Love Recklessly

So this morning we're closing up our kind of 2022 vision series where we're looking at five loves.

We said if we're going to really try to reach this city and we're going to be a people who stands out distinctly from uh the communities that we live in, from the places that we work, from uh uh the kind of uh areas of society that we find ourselves in, if we're gonna stand out as distinct, one of the things that we're gonna have to really be uh working on and understanding and working to try and reform is our hearts' affections.

Oh, our hearts are prone to set its affections on the things of this world, uh, not the things of heaven, uh, not eternal things, but of temporal things, of things that are finite and are fleeting from our very grasp.

And so what the Lord calls us to do is he calls us to set our affections on the things above, on the things of heaven, on the things that his heart is after.

Because repentance, when we look at this thing called repentance in the Bible, it's not stop doing bad things.

That's not the essence of repentance.

That's a fruit of repentance, but that's not the essence of it.

The essence of it is to line your mind up with God's mind, to think like God thinks.

Because when you start renewing your mind and you start thinking the way God thinks, sin stops.

Right?

Right?

We we try to focus on the behavior actions rather than in the root that's causing the behavior actions in the first place.

The problem isn't that we do bad things, the problem is we believe doing those bad things are good for us.

That's why we do it.

Right?

We think sin is gonna produce some type of fruit in our lives that we believe will be beneficial for us.

And then we, what do we do?

We drink from broken cisterns, right?

We're a dog who returns back to its vomit.

That's not good.

That's not good at all, right?

Some of you let those dogs lick your face.

That's a whole, that's another conversation, uh, but I want to put it out there.

Uh, we probably need to repent of that.

Um, and so and so what we need to do is we need to align our hearts' affections on the things of God.

It's fascinating.

We talked about this in week one in love God.

The fact that loving God exists, resides in the context of a command is so counterintuitive to our worldview of society.

The way that we understand love, God says, God says, I command you to love me with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.

When Jesus was asked, what is the greatest commandment?

He replies, Well, it's to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself.

With these two, there is no law, right?

The fulfillment of the law exists within the fulfillment of those two commands.

But it's a command that demands obedience.

To love someone, to love God specifically, demands submissiveness and obedience to a command.

We don't understand that.

We have like Disney love, right?

We have Disney love.

We can't help who our hearts' affections are put on.

Don't tell me who I can't love.

I have to follow my heart.

No, uh, that's bad news.

The Bible tells you that over and over again.

Don't do that.

But we submit to what God tells us to love.

So we looked at love God.

We looked at love the church, we looked at uh love the city.

Last week we looked at love truth.

This morning we're gonna look at love recklessly.

Love recklessly.

So let's talk about this.

What does reckless mean?

What this idea of recklessness, it's something that's marked by the lack of proper caution.

When someone's reckless, right, they they they kind of throw caution to the wind.

Hey, I'm just gonna go for it, uh, and we're gonna see how reckless this individual is.

So it lacks proper caution.

It's often careless of consequences, right?

Reckless behavior is often careless of consequences.

Another thing about recklessness, it's uncalculated.

When you think about a person who's reckless, they didn't calculate all the possible implications of their actions.

They didn't go through this understanding what was going to be on the other side of their actions, right?

A person who was not reckless would approach situations very calculated, very cautious, very careful, but God doesn't call us to love in that way.

God calls us to love in a way that is reckless, or at least perceivedly reckless to the world around us.

And so we see in this context of Luke chapter 6, Jesus is actually turning to his disciples and he's almost establishing for his followers a new ethic, right?

Luke 6 · chapter mention

So the ethic previously was love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.

But in true Jesus fashion, right?

If if we come to the table thinking for one second, Jesus lowers the standards for us, uh, we are foolish and we don't understand grace, and we don't understand what Jesus actually came to do.

Jesus never came to lower the standards, Jesus always raised the standards, but the beauty of the gospel is that Jesus meets those standards in our place as our substitute and applies that victory, that accomplishment to us, credited to our account, as if we had done it.

So here, in true Jesus fashion, he's not lowering the standard of love and applying a new ethic, he raises the standard of love and he says, Love your enemies.

