Matthew 5:43-48

Matthew chapter 5.

Matthew 5 · chapter mention

We're going to finish chapter 5 this morning.

As a church, we've been going through the book of Matthew together, as we do every week.

And we have been in a section that's called the Sermon on the Mount.

Some people don't like the name of that because it's not descriptive enough.

It's kind of like some call it the Kingdom Manifesto or the platform of a kingdom.

You know, like when a political party comes out and they say, okay, this is going to be our political platform.

In a sense, Jesus is outlining, and this is a a compilation of his teachings, that he he probably taught this not just on the hill where this is recorded.

Matthew says he took his disciples up on a hill and he began to teach them.

It probably didn't just happen on a hill.

It probably was the same set of messages that Jesus taught over and over and over again.

So we have some of the same material as in Luke, but it rearranged differently.

So what we're getting from Matthew is such a gift because you can imagine Jesus going from these different synagogues and teaching Saturday morning in Jewish school, like the Hebrew school, about like this guy just shows up and teaches with the authority of a rabbi, and it's just like crazy what he brings, what he brings to bear.

In fact, when we get past chapter 7 and the message is over, what we're going to see is that the group, the people were surprised, they were shocked because it's like, here's Jesus teaching with such authority.

Now, we're in a part of the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus warned his disciples.

He said, Listen, listen, I did not come to break the law or to abolish the law that Moses gave you.

Like, Jesus is saying, like, my kingdom and what I'm teaching you about my kingdom, it doesn't disregard your heritage and what Moses taught you.

No, what I'm teaching and what my kingdom about fulfills the law, and then he goes on and he gives six examples, six examples of the kingdom ethic or six antithesis.

And you remember that there was this formula where Jesus says, you have heard that it was said, but I tell you.

So when we look at these, what we have is a list of six of these individual things.

Hayden, I'm going to need your help again because our slides are not working.

If you could go backwards, um backwards to the beginning.

There we go.

This is what I want to see.

Okay, so here's our first five that we've looked at.

Okay?

The first is that Jesus said anger is equivalent to murder, lust is equivalent to adultery.

He puts strict limits and parameters on divorce.

He says you can't just go get divorced for whatever makes you feel good or bad.

You can't just, you either need to be specific qualifications for divorce.

It's a narrow qualification.

Fourth is speaking truth without needing to spice it up with, I swear, I tell you, I swear, spit to death, cross my heart, and whatever else you add to it.

You don't need to use that kind of language.

If you're a follower of Jesus, living in his kingdom, you just say what you mean and you don't break it.

You just are a truth teller and you don't need fancy language.

This is what we were talking about in the car a couple of weeks ago.

And then fourth, an asymmetrical response of goodness when the world is hash?

No.

That's what happens when you're writing this early in the morning.

Harsh when you're the world is well, it's hash too sometimes, but you feel like it's harsh.

Thank you.

Yes.

Asymmetrical, that's what we looked at last week, an asymmetrical response.

In other words, like if somebody hits you on the right cheek, your response is to turn the other one.

Ace asymmetry is like where you know you got three things on one side and one on the other, right?

It just doesn't line up.

Like it's not a deserved response or a proportional response to, and it's not a cause and effect system.

Jesus is like, you're in my kingdom, we're gonna now all of a sudden do things not just on a human plane, but we're gonna put in here the element of God as witness, and you're gonna live as a people as if I'm present in your midst.

I'm your father, I'm your judge, I'm the judge, I am this invisible third party that, and I extend beyond you.

So I'm you're gonna act in an asymmetrical way in my kingdom, and it's not always gonna be cause and effect.

And you're gonna get you're gonna be brought in and accepted into my kingdom in an asymmetrical way.

In other words, you are loved by God not because of anything in you.

You are going to be, Jesus is gonna come and die on the cross for your sins, um, not because of any good that that Jesus finds in you or the Father finds in you, but because God loves you.

And it's not uh there's not a symmetry to that.

And so we get to this sixth, this sixth um uh antithesis, and it is this love for enemies.

Definitely the most radical thing that Jesus taught.

Let's go to um the next slide, Hayden.

This is gonna be the text, so we'll go through the text and then um we'll unpack it piece by piece.

He says in verse 43, 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, so that you may be children of your father in heaven.

