Dismissing Jesus (Part 3) - Love Your Enemies

So you heard the words of Jesus from Matthew chapter 5, love your enemies, and then you see a video, a video that's blown up all over the internet in the last few weeks.

Matthew 5 · chapter mention

And my question is this is Jesus saying the same thing?

Is love your enemies the same as basically let's all just kind of find a way to get along in the world?

Now clearly getting along and respecting people's differences is a good human value, a biblical value, but but is that really what Jesus was saying?

I think it's of note that when you look at what Jesus said, it was part of the larger context of the Sermon on the Mount, and six different times he says, you've heard it said in Matthew 5, and then he says, But I say to you, and in this instance he says, you've heard it said that you should love your neighbors or love your friends basically, but hate your enemies.

He says, but I want to tell you to love your enemies.

And notice what he doesn't say.

He doesn't say, I want you to tolerate your enemies.

He doesn't say, I want you to coexist with your enemies.

And he doesn't say, I want you to agree with your enemies and minimize all of the differences that you feel with the people that are different than you, that see things differently than you do.

He doesn't say that.

Instead, he uses this word love.

And love is a hard word for us in the English language because we love a lot of different things.

We love ice cream, we love pizza, and so when we talk about love, sometimes it's hard to understand exactly what Jesus is talking about here.

And we started a series a few weeks ago that we called dismissing Jesus, and what we're doing is we're looking at some of the things that Jesus has said that are easy to dismiss, not just in the culture, but within the church.

And this is one of those things that's easily dismissed, although it is something that we know can be profound.

In fact, several years ago we had here on this stage a man named Masab Yusuf who wrote a book called Son of Hamas.

He grew up as one of the children of one of the founders of Hamas, an organization that was founded to say, we are going to destroy our enemies.

And he stood here and he's written about it in his book, about his conversion, and he stood here and told about it when he said, It was when I began to read the actual words of Jesus that I came to this, love your enemies, that I realized how radically different the worldview of Christianity is than the worldview that I had been brought up seeing and believing.

So we know that it's profound, but but is it profound just in saying, let's all just tolerate, coexist, get along?

Jesus said more than that.

He didn't say less than that, he said more than that.

And what he said is, I want you to love your enemies.

And so, in order to try to answer this question today, we're going to ask three questions.

The first question is this, and that is, who are our enemies?

Who are our enemies?

Because you may have an initial gut reaction just to this statement, love your enemies.

Some of you probably, your initial reaction is to say, I don't have enemies.

I'm somebody who really doesn't have any.

Or you quickly said, Oh no, I've got a few.

And you were able to articulate it very quickly, but but here the words that Jesus uses, the actual Greek word that he uses for enemy, has a lot of nuance to it.

It's the word uh ekthros.

And what it means is a hatred or an under, or that somebody's under disfavor or a hostility that somebody brings into your life.

In other words, what he's communicating here is not just somebody who's on a grand scale our enemy, like this is somebody in another country that's at war with us, but but he's saying this is anybody who brings hostility or disfavor into your life in any way.

And so the upshoot of this is that whether you think of yourself as having enemies or not, anytime you have a gut reaction that says, I'm a little uh kind of put off with this person, or I have a negative disaction reaction to this person, I dislike this person, that that could be the person that Jesus is talking about here.

In this last election cycle, I heard several people talk about kind of their reaction afterward, and what they would say is, if those people in my family voted for the other candidate, I'm not going to Christmas dinner with them.

Did any of you hear that kind of thing?

I heard that.

Or I can't possibly be friends with somebody who supported the other end of the political spectrum.

And what is happening in that moment is you're basically saying, I'm putting my political ideology above human relationship.

You're saying I'm an enemy in terms of ideology, therefore I'm not responsible not only to tolerate you or to coexist with you, let alone to have any kind of relationship with you.

D.A.

Carson wrote a book a few years ago in which he called it the intolerance of tolerance.

And he said that in our nation, one of the great values right now is tolerance, as long as that tolerance only goes in one direction.