Love your enemies.

You see, this is this is fascinating because they were finding themselves in an ancient Jewish context of fairness and justice.

If we looked at kind of two characteristics of their culture and society that they were going to elevate and that informed the decisions that they would make, fairness and justice were some of the two top characteristics.

And so you might have heard an eye for an eye, right?

A tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand.

If you do something to me, justice and fairness would dictate that I do that back to you.

Now that was actually mild compared to the other civilizations that surrounded them.

Fairness and justice was not necessarily in their scope, it was vengeance.

And we learned this a long time ago that often personal vengeance, when it's identified and defined by self, goes above and beyond fairness or justice.

When we want vengeance, there's obviously at times no limits to the depths of that we will go to produce it for ourselves.

And we're unsatisfied.

It doesn't actually do what we think that it will do for us to seek vengeance.

So the ancient Jewish culture was trying to tame that down and not look at vengeance, but look at fairness and justice.

So they would have that eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth type of mentality.

Here's what Jesus is telling them.

No, we're not doing that anymore.

That's not the ethic of the kingdom.

The ethic of the kingdom is actually to love your enemies.

You see, Jesus in the midst of teaching his followers about the cost that they're going to experience following him.

It comes at a great cost in detriment to self.

So we kind of find ourselves in this antinomy, right?

That this kind of seeming uh uh confusion or two things that don't really harmonize with one another.

It's that if you follow me here in this life, uh you you will be uh judged, you will be hated, you will be mistreated, you will be marginalized, outcasted.

But if you follow me here in this life now, then in eternity, uh your reward will be given.

You'll be blessed.

You will have abundance of life, you will have life eternal, you will have fellowship with the Father.

Here's what he's saying.

If you want to be liked now, if you want to be liked now, if you want to be comfortable now, if you want to be content now, if you want to be admired now, you'll have your reward.

Your reward is temporal, your reward is fleeting, it's a temporal bliss, but with an eternal misery.

So if you want to be like now, right?

If you if you want to have, if you want to have all these great relationships, if you want to be comfortable, if you want to be content, if you want to have all of that now, Jesus is letting us know in this text.

It's available for you.

Reach out and grab it, but realize in that reaching and grabbing for the things of this world, you might have temporal bliss, but you will have eternal misery.

Because there is no harmony with the things of heaven and the things of this world.

There is no harmony that exists in those two things.

But in the midst of this teaching, Jesus says this one thing.

It says it's recorded in Luke.

Jesus turns to his disciples, or the ones who are following them, and he says to those who hear, to those who are able to understand the mysteries of heaven, that it's that this world has nothing for us, but it is the kingdom and the counterculture of that kingdom and its king that gives us everything our heart actually desires but doesn't understand.

That comfortableness, that bliss, that blessing, that relationship, that intimacy that our hearts really, really want, but we don't understand it.

We don't understand how to obtain it, so we try to find it in the things of this world.

And so Jesus says to those who can hear, to those who can understand the mysteries of heaven as they are spoken, and take them in and believe them and trust them.

Those who are willing to listen to the words of life that are coming from the Messiah, to follow him, comes at a great cost here and now.

But it comes with certain promises of blessing in the life to come.

You see, his charge to them is this love your enemies.

Love your enemies.

And we have to understand that this comes in the context of Jesus' teaching.

If you follow me, you're gonna have enemies, right?

If you follow after the Messiah, if you live a life that's submitted to his kingship and lordship, if you're proclaiming the truths of the gospel, uh, then you are going to have enemies.

We've been having this conversation in our culture or in our home uh for the last several months over a reading list that my oldest daughter had at school.

And in her summer reading list, there was a book uh on Islamophobia.

And it was about a couple of students who call a teacher out on being Islamophobic, and uh then uh the the kind of you know the end is she's not that way anymore, thanks to these radical students who stepped out and uh called her out on her garbage, right?

On her bigotry and hatred and so forth like that.

So, so great, but listen to this.

And our conversations, what we said is this, honey, in in this world, in this culture, you will never hear out of the mouth of society Christophic.

You won't.