For he causes his son to rise on the evil and the good, and he sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.

For if you love those who love you, what reward will you have?

Don't even the tax collectors do the same?

And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what are you doing out of the ordinary?

Don't even the Gentiles do the same?

Be perfect, therefore, as your Father, as your heavenly father is perfect.

Well, with that, we should pray.

Lord, we um do commend to you our um own hearts and we pray that you would work in our lives.

Um I pray, God, for just your um miraculous working in this time, um, that you would take our lives and just how you say in 2 Corinthians that we're vessels and we just contain the excellency of the power.

We pray, Lord, that you um that you would cause your excellency of power to just uh flow out of us as these broken vessels, and that you would work in our midst.

And Lord, we just ask um that you um would be in our midst teaching us through this text in Matthew.

This is a hard saying.

Living it out is hard.

It's not hard to read it or understand it, but it's just it's very hard to live this out and to know what this looks like in our own lives.

And um, and so we just we give ourselves to you.

We want to be obedient um listeners this morning.

We pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Amen.

Amen.

Um so let's start with verse 43 and 44.

This is this is the contrast where he um he lays it out and he says, Um, 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.

So the Jewish tradition that's spoken of in Leviticus 19, which we will look at in a minute, is this tradition, which is to love your neighbor and hate your enemy.

Leviticus 19, and I think I have a slide for this, it does say love your um neighbor, but it does not say um to hate your enemy.

Do you have that there?

See if you can find that.

Um, yeah, so Leviticus 19, 18 would be what Jesus is referencing.

And then what became of the tradition, the 1500 tradition of Judaism was by implication to hate your enemy.

So there's this command to love your neighbor, but what had been built up within Jewish tradition was um you love your neighbor, but we hate our enemies.

And we see um a wrestling with this throughout Jewish history.

Um, like what do you do?

What do you do with this idea of enemies?

And so Jesus repeats what was familiar territory for his followers.

Love your neighbor, hate your enemy.

And then Jesus does what he does in all six of these antithesis.

He says, I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.

So in verse 43, Jesus is addressing this common tradition in in Leviticus 19.

But then he's saying, You need to love your enemies.

The original commandment focused on loving those with within one's community, which was often interpreted as fellow Israelites.

So there's a very ethnic um connotation in this of, hey, we are together, we're Israelites, we're we're we're the children of God that came through Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

We love one another, but beyond our community, you know, we're gonna we're gonna hate our enemies.

But Jesus extends this to include enemies, this love of enemies and the persecutors, challenging the limited scope of love practiced and taught by many religious leaders.

So if we were to kind of map this onto our modern day, this idea of an enemy is somebody who takes the opposite side, the other team.

It could be another nation, it could be another pol somebody of another political persuasion, another political party.

It could be a business competitor that's just playing dirty in the field where you're at.

It could be a coworker that is undercutting you at work, it could be a hostile boss, it could be somebody that you're related to, it could be a family member that is just toxic in how they treat you.

So when you read this idea of enemies, for us, you know, we could think of like Russia or maybe North Korea.

Sometimes it's China.

It could be Sam who disagrees with your political view, or it could be Sarah, who's a fellow employee and takes credit for your work.

Those would be kind of our modern enemies.

And Jesus says, love your enemies.

Jesus' instructions were revolutionary.

It wasn't merely a passive tolerance, but then active love.

It's literally the word agape, this self-sacrificing love, selfless, sacrificial, unconditional love.

It goes beyond mere feelings and encompasses actions.

Now, I told you at the beginning that Luke also records this same teaching, and it's found in Luke 6, 27 and 28.

Hayden, you can put that up there on the screen.

It says, But I say to you who listen, love your enemies, do what is good to those who hate you.

Okay, so that's the added piece of this in Luke is do what is good to those who hate you.

The second part that Luke adds is to bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.

Imagine being a disciple of Jesus, and a lot of Jesus' ministry is just teaching on the kingdom.

Like you're hearing these sermons over and over again, from with different pieces, like this, similar concepts, similar principles tied in.

And so here, Luke's in his his recording, he says, he adds this doing what is good to those who hate you.

Bless those who curse you.

As we wrestle with this, you have to understand that the church, uh in an attempt to understand this text, has taken this in a whole bunch of different directions.