He says that the tolerant is intolerant of anybody who would dare say that anything inside the kind of spectrum of what should be tolerated is by any means not right.

And then it becomes quickly intolerant.

In other words, people will say, Yeah, I want to love all my enemies as long as you agree with me.

But notice again, Jesus says something more than that.

He says, I want you to love your enemies.

I want you to love the people, the people who you have any kind of dissonance with.

So that's the first question.

Here's the second question, and that is, why should we love our enemies?

And I'm going to give you four reasons.

The first one I think applies especially to those of you who would say, I'm a follower of Christ.

The next three could apply generally, whether you see yourself as a person of faith or not.

And the first one really is very simple.

And that is, I'm just going to say we should love our enemies because Jesus says so.

Jesus says, but I say to you, love your enemies.

And you may think that that's not enough, but here's what's really going on.

Jesus is simply saying, if you're one of my followers, if you claim to be my follower, then you don't have the option to simply say, I'm going to write this person off and choose to have nothing to do with them.

That's what he's saying.

Now, sometimes what happens in, and our church could be guilty of this, is we would say the law was given to show us that we can't meet the law.

In other words, all of the rules, all of the standards, part of its point is to say, you and I can't possibly meet all of the demands, therefore, it points us to Jesus and to his grace and the sufficiency of what he did for us on the cross.

But sometimes, and rarely do people say this, what they take that to mean is, therefore, I don't need to try to keep any of the law.

But that isn't what this is about.

Jesus says, here's something I want you to actually try to do, to love your enemies.

And the fact that you and I may not do it perfectly does not become an excuse never to deal with what Jesus actually says.

When he says, This is what I want you to do.

I want you to love your enemies.

And part of what drives this is understanding that God has loved people, you and me, when we were his enemies.

This is what Romans chapter 5, verse 10 says.

Romans 5:10

It says that when we were God's enemies, that Christ came and died for us.

And what that's communicating is that God's love for us is in spite of our worthiness of it.

And that's what he's saying, I want you to do if you're my follower.

I want you to give love, even to people who you might say aren't really worthy of it.

So that's the first reason.

Here's the second reason.

The next three reasons I am going to cite or use reasons that Martin Luther King Jr.

gave in a message that he gave on this passage in 1957.

And he gave it in the Deep South in a racially divided nation to a group of mostly African Americans who were listening and dealing with some of the oppression that was happening in our country at the time.

And here's, and these aren't necessarily from the text, but here's what he said.

He said that one of the reasons we should do this is because hate only intensifies hate and evil.

And what he was talking about here is he's saying that if you or I give in to hate, in other words, if we don't love our enemies, what we do is we actually intensify the cycle of hate and evil, and it just becomes worse and worse.

Maybe a good analogy of this is if you watch kids on the playground and one kid does something mean to the other kid, and then the other kid comes back and is like, oh yeah, I'll show you.

And then the next kid comes, and he's like, oh yeah, I'm gonna show you, and then I'll show you.

You know, what starts off is, you know, he just kind of bumped me, ends up in, you know, I was throwing him down and beating his head against the concrete kind of a thing.

And that's what Martin Luther King was talking about here, Junior.

He was saying that we escalate hate when we choose hate.

That we actually make it worse.

Here's another reason that he gives, and this is our third reason, and that is hate distorts the personality of the hater.

Hate distorts the personality of the hater.

Here's how he wrote about this or said this in this message.

He said, For the person who hates, the beautiful becomes ugly, and the ugly becomes beautiful.

For the person who hates, the good becomes bad and the bad becomes good.

For the person who hates, the true becomes false, and the false becomes true.

That's what hate does.

And what he's talking about here is that there is a reality that if you give in to hate, that you don't just get the other person kind of to say, there, you're gonna pay for what you did to me, but you also take part of that into you and it distorts you.

And it distorts your perception of yourself and of the other person, but it also distorts you so that you can't even see beauty anymore.

And here's part of what this does, and Martin Luther King Jr.

again says this in this message is he says that what happens is we fail to see any good in another person and we fail to see any wrong in ourselves.