You you won't hear that if you disagree with us, that that if you don't line up with our beliefs and convictions and the way that we understand truth and the word of God, that if you don't, if you don't line up with us and accept us and embrace us and allow us to be in that inclusiveness that you're pursuing, you're christophobic.

You won't hear that out of the mouth of culture.

It's not coming, don't look for it.

But every other phobicness that they can uh create and fabricate within society, you're going to hear over the oh it's just coming down the pipeline.

Why will there never be Christophobic language?

Jesus promised it ain't coming.

Jesus promised to us it's not coming.

In Luke chapter 6, 22 through 23, just a few verses before this, what we see is this blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you and revile you and spurn your names as evil on account of the Son of Man.

Luke 6 · chapter mention

So let's stop there.

It's not because you're just a jerk, right?

It's not just because uh uh of how mean you are or how actually bigoted or prejudiced or whatever it is you are, when you don't communicate love in the way of the kingdom, when you're an unkind person and people treat you this way, you might deserve it, right?

What Jesus is saying, on account for me, when you proclaim truth, when you submit to my word, when you're expressing the love of the kingdom, on account of me, they are going to hate you.

Okay?

And then it says this rejoice in that day.

Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven.

For so their fathers did to the prophets.

This is the promises of Jesus to his followers.

If you're gonna follow me, the world's gonna hate you.

If you want to be liked by the world right now, you can have it, but it's temporal bliss met with eternal misery.

But if you want eternal life, then realize the world is going to hate you because of following me, but your promises of reward are great, and you can have them.

This is kind of the summary of what Jesus is communicating to us.

So if we look at 27 through 31, what we see for this passage is the demands of reckless love.

The demands of reckless love.

You see, in this time of teaching, there's both an expectation of our social status that we will be hated and reviled by the world, and a command of uh uh to us on how to navigate and respond to it.

Okay, so we're gonna be hated by the world, we're gonna have enemies amongst society and culture because we follow after Jesus, because we proclaim the truth of his gospel, because we stand on the truth of his promises, because we love others in the way that he's called us to, we are going to be hated.

So that there's an expectation established, a command on how we navigate and respond to that reality.

The expectation Jesus sets for us is that we're going to be hated for following him.

But the command is that we love our enemies in response.

To bring clarity and application to this statement, Jesus walks us through three very unnatural responses to being hated, to having enemies.

We see this in three specific ways.

The first thing we see is unnatural deeds.

So, unnatural responses, the first one we see is unnatural deeds.

Do good to those who hate you, Jesus says.

This is an unnatural deed.

When we engage with people who hate us, who revile against us, it's not our propensity to do good to them, right?

We might want to fight them, we might want to do harm to them, we we might want to uh withdraw and retreat and separate ourselves by this chasm of relationship, right?

We don't want to press in and bless.

We don't want to do good.

That's not our propensity as human beings.

But Jesus says, here's the response the unnatural deed of doing good to those who hate you.

What is the retaliation expected for those who may hate you?

It's to do good to them, to respond in unnatural ways of kindness, charity, benevolence.

We're prone to do two things in response to people who hate us.

And this is what we talked about just a second ago.

We're prone to do two things.

We're prone to retaliate, or we're prone to distance ourselves.

When people hate us, we are prone to retaliate or distance ourselves.

And God is telling us through Jesus here, no.

Do good and press in.

He's charging his followers to draw near and be benevolent.

Next, we have unnatural words.

So Jesus goes on with this response: bless those who curse you.

Bless those who curse you.

Unnatural words.

We do not return vile with vile, but with blessing.

You see, as a curse is spoken against us, Jesus is calling for us to lavish blessing in response back to them.

I know when I get heated uh and I start getting into that, I get like caught up in that passion, and someone is maybe saying harsh things to me, I my tongue and when set loose is like a forest fire.

I I can tear somebody to pieces real quick.

Uh that the Lord blessed me with that.

No, he didn't actually.

He did bless me with a mouth, but it but but sin has caused it to tear down people uh too often in my life.

Uh and so it's a weapon unbridled at times that I have to put under discipline so that I might exalt the name of Christ and bless those who might curse me.

You see, we have to uh get we have to not get caught up in the moments.