As I mentioned last week, this was inspiring material for Martin Luther King Jr.

This was an inspiration for Gandhi, who was not a follower of Jesus, but loved the Sermon on the Mount.

There was a whole group of people called the Anabaptists that they can trace their roots back a long way, back before Martin Luther.

They were this kind of minority.

The Anabaptists, though, took and they decided central to their faith would be the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount, that they would create a community called uh just trying to live out this material.

When I was like 10 or 11, my dad heard about this community, this Anabaptist community that lived as a commune on a property, I think in New York or Pennsylvania.

It's called the Bruderhof.

They have German roots, so they still speak some German in their community, but it's a it's a commune of like a hundred families that live together kind of in dorm apartments.

They eat all their meals together, or I think they eat dinner together.

Um, they worship together.

Uh their kids have a school, like a like a private school on the property there that the kids go to.

Uh the men uh work in a factory.

They even have their own fire department with fire trucks uh to go and put out fires or respond to emergencies on this massive property.

And they um are very similar to kind of the um uh the Mennonite community or um the community that's up in Lancaster with the Amish.

Similar things.

They then in their in their factory they would construct these beautiful, handmade um like kids' toys and sheds and different like wood structures, right?

So, anyway, we lived amongst them, and central to them for them, being a follower of Jesus meant we want to take this material in the Sermon on the Mount as real and as true as possible.

And so they that community, uh part of their tradition is that they take this and they are pacifists.

So that means that because of the whole like don't ever take an oath, they will never serve in government because you have to take an oath when you enter office.

Um, they won't serve on jury duty.

Um, but they also will not often, oftentimes they won't enlist for any type of military service because they believe that followers of Jesus cannot respond in a violent way ever to harm.

And there's uh a number of different kinds of streams of like pacifism and what it means to be a pacifist, but that's like the um um Anabaptist uh tradition.

Um I was listening to a sermon yesterday on this text, and and while he's not an Anabaptist, he himself is convinced as a follower of Jesus we cannot ever have a violent response that that's out of place for a Christian.

And and I've listened to that um those that theological position, and I deeply respect anyone that tries to live that out because that's it's very hard to implement that, and and I appreciate the sincerity.

I don't think that that is um the idea that Jesus is teaching here.

And as I wrestle with the text we looked at last week and what we're looking at this week, I think um these ideas are best reconciled in David's life, um, Jesus' life as well as David's life.

So when you look at David, um, and I want to show you actually a story from David's life, um, we can put it up here on the screen.

Um, David had an enemy whose name was Saul.

And it says that Saul ordered his son Jonathan and all of his servants to kill David.

But Saul's son Jonathan liked David very much.

So we already have history up to this point.

David has loyally served Saul.

One of the primary things, there's two things that David has done for Saul.

One, he was a musician that would soothe Saul with his music.

The second thing that David was was that he was a great warrior, and he killed thousands of Israel's enemies.

And there was, he was a legendary warrior.

That there were songs that Israel would sing about how legendary David was.

And it caused, it says in Luke, in 1 Samuel 18, it says that it caused Saul to feel uh jealous of David.

And uh Saul let that jealousy take hold in his life, and so he commands his servants to kill David.

And then it says, so he told him, My father Saul intends, this is Jonathan speaking to David, my father intends to kill you.

Be on your guard in the morning and hide in a secret place and stay there.

I'll go out and stand by my father in the field where you are and talk to him about you.

When I see what he says, I will tell you.

When I see what he says when he says, I will s I will tell you.

Then Jonathan spoke well of David to his father, uh, Saul.

He said to him, The king should not sin against his servant David.

He hasn't sinned against you.

In fact, his actions have been a great advantage to you.

He took his life in his hands when he struck down the Philistines, and the Lord brought about great victory for all of Israel.

You saw it and you rejoiced.

So why would you sin against an against innocent blood by killing David for no reason?

So Saul listened to Jonathan's advice and swore an oath, as surely as the Lord lives, David.

Um David will, surely as the Lord lives, David will not be killed.

So Jonathan summoned David, told him all these words, and Jonathan brought David to Saul, and he served as before.

So this is the beginning of the story.

Um we get jump down to the keep going to the next.

Okay, yeah, so this slide right here.

So David ends up at a meal, he's playing his instrument at this meal.

