terrible thing, but you can imagine the questions that were going through the minds of that community. So you've got information gathering, you probably won't be able to see it, but information gathering leads to anger, leads to hurt, and the cycle continues from hurt to anger to information gathering, and more to hurt. If you're the parents of one of these children, and you hear that he was planning to do some very nasty things to your children, you're gonna get angrier the more you know, isn't that true? And here's what I want us to understand about this, this process is often short-circuited in the community, we tell each other, get over it, forgive, forget, go on with life, it's not that simple. Those questions need to be answered, those searches need to be completed, and the issues need to be clarified so that you can bring issues to arrest. That's why you've got so many kids who have been adopted out, for example, who in their teenage years or later on in life, they begin this search for their parents because to be ruthless, not ruthless, but ruthless, to not know where you come from or who you are has a great bearing on where you're going in the course of your life, and so information gathering is such a part. Sometimes we find answers, sometimes we don't find answers, but the cycle of information hurt, anger, and around and around it goes until the process comes to a measure of completion. How do you know when it comes to completion? You know that it comes to completion when you get to a place called reframing. Let me enlarge that for you, information gathering here leads to reframing. Reframing means that you begin to understand what actually happened and why it happened. Up until then, you have a lot of questions, you may think it's my fault, it's his fault, it's her fault. Information gathering helps you sort out which is which, and now you can come to a place where you can actually reframe the truth, and for the folks in nickel mines, reframing meant they came to an understanding that this man was profoundly mentally disturbed. It lived below the surface, nobody, not even his wife, who by the way is a devout Christian woman who went to a prayer meeting the morning that he went to do this awful deed in the school, and for reasons unknown, he just snapped, and that's how this horror came to be. They could stop blaming themselves, how come nobody saw it come, how come nobody could prevent it, and reframing helps you get to the place where you know what your part in something was, what somebody else's part was, you learn you don't have to take responsibility for what somebody else is doing. I mean, imagine this widow of the shooter, how tough it is to go around the community knowing that your husband is the one who killed these girls. That's a terrible burden to live with, and she's remarried now by the way, and we'll talk about that more in a moment, but reframing means I know what my part was, I know what wasn't my part, what your part was I can't do anything about, what my part was I could take to the cross, thank God for the cross, I can receive forgiveness, and I can leave it behind and go on with my life. How do I know that process is completed? Well, it shows up in a desire, or in an ability to release the desire to retaliate. To retaliate, again, is to get even, and getting even is the most natural of all human conditions. To err is human, as the saying goes, to forgive is divine. And so as we go through this process of learning to forgive, all the things that we've just been talking about, how do you know you're getting there? You're starting to lose your, your hurt is getting healed, your anger is starting to abate, your questions are being answered, and now you can come to a place where you have reframed not only, but where you can come to the place where you can actually start leaving it behind, and you start losing the desire to retaliate. Very counterintuitive, it is contrary to how most of the world operates, which is why this community gained so much publicity in this whole process, because it was so at odds with what the world expects, but it's rooted and grounded in the character of God. And if we are his children, we are expected to manifest by faith in Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit, his characteristics. Jesus talks about that, you might recall, in Matthew chapter five, profound verses, you know them well. Let's read them together. Are they here? Maybe they're not here. Let me read them to you from, sometimes things disappear in cyber land. It's a mystery. Matthew five, this is part of the servant of the mount, and Jesus says, you have heard that it was said, love your neighbor and hate your enemy, but I tell you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your father in heaven. He causes his son to rise on the evil and the good, sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous, and if you love those who love you, very interesting verse, if you love those who love you, what reward will you get, are not even tax collectors doing that, and if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? And then verse 48, powerful verse, I think, be perfect therefore as your heavenly father is perfect. The word is be complete, be mature, and Jesus' argument is very simple. Your father who is in heaven looks over all creation, and he blesses the good and the bad. The sun shines on the righteous and on the unrighteous, the rain falls on the good and on the evil, and he says, if you are your father's children, then he says, it is your responsibility to manifest that same character in your heart, and that then is the collective decision that this Amish community made. Wasn't easy, they were just as human as you and I, they grieved intensely, but they also knew that as followers of the Lord Jesus, they were called upon to forgive from the heart. You and I likewise are called to forgive from the heart if we expect to receive God's forgiveness for all our deeds, and that's why the two are always linked together. To take you back for just a moment to this chart on forgiveness, you see over here is God's intervention and prayer and fasting because at the end of the day, this doesn't come naturally to anybody. Some people would say, well, you know, the Amish were just that kind of people, and it was easy, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. They're just as human as you and I, and sons and daughters of Adam, we don't vary much at all. What it takes is the grace of God, the experience of our own forgiveness, God's work in our heart, and