And he's talking about two great doctrines of Christianity right here.

Two things that are seemingly opposite.

One is the doctrine that says that people are created in the image of God, and the other is the doctrine that says that we have all sinned and fall short of the glory of God, the doctrine of original sin.

And here's how these two things play out into this context.

If you distort yourself so that you don't see the doctrine of the image of God, what it means is when somebody offends you, you fail to be able to see any good in them.

And so what you start to do is you start to say, that person, they're bad, they're evil, they're wrong.

Instead of being able to say, even in the worst of us, because we're created in the image of God, there's some good.

And then on the other side, the doctrine of sin, if we get distorted, we start to say, I'm right, I'm a victim, that person's all wrong, I haven't done anything wrong, rather than being able to own any part of a conflict that we may have participated in.

Because we don't see ourselves as sinful, as broken, as capable of any wrong.

And so, even in the best of us, there are some things that are flawed and wrong and broken.

And what hate does is it distorts that and it distorts our capacity to see the good.

And then Martin Luther King gives one more reason.

He says this.

He says that that love has within it a redemptive power.

Now, again, think about where he was speaking this and when he was speaking this.

He was speaking this to a group of people who were purely because of their race being not just discriminated against, but abused.

And he stands there and on the authority of the word of God says, says, love your enemies because love is what has redemptive power.

And he cites this example.

He said that Abraham Lincoln, when he was running for president, had a man who would follow him around and tell everyone what a lousy man he was and what a poor character he had.

And that when Abraham Lincoln was elected president, that he had an opportunity to appoint people to his cabinet, and he appointed this man to his cabinet, and most of his closest advisors said, What are you doing?

Do you know what he said about you?

Do you know how how mean he?

I mean, he is your enemy.

And Abraham Lincoln said, he may have said some things about me, but I don't choose to believe things about him unless they're true, and he's the best person for this job.

And when Abraham Lincoln was shot, this man, Mr.

Stanton, evidently stood up at his funeral and was one of the people to talk about his character and who he was and what a good man he was.

In other words, love had brought about redemption.

And again, if you think of Martin Luther King Jr., speaking on a global kind of societal scale, he affected change in our society by mobilizing a group of people to say, we're going to choose not hate but love.

And we're going to bring about a change.

It was Martin Luther King Jr.

who said this in a different context.

He said, darkness cannot drive out darkness.

Only light can do that.

Hate cannot drive out hate, but only love can do that.

And certainly that's talking about maybe on a grander societal level, but but think about it in your own life.

When have you ever given in to the urge to be petty, mean, vindictive, or cruel to somebody and had it work out well?

I mean, just think about that.

When's the last time you'd say, you know, I am so glad that I was completely petty in that situation?

It doesn't happen.

And so it's important for us as we think about this to say, who are my enemies?

It can be anybody.

It can be a roommate, a business partner, a spouse, somebody in my family, somebody I'm close to, that I have a little bit of tension with.

And then why should I love my enemies?

Well, if you're a follower of Jesus, because Jesus said so, but but for all people, because hate escalates.

Hate distorts us, those of us who hate, and love is the only thing that has the redemptive power.

And so that leads us to a third question.

And that is how can we really love?

How is it that we can love?

Now, I mentioned earlier that love is a little confusing for us because we assume that it means to have an emotion for that, that I'm gonna feel about this person who's hurt me like I feel about ice cream.

You know, I'm just gonna have nice warm feelings or whatever it is I get when I think about it.

That isn't necessarily what Jesus is saying here.

He's talking about actions.

And when we look at what's said in Matthew chapter 5, verse 43 through 47, and then that's parallel in Luke chapter 6, verse 27 through 36, I believe that we can see some things that Jesus is urging us to do as a way to love those who've hurt us.

Matthew 5:43–47 Luke 6:27–36

And so I'm going to give you an acronym with the word love, where each letter starts with something that kind of points to something.

And I hope that this synthesizes what these texts say, and it tells us some things that we can actually do to love those who might be people that we have a hard time with.