Saul is just provoked, and he throws a spear at David, hoping to pin him to the wall, and yet David escapes, he runs away that night.

So here's David.

He uh according to even Saul's son, Jonathan, David has done everything like just to benefit Saul, and yet Saul decides this guy's my enemy, he must die.

And so David continues to serve this guy on Jonathan's word that, you know, look, my dad's changed his heart, he's not gonna kill you, and so he's there playing his saw, and now David, like Saul's trying to kill him.

And what does David do?

David runs away.

Now, here's this guy.

In this scene, he's playing a harp.

Is David capable of taking on Saul, fighting against Saul?

Yeah.

David is this crazy good warrior that has like killed, like with in one instance, like he went and killed and circumcised 300 Philistines just to get his wife, the lady he wanted to marry.

Like, this guy is very competent in violence, and yet in this setting, he decides I'm not going to retaliate.

Keep that in mind as we go through this text, as Jesus is teaching, because it's um the response is a David's response to Saul is a nonviolent response.

Let's go to the next slide, Hayden.

Matthew 5, 45.

We'll look at motivation that Jesus gives.

He says, I want you to do this so that you may be children of your Father in heaven.

For he causes his son to rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.

So the motivation here is that your actions, your actions reflect the culture of your family.

Why do you love your enemy?

Why do you bless him?

Why do you do good for him?

Why do you pray for your enemy as a citizen of the kingdom?

Not because they deserve it, not because some kind of corresponding that they've earned it, but because you're of because you're a child of your father.

You're in this family where this is just how we do things.

Did you ever have that kind of stuff in your family where it's like you kind of have other people ask you, like, why does your family do that?

And you're like, well, I don't know, that's what we've always done.

That's just how we do life, right?

You have kind of like the these traditions, right?

Um, of and I would love to hear some of your traditions, right?

But one of the things that I heard last week as I was teaching, some of our Filipino uh friends that attend, they came up to me after they said, our tradition, when when we hear this principle, um we have a saying that says, when someone throws a stone at you, you throw back a loaf of bread.

And that was the saying that they shared, um, they shared with me as their kind of their uh colloquial uh version of the same principle.

We all have traditions that we grew up in, and Jesus says, one of our traditions, as you come into my family, hey, one of our traditions is that we have a asymmetrical response to evil.

We have a a weird way of handling evil in the world.

Where it's it's almost like it's almost like when when I was like in my late teens, early 20s, I used to take Bible college students to work with um seniors that were end of life and um like in memory care where they have like serious dementia, they kind of sit in their um wheelchair and they're kind of pretty much gone.

And um they can't remember like who you were last week or who anybody else is around them, but we would sit there and I loved it because they could you could sit there and you could have a conversation with them, but you could do both sides of the conversation.

So you could like I would talk to them and then I would answer the question that I would ask them for them, right?

And it was kind of like an asynchronous or uh an asymmetrical relationship.

Like, we're just gonna have fun here and like laugh along, so it which is great because like if you crack jokes and like you can ja laugh at your own joke with them and just kind of bring them along and and they're just sitting there like smiling.

It was, I don't know.

I I just got a kick out of it.

And for some reason, when I think of this um uh uh asymmetrical response, it's like that.

It's like, yeah, you're gonna enemy, like you're gonna be unprovoked.

Like, all I've done for you, David's like, all I've done for you, Saul, is I've just been good.

I like I killed the enemies, I wiped out Goliath for you.

I've sat here and played my harp when my family's back there with the sheep.

I gave up all that, and here I am, and there's nothing I deserve to be like having sore like spears thrown at me.

And but I'm not gonna retaliate.

You know, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna kill you.

It's this just strange tradition in God's kingdom of I'm not going to respond tooth for a tooth, eye for an eye.

Instead, I'm gonna be this one who's just responding with goodness to the person that's bad.

And so Jesus says the motivation behind doing this is that this is our tradition, this is our family tradition.

And if that rubs you the wrong way, you and I need to know like we're in the family because that's the tradition, because we were enemies when Christ died for us.

Like, there was nothing about us that deserved the cross.

That before we even came along, God knowing that we would come into the world as sinners, earning the wages of sin, he died for us.

And then he gives this illustration about how this is how God does the world.