God's work in our relationships. And so for the Amish, they took some very concrete steps. What they did is they, let me see if this is where I wanna mention that, yes. I don't know, no wonder I'm confused here. Here's what they did, they called a gathering. And in that gathering, they had about a hundred of the Amish families gathered together with the widow of the shooter, and they had this incredible reconciliation service whereby they released her, and they blessed her, and they did what they could to provide for her needs. And they also took it upon themselves, then, to go to the funeral of this shooter and show solidarity with her family. And that takes us back, then, to the point that I skipped over, actually, and I wanna come back to that for a moment, is that if the first step is to forgive from the heart, then the second step is to do good to your enemy. Listen again to how Paul puts it, if we can get that verse up. If your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he is thirsty, give him something to drink. If your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he is thirsty, give him something to drink. That's a quotation from the Book of Proverbs. And it is God's invitation to you and to me to put into action what we've just been talking about, where the character of God is to bless even saints and sinners, and he is inviting us to do exactly the same kind of thing. What happens when we step into that and we actually return good for evil? Very quickly, in the time that remains, we're gonna touch on three things that I think are profoundly important. Number one, we might win over our enemy. We might win over our enemy. If we can get that slide up. Verse 20, the verse that we just quoted, if your enemy is hungry, keep that verse up. If your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he is thirsty, give him something to drink. And then notice how that passage ends. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head, very interesting expression. And there's a lot of different interpretations as to what that might mean. Some of which are way out to lunch, but I take it at face value, and I think it means your returning good for evil gives an opportunity for that person to be shamed in his wickedness and to come to repentance. Proverbs says, "A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger." What happens when you aggressively address somebody, they almost immediately become defensive, do they not? And it just goes tit for tat. And before you know it, the relationship disappears into conflict and confusion. But what happens when you're the least? What happens when you say, I'm really sorry, I take responsibility for my part in this particular situation? What very often happens is that now you make it possible for the other person to come along and say, well, I was wrong to, and I'm sorry. And the reason for that is that the reason people are mean is almost inevitably because they feel threatened. And they're afraid of power because their experience is that power can be hurtful and destructive. And so immediately we become defensive in the presence of power. That, by the way, is why God, who could have used power to bring us to himself, chose instead to bring us to himself by the power of the cross. Because in showing his weakness, he makes it possible for our hearts to open up and to respond to him. And so when you and I are not overcome by evil, but instead return good for evil, we create an environment that if there is anything at all in that person's heart that is still good and that can long for restoration of life and relationships, it will bring that out and it will make it possible for that person to be won over and to repent of where he or she has found himself. There's a powerful example of that in 1 Samuel chapter 24 where David is being chased through the wilderness. And you will recall, Saul's kingship was rejected by the Lord because of his disobedience. Samuel had anointed David to become the king of Israel. And Saul found out about that and he was determined to kill David. A whole bunch of riffraff had joined David and every opportunity Saul had, he was trying to kill David and capture him and his troops. And then in 1 Samuel 24, you have this beautiful situation where David and his men are hiding deep in a cave and Paul comes in to go to the bathroom. Remember that story? Fascinating story. And David's men are trying to encourage him, here is your opportunity to kill Saul and get rid of all this persecution. But David knows that he cannot do that because Saul is God's anointed and he cannot kill the anointed of God. So what does he do? Sneaks up on Saul going to the bathroom and cuts off a piece of his robe. Remember that story? Fascinating little story. And then when Saul's all done and he leaves the cave, David calls after him and he says, "Look, Saul, recognize this little piece of cloth? "Look at your robe. "I was close enough to do you in, "but I chose not to do that. "And here, here is the evidence." And Saul's response illustrates this principle that we're just talking about, if we can get these verses up. He says, "In one Samuel 24, 17 to 19, "you are more righteous than I." This is Saul speaking. "You have treated me well, but I have treated you badly. "You have just now told me of the good you did to me. "The Lord gave me into your hands, but you did not kill me. "When a man finds his enemy, "does he let him get away unharmed? "May the Lord reward you well "for the way you treated me today." And for the moment, at least, Saul called off the chase. Didn't last long, because when there is evil in your heart, evil has a way of coming back up to the surface. And again, and again, Saul tries to kill David until Saul himself gets killed in battle against the Philistines. But as I said, one of the reasons for the cross is that God shows us his weakness so that we will not be afraid of his power, but that instead we will come to him trusting because he has demonstrated his heart. And you and I overcome evil with good when people can see that we come with nothing in our hands. We have nothing to prove, but our love for people around us. Not an easy thing to practice, and it's not easy to practice when our emotions are on high, but it needs to be done. There's a second thing that happens when we practice what scripture calls us to do, and that is we will experience God's blessing. We will experience God's blessing. It's very interesting in this passage that when the Apostle Paul quotes from the Book of Proverbs, he leaves off the last