And my encouragement here is to say, take some small steps, little steps, one step at a time, because if you simply say, I've got to love this person, it'll be a little bit like saying I need to climb Mount Everest next week.

And when Edmund Hillary climbed Mount Everest in 1953, the way that he got it done with his Sherpa was a step at a time.

Not saying I'm doing the whole mountain today, it was a step at a time.

And so this may feel to you like there's no way I could ever love that person.

Do you know what they've done to me?

I'll never feel about them the way I feel about ice cream.

That you would be able to say, I can do some of these things.

And so the acronym LOVE, here's what I'm going to say, and that is the first is to leverage your good for their good.

Leverage your good for their good.

Luke chapter 6, verse 27.

Luke 6:27

Again, a parallel to Matthew 5.

It says, But to you who are listening, I say, Love your enemies.

And he says this do good to those who hate you.

Verse 35.

But love your enemies and do good to them and lend to them without expecting to get anything back.

Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he was kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.

And so here, Jesus' exhortation is simply to say, do good.

Leverage your good for their good.

And then in Luke chapter 6, verse 28, we're told to pray for those who mistreat us for our enemies, basically.

Luke 6:28

And what this means is that you and I will find opportunities to take things in our lives that are for our good that nobody would expect for us to leverage for somebody else, especially somebody who's our enemy, and say, I'm going to find little ways to leverage myself for them.

Now that is hard.

I was thinking about this, especially this idea of praying for our enemies.

And I remembered years ago we had a neighbor, and one of my sons became friends with the boy who lived in one of these houses.

And I would classify the relationship as hot and cold.

So one day it was like, this guy's great.

I want to sleep at his house for the next month.

And then the next day it's like, I can't stand him, I never want to talk to him again.

If you've had kids, you know how that can kind of play out sometimes.

And I could always tell when things were good between my son and this other boy, because my son would come in the house and he'd say, Hey, can I get a couple things?

I'm going to take them out for you know, this guy and me, and we're going to, you know, have lemonade, we're going to do this, we're going to do that.

And he would always come in.

Here's what Jesus is saying.

Even when you're at odds, that you still come in and ask to leverage your good for them.

You see, the reason that I would give things to this little neighbor boy is because my son asked.

And what Jesus is saying is, I want you to keep coming to your Heavenly Father on behalf of your enemies, and I want you to, in your life, figure out things that you can do that you can leverage so that they can still have good things in their life.

Leverage your good for their good.

That's the owl.

Here's the second kind of thing that goes with this acronym LOVE.

Oh, offer the second cheek.

Offer the second cheek.

Here's what Jesus says Luke chapter 16, verse 20, or Luke chapter 6, excuse me, verse 9.

Luke 16:20 Luke 6 · chapter mention

If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also.

If someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them.

Now this is radical.

Some people have read this and they've said, well, what Jesus is doing here is he's saying, well, you only have two cheeks, so you know, let them burn you once, let them burn you twice, then you're done.

I don't think that's exactly what's going on here.

In fact, I think what Jesus is doing is he's implying this language to say, in essence, listen, I want you to not be offended or wiped out by something, but instead to be the person who's big, who chooses to be big in the situation.

Now, I don't think he's talking here about abuse or having to stay in a destructive relationship.

That's not what's in view here.

But what is in view is saying, I'm not going to be the person who gets so bent out of shape every time somebody hurts me or makes a demand on me that it breaks the relationship.

Instead, I'll offer the second cheek.

In fact, there was one time when one of Jesus' disciples came and said to him, basically, How many times do I have to forgive?

This is Matthew 18.

And he says, Should I forgive seven times?

And what he's basically saying is, he's saying, Should I forgive seven times seven is a number of completion in the Old Testament?

So that seems like a good number.

Don't you think, Jesus?

Do you know what Jesus responded with?

Matthew 18?

Verse uh 21, 22, he says, You should forgive 70 times seven.

And his point wasn't, well, sit down with your book and keep track until you get to 491, and then you go, that's it.

We're done now.

His point, again, number of completion, saying 70 times seven is you should keep on forgiving.