He says he causes his son to rise on the evil and the good.

He sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.

I looked this morning at the weather report in in North Korea, and it's the same weather report as here, and it's sunny.

It's cold, it's about as cold as it is here, but it's sunny.

Like, it's not like being wiped out, right?

God is giving us the same weather as our enemies.

The weather right now in Iran, it's rainy with a high of 49 and a low of 40, right?

That's the weather report for today.

The way that God works in the world is that he gives good weather to the people who hate him, who are evil, who are doing what is wrong.

He causes uh the rain, the sun to rise on the evil and the good.

He sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.

If we jump back over to David's life, and there's a slide for this, Hayden uh 1 Samuel 24, 3 through 7.

When Saul came to the sheep pens along the road, so Saul's chasing David, there was a set of caves, right?

And he had to go to the bathroom.

So he went up into these caves to relieve himself, and David and his men were happened to be hiding in the recesses of that very cave.

And so the friends, the men of David, they say to David, Look, this is the day that uh the Lord told you about.

I will hand your enemy over to you so that you can do with him whatever you desire.

So David got up and he secretly cut off the corner of Saul's robe.

Go to the next slide.

Afterwards, after he's cut off a corner, because like imagine David's kind of disrobed himself, or Saul's disrobed himself to go to the bathroom.

David cuts off a hole out of this robe or a corner.

Afterwards, David's conscience bothered him because he had cut off a corner of Saul's robe.

He said to the men, As the Lord is my witness, I will never do such a thing to my Lord, the Lord's anointed.

I will never lift up my hand against him since he is the Lord's anointed.

There's one more slide here.

Yeah, with these words, David persuaded his men, and he did not let them rise up against Saul.

Then Saul left the cave and went on his way.

Saul has done everything to lose the respect of David and the affection of David and the love of David.

But David isn't holding back vengeance, he isn't, he isn't protecting Saul's life because of a quality in Saul.

David is in a relationship with God.

Do you notice back in our text?

Could you go backwards one one slide?

It says, he says, as the Lord is my witness.

That sounds like just kind of like old King James language, as God is my witness, right?

But but but this is the principle.

Like this is the idea with Peter, when Peter teaches this in a practical way.

When when Jesus calls on us, it's it's living as God is our witness.

Like you can't see him, but he is there.

He's present, not only is he witness, but God's gonna deal with Saul.

He says, as the Lord is my witness, but what else does he say?

What else does God do?

What else is God present in?

It says that the that Saul is the Lord's anointed.

Is he acting like it?

No.

No, he's not acting like it.

He's not at all acting like it.

But he's still the Lord's anointed.

This week I was listening to a um a cool interview with um uh a guy who's kind of like evangelical Christian.

He's interviewing a woman who is a theologian, and she comes from the Greek Orthodox or the Eastern Orthodox tradition.

And they were talking about kind of their different ways of leadership, and um they're talking about the leadership in the Orthodox Church and how there's a priest, like we call like the leadership in our church, we call him a pastor.

Um, but for them they call him a priest, and she was talking about how they gladly um submit to the priest, trusting that this is the one that God, um, the Holy Spirit has appointed to this leadership role.

And so Preston, who's doing the interview, he says, Well, um, I'm sure that you know he that this that your priest, who you deeply respect, has really earned your respect.

And she said, Yes, but we would still respect him even if he didn't behave in a way that was like Jesus, because we just trust that this is the priest that the Holy Spirit has appointed to lead in this setting.

It was a fascinating, and and and they were just talking about the tradition of how they do church and how they view leadership and and the the kind of idea of just respecting this is who God's placed here.

And if God didn't want this person to be here, God could take him out.

Um, and that was David's view of Saul.

Like, this is the one that Samuel the prophet anointed as the king.

It is not my role to take him out or to um avenge myself of all that he has taken from me.

And Saul was horrible.

Saul, like, in his pursuit of David, he like he killed a bunch of priests, uh, had a bunch of key priests killed off.

Like, Saul has behaved horribly.

Any one, any one of us could have gone like, yeah, this man is a tyrant and he needs to be stopped.

And yet David is leading his men to not avenge himself, but to turn over vengeance to God.

So um, back over in Matthew, Matthew 5, 46 and 47, kind of closing out Jesus' teaching, Jesus illustrates this point here.