part of that verse. Here's how the quotation goes, "If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat. "If he is thirsty, give him water to drink. "In doing this, you will hear burning coals on his head." And then the part that Paul leaves off are these words, "And the Lord will reward you." The Lord will reward you. And that's almost identical to what Peter says in 1 Peter 3 verse 9, "Do not repay evil with evil, or insult with insult, "but with blessing, because to this you were called "so that you may inherit a blessing." At the end of the day, what guarantees success in life is not our own ability to make it happen. It is our relationship with God through faith in Jesus Christ. And when we walk before him in obedience, and we do his will, and we experience his blessing, that is all that matters. And so even though it may look like we're going to suffer loss, and it looks like we're the patsies because we're not returning evil for evil, but overcoming evil with good, God can more than make up for what we are losing out on. Because you see, if he is pleased with us, what else matters? Because he can more than compensate what is being taken away from us. And our responsibility then is to make sure that there is nothing between God and us that gets in the way of his blessing. And I wanna make one more reference to the story of David before we bring this to a close this morning, because this principle is so powerfully illustrated in his encounter with Abigail. Anybody here remember who Abigail was? Abigail was the wife of a dude by the name of Nabal. And Nabal was a very wicked but very rich man with huge possessions, a lot of sheep, and he was just a big rancher dude and had a lot of servants and a lot of money. And while David and his men were on the run all the time, they protected his men from people that would harm or steal their property or their possessions and never expected anything in return. So now David and his men are in a situation where they have some need, so David sends a delegation to Nabal and this delegation says to him, "Look, we've been there for you. "How would you like to provide us with a picnic lunch "for all these 400 people?" Well, Nabal is a rude dude and he laughs at them and he says, "No way," and he sides with King Saul as opposed to David. And this delegation comes back to David and David may be a good, soft-spoken dude, but he's a warrior and he is livid. Remember the story? He is just, he is going to take his men and he's gonna teach Nabal a lesson. He says, "I am not going to leave one of you alive "in this camp." Well, Abigail is Nabal's wife. She hears this story and she's a smart cookie because she knows trouble is brewing. And so she gathers all these possessions together, all these supplies, and she goes out and she meets David. And here's what she says to him and we'll be done in just a moment, but let me read you this because this is such a powerful story. This is 1 Samuel 26, beginning at verse 28. "Let no wrongdoing be found in you as long as you live. "Even though someone is pursuing you to take your life, "the life of my master will be bound securely "in the bundle of the living by the Lord your God." I love that expression. Your life will be bound securely in the bundle of the living by the Lord your God. "But the lives of your enemies he will hurl away "as from the pocket of a sling. "When the Lord has done for my master every good thing "he promised concerning him and has appointed him "as leader over Israel, my master will not have "on his conscience," listen to this, "the staggering burden of needless bloodshed "or of having avenged himself." Here's what she's saying, God's gonna make you king. When you become king, you don't wanna have to live with a guilty conscience of having returned evil for evil. It's your job to return good for evil because God is on your side. And so then David responds in verse 33. He says, "May you be blessed for your good judgment "and for keeping me from bloodshed this day "and from avenging myself with my own hands." What happens when we return good for evil? We may win our opponent over, not always, but sometimes. But even if we don't win the opponent over, we will experience God's blessing in our own lives. And at the end of the day, that is all that matters. There's a third thing that happens, we'll come back to that perhaps, Lord willing, next Sunday on Pentecost. Sunday, but the question for each one of us is this. Number one, are there places where evil has overcome us? And we have allowed bitterness, resentment, rejection to enter into the core of our hearts. That's a very dangerous place to be because it is a place where the devil can stir up a lot of murderous instinct. The antidote to that is to forgive freely from the heart. So here's the question, are there places in our relationships where we yet need to practice the process of forgiveness so that we can come to a place where we can truly forgive from the heart? How do you know when you're there? You're there when you no longer have joy in trouble that your opponent experiences. You're there when you know that you can bless the other person and you can truly rejoice when it goes well with them. Not an easy place to get to. It takes the grace of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. And so third question is, are there places where you need to overcome evil with good? Are there places where you and I need to step into relationships and say we're gonna let bygones be bygones, I forgive you from the heart, and I'm gonna use my time, talent, and treasure to bless you in ways that honor God? That's what God's after in Christian community. That's what it means to be called a child of God. None of us is gonna do it perfectly, we're gonna fail many, many times. But will we grow up in Christ to become more and more like him so that in a world that is torn apart by violence, torn apart by evil and wickedness, that somehow or another God's people can be the salt of the earth and the light of the world. Because as they are, and that's what we're gonna look at, Lord willing next Sunday, the power of evil will be broken. Not by might, nor by power, but by God's people living in the spirit of Jesus. What a challenge, but what an opportunity because of the resurrection of Jesus and the outpouring of his Holy Spirit. [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 2 START at 00:50:45.380; remove through 00:50:51.000] (light music) [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 2 END at 00:50:51.000; resume after this marked segment]