We cannot allow passion to dominate us, we cannot allow the situation to dictate our response.

We tend to get caught up in the moments of passion and we respond in reciprocated words of harm, violence, and the grab for power.

But Jesus calls us to respond not with our emotions or an unbridled tongue, but with our emotions and tongues submitted to his will.

Respond with blessing.

Thirdly, he gives us unnatural prayers.

So we have unnatural deeds, unnatural words, unnatural prayers.

Jesus here tells us to pray for those who abuse you.

Pray for those who have abuse you.

Now, let's be um sober for a moment.

At Sacred Mission, we take abuse extremely seriously.

Um it's nothing that we're ever gonna take lightly.

It's something that we any charge of abuse, any any uh confession of abuse, we take with utmost seriousness here at Sacred Mission.

Uh it is a place where we strive to protect people.

I do want to help us understand that this is the one where there is a little bit of distance communicated in Jesus' expectation of our response.

Pray for our abuser.

There's a little bit of distance in that language.

We want you to be protected, we want you to not place yourself continually back into situations of abuse, especially those of the physical or sexual nature.

We want to protect you, we want to come around you, we want to help you, but there is a call to pray for them.

It's hard to have an enemy when you're praying for them.

It's hard to hate when your language is filled with prayer.

That God would love them and help them, God would save them and rescue them, God would bless them, that God would work a miracle in their life and bring life where there is death, where there is destruction.

So what we're saying is, I don't think that this is text is communicating for us to continually put ourselves into abusive circumstances so recklessly that it could cost us our life.

I don't believe that's what Jesus is calling us to for one second.

But I do believe he's telling us there's a different way to respond, there's a different ethic of the way that we even love those people who have done such harm to us as individuals that our only natural expectation is to hate them, to desire for their wickedness and destruction.

But Jesus is saying, pray for them, pray for them.

It's impossible to pray for someone and hate them at the same time.

To pray for the abusers of our lives is totally unnatural in response to the pain and the turmoil that we have faced at the hands and words of others.

Yet this is the very love we're called to.

And by God's power, by God's spirit indwelling in us, we're actually able to.

So that's the fascinating thing about these unnatural responses that Jesus is calling us to in relationship to our enemies.

In our own strength and in our own strivings, there's no way we could love like this.

No way that we could love like this.

But by God's grace and by his spirit indwelling within us, unnatural things are enabled by supernatural power.

And we can.

We can actually love in the way that Jesus is.

Called us to love.

In the next string of commands, Jesus gives to his followers, he calls them to love in unnatural and even reckless ways.

He goes through these lists of things.

Turn your cheek to them when they strike it.

Give them your shirt when they take your jacket.

Walk with open hands to beggars.

Do not ask for your things back from thieves.

These are this kind of practical applications that Jesus is calling us to when we're experiencing enemies for the sake of the gospel.

All of these standards of love seem to be careless and uncalculated.

Don't they, when you when you think about this, if somebody strikes you on one cheek, turn to them the other.

If they take your uh jacket, give them your shirt too.

If you're walking down the street and there's beggars with open hands, you walk with open hands and you're giving.

If someone steals from you, don't ask for it back.

That seems uncalculated, that seems careless, but they're actions of a love that doesn't make sense.

A love that is reckless in nature.

Ultimately, these are loving actions not rooted in vengefulness, but in generosity and charity.

We're being called to not white knuckle our status or our stuff, but for the sake of even our enemies, lay them down as things not to be grasped.

So, what's Jesus calling us to?

There's nothing in this world that is going to give you the life and relationships that you're looking for.

So why do we white knuckle our status of this world and our stuff of this world so often?

You want to be liked now, you can have your reward.

You want to have stuff now, you can have your reward.

It's all waiting for you.

As long as you work hard enough to grasp it, you can have it.

But it's temporal bliss with eternal misery.

Jesus is saying, stop white knuckling those things and lay them down even for the benefit of those who may hate you.

If you want to be loved by this world, then don't follow Jesus.

If you want to follow after Jesus, then don't be in love with anything in this world.

1 John 2, 15 says this do not love the world or the things in the world.

If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.