And there should be a slide, Hayden, that gives us verses 46 and 47.

He says, For if you love those who love you, what reward will you have?

Don't even the tax collectors do the same?

And if you greet only brothers and sisters, what are you doing out of the ordinary?

Don't even Gentiles do the same?

So as Jesus illustrates this, he he calls to mind two of the most hated people in society, right?

Um, and I don't know what that would be for us.

Like maybe it's like the Ku Klux Klan, and um, I don't know, I don't want to tell you like who I most hate in society, but but we all have the people that are like the most hated and they deserve to be despised, right?

So Jesus says, hey, for us as Jews, like the Gentiles and the tax collectors, these are the worst.

And what do they do?

Like what's normal for them is that they just love their neighbors, right?

They they um in their own lives, um are the ones who are loving and caring and kind to the ones that are their brothers and sisters.

If you love those who love you, what reward will you have?

Could you just remember that word reward?

Because I know that in our Protestant evangelical Christianity that is heavily based on the foundation of Luther and Calvin's rebellion against Catholicism and a works-based religion, that we really shy away from any type of concept of um uh let's see.

Well, I keep using the word, but but um cause and effect, or that you get a reward.

But Jesus doesn't teach that.

Jesus teaches a lot about rewards, and we will see that more as we get into chapter six.

But here he he says, like, if you act like the the tax collector or the gentile, like you're not gonna get a reward.

That's that's this is just normal, right?

That's like reading um whoever wrote, you know, how to win friends and influence people.

You're just playing by the rules of like how the world works and you're being shrewd.

No, in my kingdom, we we have this weird thing that we do where we love enemies.

And and it's not gonna be like the bestseller book, you know, for 50 years.

It's not gonna be how you win friends and influence.

This is not strategic.

Like it doesn't make sense.

Like there's no long play in this.

No, this is a family tradition for us in the kingdom, and and what you need to know, and Peter doesn't something where he like says, he kind of gives some reasons why we love our enemies, where like that this may convince and compel them to come in.

Paul gives some reasons where he's like, it's like putting coals on their head, which may um provoke like a um a sense of conviction and lead them to Christ.

But we're not given a lot of material on like how this factors in.

We know that we're the recipients of the tradition, and then we're kind of obedient in the tradition, and the results may vary.

There's a lot of like what happened to Martin Luther King Jr., you know, convinced, you know, acts of nonviolence, non nonviolent resistance.

That guy died for having that, like the outcome of that was like great societal change, but personally it was costly for him.

So for um for us as followers of Jesus, these exam, these examples from Jesus, tax collectors and gentiles, they imply that kingdom citizens should be better.

They love those who love them.

But kingdom citizens, followers of Jesus, we love our enemies.

It is a hereditary trait.

So that makes life sometimes complicated because you have people who are toxic, people who are difficult, and being loving and kind would be fall into the category of enabling them.

So I don't have all the answers on how this works itself out.

Again, for me, David has been um one of the great examples because David's life doesn't prove that you always are in a nonviolent position.

It seems as if David embodies this I'm not gonna repay the evil done to me, but I'm gonna entrust personal um vendettas to the Lord and give space.

But I personally don't think that you can, that a Christian can be a person of nonviolence and obey God's concern for justice in the world.

I think that uh to carry out and defend the weak, sometimes there is a place for a violent, threatening response that causes evil to be pushed back in the world.

That's my personal conviction.

That's what I see in David.

David finds a time to not return evil for evil, but at other times he's this great warrior that God gifts.

Like he literally, Psalm 18, is him praising God for gifting him to be this incredible warrior that can kill thousands of people.

So, what what that tells me is that, hey, as as citizens, there is this governing ethic, especially I think in this time where we're giving place, like Romans 12, it should be, I think, the guiding, the clearest principle on this, where we're not repaying evil for evil.

And Paul says, instead you're giving space for God's wrath, because it's God that repays.

And so I don't think that Jesus' text here is saying that now all of a sudden you need to just do some mind trick where the person who has made themselves your enemy, Saul, in your life, you've got to like love them.

No, I think like I think in order to fulfill this, you need to recognize you have an enemy.

Jesus doesn't say they're no longer your enemy.

No, they are your enemy, and there is a good that can be extended to them.