Now, again, that doesn't mean that you stay in an abusive or destructive relationship, but what it means is that rather than being a person who says, you know what, I'm offended, I'm hurt, I'm done, I'm just done, that you say, I'm gonna take the high road, I'm gonna be big.

And love sometimes is even when a person doesn't deserve it, saying, I'm going to offer the other cheek.

In Proverbs chapter 15.

Proverbs 15 · chapter mention

We read this in verse 1.

It says, A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.

And usually when we read that, we read that to mean if you are gentle with your words, you'll diffuse a situation, but if you're harsh, it'll stir it up.

And I think that's an appropriate reading.

But you could also read that, that a gentle answer turns away wrath.

It could be your own wrath.

And it could be that a harsh word stirs up your own wrath.

And if you think about it, isn't that true?

That when you are soft with your words, that you actually become less agitated.

But when you're harsh with your words, you become more agitated.

Sometimes maybe just simply saying, I'm going to be big here.

Is a step of love.

So we're going to leverage our good for somebody else's good for their good.

We're going to offer the second cheek.

Here's another thing that we see.

This is the V of love.

I'm going to say we need to vocalize or verbalize blessing.

And I get this from Matthew chapter 5, verse 47.

Matthew 5:47

Here's again what Jesus says.

He says, And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others?

Do not even pagans do that.

And then in Luke chapter 6 again, verse 28, he says, Bless those who curse you.

Luke 6 · chapter mention

Pray for those who mistreat you.

And so Jesus in the two different passages says two things that are similar, but they're related.

One is, I want you to speak to them, greet them, because people of all kinds of backgrounds greet each other.

And then he says, I want you to bless them.

And here's what happens sometimes when you get kind of at odds with somebody, and that is you say, I'm not even going to speak to them anymore.

Now we tend to be a little more sophisticated about it.

We just avoid, like we go to the other side of the room when we see them so we don't actually have to talk to them.

But here, what Jesus is saying, he's saying, he's saying, if you want to love the other person, go say hi to them.

Greet them.

And I don't think he means hi.

I think he means greet them as if you care about them.

And when he says, bless those who curse you, I think what he's referring to here, in greeting, he's saying, I want you to speak to them.

And when he says, bless those who curse you, I think he's saying, I want you when you speak about them to speak well of them.

Now this is hard.

If you have somebody who's hurt you, the tendency is to say, okay, you've hurt me, but I'm gonna make sure everybody I know who knows you knows what a scoundrel you really are.

And do you know what Jesus is doing here?

He's saying, here's what I really want you to do.

I want you to instead choose to return a blessing for a curse.

That doesn't mean that you don't have a confidant or somebody that you can tell about your hurts, that there's nobody you can say it to.

But it means you need to be very careful that you don't have 50 confidants or 10 confidants, that you only have a couple, and that when other people talk about that other person, that you're saying, I'm going to choose to bless rather than to curse.

I'm gonna choose to speak well of.

I'm gonna verbalize a blessing.

Vocalize a blessing instead of speaking poorly.

That's hard.

The E.

L, leverage your good for their good.

O, offer the second cheek.

V, verbalize or vocalize a blessing.

And the E doesn't come from Jesus, but it comes from Genesis chapter 50.

Genesis 50 · chapter mention

And I'm just going to say it's express thanks.

Express thanks to God.

In Genesis, what happens is Joseph is sold by his brothers into slavery.

Now, even if you're not familiar with the Bible, you know this story, you've heard it.

And and think about that.

Sold by brothers into slavery.

I mean, if ever you had a reason to say, they're my enemies, I hate them, that's a pretty good reason.

Joseph ends up, after being a slave, rising through ranks and becoming in charge of a big portion of Egypt, and his brothers come begging food.

And he could have easily said, No, you're getting what you deserve.

Remember when you sold me?

But what does he do?

Genesis chapter 50, verse 20, he says, You intended to harm me, but God intended this for good.

Genesis 50:20

Now hear that.

He doesn't take them off the hook.