Do we understand that?

Jesus or uh the apostle John is making a very black and white line in the sand statement.

If you love the world, the love of the Father is not in you.

That should cause us to approach our relationship with culture, our relationship with our stuff and our status with fear and trembling.

Do I love this?

Am I white-knuckling this?

Or am I able to, with open hands, let it go because everything is at the mercy and power and strength and sovereignty of the creator of the universe?

I don't have to prove myself anymore.

I don't have to earn status anymore because the king of all creation laid it all down at the foot of the cross, was hung on those beams, and then what does he do in his resurrection?

He gives me an eternal status as a high priest, as a son, as a saint, as one who is reconciled to the Father with all the blessing of the inheritance of the kingdom as mine.

I don't have to fight anymore.

I don't have to retaliate wickedness anymore because I have nothing to prove.

So what do I get the freedom to do?

To love.

I get the joyous freedom to love, even those who hate me.

Jesus then ends this section of the demands of reckless love with this.

And as you wish that others would do to you, do so to them.

This is the completeness of the new ethic that Jesus is applying for us.

Jesus gives to his people love God, love your neighbor, love one another, love your enemy.

Our response is not discovered in justice or vengeance, but in mercy and benevolence.

To do good to others, even our enemies.

This is the kind of love that Jesus is calling us to, this agape love.

We've been talking about this throughout this series.

Agape love is understood as a determined love even though future misery awaits.

I am determined to love you even at the risk of future misery before me.

I'm not playing it safe anymore.

I'm not just loving you because I know that it's safe to love you.

I'm not just loving you because you're gonna love me back the way that I love you, or that what I do to you is gonna be reciprocated to me.

I love you even though my harm might lay out in front of me.

This is the completeness.

This is the doing good to others, even our enemies.

Our definition of doing good, our functional definition of doing good is this our desire for good becomes the measure of good we also desire for others.

Our desire for good becomes the measure of good we also desire for others.

So when it comes to your enemies, if you were that person who hated you, who reviled you, who spoke wicked of you, who told lies about you, how would you want to be treated?

What kind of good would you want extended to you?

What kind of mercy and benevolence would you want extended to you?

What kind of forgiveness would you want extended to you?

How would you want to have good in your life?

That's what we're called to give to others.

In verses 32 through 37, Jesus shows us the unnatural state of reckless love, the unnatural state of reckless love.

Here in this section of Jesus' teaching, he shows us that the love we have for others should look different based on the new identity we have in him.

He calls us out of the laziness, the weakness, and the self-serving nature of the love we possess intrinsically.

So naturally within ourselves, the love that we possess is self-serving.

It's lazy, if we're honest.

It's very weak, it has no real power.

But he's calling us out of that based on our identity in him.

And this is what he does.

He does this three times in this next section of the scriptures.

He calls this natural love a sinner's love.

This is a sinner's love.

What is he saying?

This kind of love that's lazy and weak, that has no power, that loves people the way that uh that loves people who already love them, who will lend to others because they know that they're gonna get that money back or that stuff back, who's gonna treat people well because they know that that treatment will be reciprocated.

He calls that a sinner's love.

What he's saying is this is what you are prone to in your natural state.

But I'm calling you to do something unnatural.

Unnatural.

To love those who love us, do good to those who do good to us, lend to those who will pay us back.

Those are all expressions of natural love.

It is a love that is both cautious and calculated.

A love that is rooted more in selfishness than in selflessness.

You see, to love the way Jesus has both called us and empowered us to will look careless.

It'll look careless and it'll look uncalculated.

It won't make sense to the natural love of this sinful world.

It will look like a reckless love.

But this unnatural love is empowered by a supernatural Savior.

One who says that we don't have to white knuckle our status or our stuff any longer because we are his and he is ours.

Our reward is great, Jesus says in this passage.

If you love in this unnatural way, your reward will be great.

And our reward is great because our reward is him.

He tells us that you will have sonship.

You will have sonship.

That's the ultimate reward.

What our hearts are longing for in every sinful pursuit is a relationship of a father and a child.