Now, what do you do with abusive people?

What do you do with people that are enabled?

What do you do with them mentally ill?

Um, I don't know.

I don't know, but I know this that the promise of the new covenant was that God's Spirit would dwell in you.

So you have the Holy Spirit, and what it says in 1 John 2 is that the Spirit will be your teacher.

So Jesus, we have the teaching of Jesus, but then we have the guidance of the Holy Spirit to know what to do surgically in our life, in that relationship, the one you're thinking of, right?

So um for me in my own personal life, I served for three and a half years under a pastor who was like a cult leader.

Didn't realize it, didn't take the job knowing it, but about a few years in, I realized I'm in I am working for a man who is highly uh destructive.

He is serially destroying the faith of people around me.

And so I wrestled, what do I do?

Like I didn't do anything, and and he was doing it, he was treating me like that, and he was harmful.

And so for me, that a lot of this material, this was the first time I had to wrestle with this.

What does it mean for me to love my enemy?

But what does it also mean for me to be on his board and to carry out justice?

And it it meant that for me, I uh the time arose after I had moved away.

It meant I could go back and confront him with 15 other former board members and tell him, you're a liar, you're a cheat, and you're hurting people, right?

And his authority told him, like, you're kicked out of our denomination, um, and you know, need to change the name of your church.

But really, what we what we want is you need to resign.

He didn't resign, he continued to lie about all of us.

And back um in September of 2017, I think it was September of 2017, he was, this guy was disturbed, right?

He was emailing me, this is almost 10 years, almost 10 years later.

He's emailing me saying, uh, or not 10 years, it was five years later.

He's saying, you know, come on back for a celebration of the church, it's an anniversary.

And I'm like, I can't do that.

You've been like, you're under church discipline, you've been kicked out of our church, you're like a horrible person, right?

And he's like, Well, I don't think I've done anything wrong to you.

So anyway, I wrote this letter to him, and I just felt like the Holy Spirit was on me as I wrote this letter because I was just surgical in laying out for him his sin and explaining it to him in like with clarity.

But at the end of end of my um email to him, I said a couple of things.

I said, I just want to call you to to repent and to change what you're doing.

You're not it's not too late to take a break, get into counseling, like listen to the people who love you the most and are speaking truth into your life.

Like you could be restored, you don't have to be this person.

And I close by saying, It's but either way, I can't wait for this all to be behind us.

We're gonna be in heaven together.

And I believe he he's in heaven.

Well, I never heard from him.

The very next day, though, from what I understood, he rejected what I had to say, and he was diagnosed with terminal cancer and died a couple years later.

And so, in my book, as I looked at that in my own life, this was God saying, showing me, like, hey, you gave place, you didn't, I didn't avenge him.

I I didn't like reveal the nakedness.

I like I could have put it all over the internet, I could have like tried to turn his church against him.

There's all kinds of like hurtful things that go through your heart when you've been wronged, right?

All kinds of steps you want to take where it's just like I'm gonna get back at you.

I'm To make this hurt, right?

And I didn't.

God gave me the grace to not do that, but to deal with him in a loving way and truthful way.

And then God decided, this is my wrath.

And that guy, I think the guy died probably 25 years early, earlier than he needed to die, because of in I mean, my interpretation of the event was that God took him out because of his ongoing rebellion towards him.

So I commend that to you as a story to trust God in the midst of your persecution.

I don't know what it's going to look like to love your enemy.

And it's definitely not going to be easy.

But you have the Spirit guiding you and also empowering you in that.

We do it because we're children of the Father.

And we do it because He loved us.

We are the recipients of this radical, radical, asymmetrical love of the Father.

All right, let's pray and then we'll take communion together.

Lord, we just commend this teaching to you.

Lord, our hearts have been open to you.

We've listened to what you taught, and we admit that this is a hard one to obey.

And there's objections that immediately jump up in our own lives where we don't want to do this.

And we don't know, we're afraid of the outcomes.

We're afraid of like what may happen.

And so, Lord, we just um we come before you and we ask that your spirit would lead us and guide us, and that you would just make it really, really clear how we are to act and how we're to treat our enemies.

We ask that you would work and use us to be just this beautiful testimony of the love of God in our midst.

We thank you, and we pray these things in Jesus' name.

Amen.