He doesn't say, hey, it's all good, we're all good.

He says, You intended to harm me, but then he says, but God intended this for good.

And what he was able to do with the perspective of years is say, somehow, someway, God used your actions that were intended to harm me for his good, for good ultimately.

Now you may not have the perspective of years yet on something.

You may not be able to say, You intended to harm me, but God meant this for good.

But if you can express thanks to God for the hard things and the enemies that have come into your life, what it will do is it will turn you from saying, they're trying to get me and they're winning, to God is using even that for my good.

And the reason that that changes something for you, for me, is all of a sudden I'm not on a on a level field saying, you know what, this is a battle between me and you.

I'm saying, my God, who didn't sanction your evil because you intended to harm me, my God's gonna use it for good in my life.

He's somehow gonna take the thing that you tried to destroy, that you tried to break, and he's gonna bring about redemption and beauty from what you tried to use in a destructive way.

And when you and I can do that, what we're doing is we're saying we have a confidence in a God who's bigger than what any person can do.

And that's a way that we can love, take a small step of loving our enemies.

And you see, this is what Jesus was saying.

He was saying, I want my people, those who call themselves my followers, to be known not as being tolerant or coexisting or agreeing with everybody, but being loving.

In fact, sometimes the most loving thing you can do is to disagree with somebody because you're about something that's even for their betterment ultimately.

But Jesus is saying, I want you to choose love.

Now I would guess some of us are sitting here right now and we're saying, yeah, I've tried that.

It hasn't worked out so well.

And the truth is, you may choose to say, I'm going to love somebody who has been hard for me to love, and it may seem like it backfires.

I remember a few years back I had somebody who was who was speaking kind of against me, against this church, saying all kinds of things that I didn't think were particularly kind or true.

And I said, okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna love this person, I'm gonna do good.

I'm gonna, I didn't have this little love acronym, but but in my mind it was like, I'm gonna do this.

I did some of those things, and you know what?

The the behavior continued.

And the reason I say that is ultimately we don't do this to get somebody to change.

We do this because we believe that it's the best thing, because it honors God, but it's also good for us.

Hate escalates hate, hate distorts us, and it breaks the cycle of love.

And here's what's really key, and that is if you just simply walk out and say, okay, I've got a few enemies and I'm gonna try to love them this week, how can I leverage my good for their good?

How can I verbalize a blood?

You know, how can I do that?

You may be able to do it for a while, but here's where your strength will really come from.

Romans 5, 10.

When we were enemies, Christ died for us.

When I realized that Jesus leveraged his good for my good, that he brought his perfect record and went to the cross for my imperfect record, that he took what he could have claimed just for himself and said, I want, I want you to have it.

When I realize that God offers the second cheek, so to speak, over and over, that every time I fall short of loving my neighbor or doing anything that God calls me to do, that there's beauty in him forgiving and offering grace and redemption.

And when I realize that he has verbalized blessing, we could say we all as people deserve eternal punishment, but Jesus has basically said, I love you and value you, and I'm gonna make you my child by offering you forgiveness and grace.

When I can live in that reality, then it's much harder to hate or dismiss or diminish or cut down people who've hurt me, but it becomes out of that overflow that I can say, I can do some small things that express love.

And what that'll do is it'll bring healing to hopefully homes, to to businesses, to dorm rooms, to campuses, and ultimately even beyond that, to society.

And we've already seen in our nation how a group of people based on the words and teachings of Jesus can help revolutionize something.

And you can be a part of that kind of a revolution even now, where you are, just saying, I'm not going to be one who jumps into the hate, but I'm going to be one who says, I'm not going to dismiss the words of Jesus, but I'm going to choose love.

Father, we thank you for the opportunity just to gather here and for how you have instructed us in things that are not just theoretical in future, but are practical for the here and now.

And Lord, I pray for me and for each person here that we would so experience your love through Jesus Christ that it would be second nature to love even those who are hurtful to us.

And Lord, that that would change us, change our little corner of the world, and then this region and beyond.

And we pray this all in Jesus' name.

Amen.