Every single one of us, we dive headfirst into sin, looking for that very relationship in its most pure and beautiful and good and holy state.

And we think stuff is gonna give it to us, or we think status is gonna give it to us, and it fails, it fails every single time.

Don't worry, it fails us every single time.

And so Jesus says this when you love recklessly, when you love unnatural ways, those rewards that you're looking for, no, no, no, no.

I'm gonna give you a better reward.

I'm gonna give you something eternal and eternally better.

And what is it?

It's sonship.

You will be sons of the most high, he declares.

At the end of a life who sought to love the unlovable, who did good to those who did them harm, who gave to those who sought to steal from them, the end of that life is sonship.

And here in the closing of the text, Jesus gives us the why.

The why is probably one of the most important questions we can ever ask, right?

Why?

And to answer that why is critical.

It helps us understand it.

Your children will ask why 10,000 times a day.

And there's a point where I just say, you don't need to know why.

You just need to do what I told you to do, right?

But but I really try to labor in answering the why for my kids and their ridiculous questions so that they can understand that there's reason behind the things that we're asking them to do.

And here Jesus gives us the why.

God is not a God who is uh uh sorry, let me go back.

Jesus gives us the why.

Why should we put any effort into loving our enemies?

Two reasons.

God is kind to the ungrateful and the evil.

Let me tell you something.

He's talking about you.

Why should we do this?

God is kind to the ungrateful and the evil.

That's you.

When we were shown the mercy of God, when we were extended benevolence in Jesus, what was God doing?

He was demonstrating his kindness to the ungrateful and the evil.

It is Romans tells us that it is God's kindness that leads us, ungrateful and evil people, to repentance.

So why do we do this?

Because our Father is kind to the ungrateful and the evil.

And then secondly, he says, be merciful even as your father is merciful.

He's talking to you again.

Do you remember when you were ungrateful and evil?

Do you remember when God extended kindness and mercy towards you and he brought you in through trust and faith in the finished work of Jesus?

Do you remember the mercy you experienced?

Now extend that mercy to one another.

Now extend that mercy to your enemies, to those who hate you.

We love our enemies because of equity and emulation.

God is not a God of fairness.

Praise God.

To those of whom he loves, God is equitable in kindness.

That means he gives us more than we even need.

He is equitable in kindness.

There is a great chasm between you, what you deserve, and what you receive from him.

And in sonship, because he closed that chasm gap and brought us into relationship with himself, we're called to emulate him.

He shows mercy that is in his character and has been demonstrated toward us in Jesus, so we should be merciful also.

So ultimately this morning, what Jesus is calling us to is this God calls us to love recklessly.

God calls us to love recklessly.

The way that God calls us to love is so unnatural to the world, so unnatural to the way that we used to know and express love, but we have been shown a better way in Jesus.

We've been empowered to a better way by the Spirit.

The love that God calls us to seems reckless, it seems careless, without caution, uncalculated, but it's a love that insists, is determined, is willed toward others, even though future misery awaits us.

We don't love based on what we'll get in return or the benefit that we will obtain in the relationship.

We don't love because we have assurance that we won't be wronged, mistreated, abused, slandered, or whatever other thing we might face in this life.

No, we love.

We love because He has first loved us.

When we put standards on our love, when we try to enforce conditions or demand personal merit to obtain our love, we're no longer walking in the love of the Father.

We're walking in the love of this world.

What Jesus says is we're walking in a sinner's love.

It's not a love that emulates heaven, it's not a love that emulates the heart of the Father.

He says it's just a sinner's love.

It has no power, it's lazy and weak.

God loves us because he determined in his good pleasure and divine will to set his love upon us.

When we think about this, why does God love you?

You're a horrible human being.

God doesn't love you because of anything you've brought to the table.

God doesn't love you because you've merited that love to be earned and obtained by yourself and your actions and your accomplishments.

God does not owe you anything but to crush you under the weight of his wrath and judgment.

That's what God owes you.

God loves you because in eternity past He determined to love you.

And that determination, that setting His will to love you on you, nothing you can do can remove that.

Nothing you can do can stop that or cease that or eradicate that.

And that is good news.

God does not love you because of your performance.

God loves you because He said, I will love you.

That's the good news of the gospel church.

That's the good news that even though we were ungrateful and evil people, in his determination to place his love upon us from before the foundations of the earth, we have been brought into relationship with him through Christ, not because of our own strivings and work and merit, but because of his divine will and good pleasure to love us.

To love us.

The new ethic, not just to love our neighbor, but to love our enemies, is not motivated by the merit of the one who is the receiver of our love.

It's not motivated by the other person.

Whether they earn or deserve our love or not.

The command is to love.

When we have our love determined or rooted in the merit of the other, then it's selfish.

It's self-serving.

We're called to a determined love that says, even if you harm me, even if you revile me, even if you hate me, I will consciously determine to love you.

But we don't operate in this.

Typically, we do one of two things.

We love people because they benefit us.

We love people because they benefit us.

The love we function in looks eerily similar to the way that the world loves, doesn't it?

A sinner's love.

Those who love us, who do good to us, or return to us, what is given to them, these are metrics of a sinner's love.

How you benefit my life.

Do you prop me up in my visions and dreams?

Do you push me forward in my goals and ambitions?

Do you support me in my endeavors?

Do you benefit being in my life?

Do you benefit me being in my life?

That's a sinner's love.

That's not the love of the gospel.

That's not the love of the kingdom.

Surely not the love of our King.

This does not bear witness to the love of Jesus that we have claimed to have experienced, yet see little transformation from it.

When any of these things are jeopardized, the benefit of us, whenever it's jeopardized, will pull back our love.

And what do we do?

We place it in self-preservation.

Because the love itself was so rooted in self-interest that it can only actually survive in self-preservation.

So if you jeopardize this love that I'm extending to you at any point where it no longer benefits me to have it placed upon you, I'm going to pull it back and I'm going to preserve it.

Because it was rooted in self-interest, it can only be preserved and protected in self-preservation.

And so I could put it in its fortress and I lock the door and I keep it away from you.

It's not a love that is others focused or one that looks to have another's good at its aim and endeavor.

It is a love that is calculated and cautious.

It evaluates the return of investment.

It assesses the cost-benefit factor.

It makes decisions best on highest gains.

Ultimately, this kind of love functions in the economy of self.

What's my return investment on loving you and having a relationship?

What's my cost-benefit scenario factor in loving you and having a relationship?

What kind of gain of return will I have in loving you?

That's functioning in an economy of self, not an economy of heaven.

If we have received the love of Jesus, then we, then the way we love, even our enemies, should be transformed by it.

It's a selfish, selfless love, not a selfish love.

One that chose to love us and lavish that love on us, even when it seemed reckless to do so.

Some of us, though, we love people if they meet our conditions.

We stand as the judge of who can have our love, and it's as long as you meet all of these conditions, then I will love you well.

It's a performance-based love.

Many of us operate in this conditional love.

It isn't necessarily built upon self-benefit, but it does have to be earned by the other person.

It's motivated by the merit of the other.

It isn't a love that is freely given, it's a love that is costly earned.

This is contrary to the love of God and Jesus.

The conditions we met demanded judgment and wrath, not mercy and sonship.

Not mercy and sonship.

In fact, the condition God put before us to have relationship with Him could have never been met in our own strength and effort.

Do you understand that?

God demanded perfection.

For us to have relationship and communion with God, He demanded perfection to every dotted eye and cross T of His law.

And there was nothing in our own strength and strivings that could have reached that standard.

We could not, in and of ourselves, meet the conditions of God's love for him to love us.

We couldn't do it.

There was nothing in us that could have ever accomplished that.

So we were destined to never merit a conditionally based love.

So what does he do?

He descends to us, he condescends to our state and puts on flesh, and then he himself accomplishes the fullness of the law to the perfection of the demand, and then gives it to us.

And then gives it to us that we In Christ might be seen as the perfectly obedient ones and have sonship with the Father.

This is what He does for us.

He descended to our state and He met the demands on our behalf.

He determined to love us in spite of any merit of our own.

We love if it's proven to be worth loving the person.

Don't we?

It's a love rooted in selfishness.

Just like the other expressions of a sinner's love, Jesus says, but ultimately, if we're honest, our love is rooted in fear.

And when it's jeopardized, our emotional, mental, or even physical safety, we pull that love back and we lock it away in self-preservation.

Our conditions, our selfish ambitions of protection.

But God calls us not to love in protective ways, but in reckless ways.

In ways that are uncalculated, that throw caution to the wind, that doesn't make sense to the world around us.

Why?

Because Jesus loved his enemies into friends.

That's the hope of the gospel this morning.

Jesus loved his enemies, you and I, into friends.

Think about the love of Jesus extended to us in his condescending to us from heaven, in his robing himself with flesh, in his coming and living amongst us, being benevolent and charitable, kind, merciful to ungrateful and evil people.

And what does he do?

In his lavish love, in his determined love, he loves you and I into friends.

We go from enemies to friends.

Romans 5.10 says this for if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his son.

Much more now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life?

While we were enemies, at war with God, not on his side, not someone that he would love and be kind to because of any doing of our own.

We were at war with the Creator, enemies in our sinful, rebellious state against his kingdom and against his lordship.

What does he do?

He's kind to us, he's merciful to us.

Man, God doesn't come down and demand that we love him and demand that we meet every expectation and condition of his love so that we can be loved in return.

He doesn't come down and do any of that.

He sees us in our pitiful state as enemies who could have never won our own war and says, I'm gonna love them and I'm gonna make them my friends.

I'm gonna be benevolent, charitable, kind, merciful to them.

And this is what he's calling us to do.

Those who would hate us for the sake of his name, who would revile us, who would speak evil against us, who would tell lies about us, who would maybe even stretch out their hand to strike us because of his name, we're being called to love recklessly.

So three things as we close up today.

Number one, I want you to identify your enemies.

Every single person in this room can think of one person in your life who you've pulled back love to self-protect.

For self-interest and for self-gain and for self-preservation, you have pulled back because they have done harm against you.

Think of that person, think of that multiple people.

Right now, think of their names, identify your enemies.

We all have them.

Identify them.

Second thing I want you to do is this week, every day, pray for them.

Pray for your enemies, pray for them by name.

Pray that God would be merciful to them as he's been merciful to you.

Pray that God would shine his light upon them as he shin his light upon you.

Pray that God would do good to them and bless them, see their welfare, that he would be kind to them in the ways that he's been kind to you.

And then pray that he would use you to show and express that love to them.

Pray for them this week.

Pray for them throughout your mornings and your afternoons and your evenings.

By name, think of their face, see them before you, and pray for them.

It's hard to hate someone you're praying for.

I pray also, not just for their good, but for your heart to be softened to what Jesus is calling us to, to love recklessly in these scriptures.

That your heart would be softened and willing to maybe even love with future misery on the other side of it.

Lastly, do good towards your enemies.

So, those people, that person who you've seen their face, you've said their name, you've prayed for them, I want you to think about how you could do good to them.

Maybe you can write them a letter telling them how you forgive them and how you love them.

You can mail it to them.

Maybe you can actually show up and ask them to go to lunch and pay and be kind and benevolent.

Maybe you can go and help them with something that you know that they've been struggling with.

Maybe you can be present.

And here's the reality: there is zero expectation, there is a negative expectation that that love is gonna be reciprocated with any sense of kindness or goodness.

That's not why we do it.

I'm not saying, hey, if you're just super nice to the person who treated you like garbage for like 20 years and you ask them out to lunch and pay, they're gonna be nice to you now.

No, I don't, I don't know.

They might punch you in the face because they don't want your help.

I don't know what's gonna happen on the other side of that.

I'm not making empty and vain promises.

I'm telling you to be obedient.

I'm telling you to extend goodness where you've wanted to pull back in self-preservation.

I'm telling you to pray for them when you've wanted to wish harm on them.

I'm telling us to try and submit to the scriptures so that we can start emulating the king in our lives.

Do good to them.

Do good to them even if future misery lies on the other side of it.

Because we don't do these things by what we can get out of them.

We do these things because we have been the recipients eternally of them.

Amen.

Let's pray.