Love your Enemies

Hey, Church at the Grove.

Welcome to our online worship gathering.

It is so good to be with you as we celebrate this Sunday, or you may be watching this at another time.

My name is Russ, and if I hadn't met you, I'm one of the pastors at Church at the Grove.

So excited to have you with us.

I hope you'll connect with us on your app, on your phone, or online on the computer.

We would love to connect with you personally and move beyond just a sermon or just a worship service and actually get involved in developing a friendship, relationship, and to help you on your spiritual journey.

Several years ago, I read a book called Unbroken by an author named Laura Hildebrand.

And she's one of my favorite authors.

She wrote a book called Sea Biscuit, and both of these movies, both of these books were eventually made into movies.

And so she just I love her writing.

I love how she tells stories.

And she tells, she writes books and stories out of true history.

And she wrote this book called Unbroken about this unique guy named Louis Zamperini.

And the only way I can describe it is it's almost like a Forrest Gump type of life.

He was a world-class runner in the 1930s.

He actually ran in the Olympics in 1936 in Germany.

He was said to have actually shaken the hand of Adolf Hitler.

He just had an interesting life.

But on May 27, 1943, he was serving in the United States military during World War II, and he was on a plane that was searching for other planes that had crashed, and his plane lost an engine and it went down into the Pacific Ocean.

And he spent 47 days, which was a world record for survival at sea.

47 days he spent at sea, and in the book and the story and the movie, he fights off sharks and they have to survive, and it's just extremely dramatic.

But that was only the beginning of his story.

He is then captured by the Japanese and he spends two years in this famous, notorious Sugamo Japanese prison camp, where they find out that he's this famous U.S.

sprinter and this Japanese soldier who is one of the guards in the camp.

They nickname him the bird.

He begins to systematically torture Louis Zamparini.

And so in 1944, he's declared dead.

So his family think that he's gone.

They actually have a memorial and they celebrate his life.

But the war comes to an end and he is set free and he comes home from the prison camp.

He comes home from the war, but he still stays enslaved.

And it's a new prison that he lives in.

It's a prison of bitterness.

It's a prison of alcoholism.

It's a prison of dealing with unpacked trauma that he went through while he was tortured in that Japanese prison camp.

So he he endures constant nightmares and he becomes obsessed with wanting to try to find this prison guard that had tortured him and somehow kill him.

But here's what I love about this story.

In 1949, there's a guy named Billy Graham that for the first time had this big crusade in the city of Los Angeles, and Louis Zamparini ends up going.

After he's been married, he's still being haunted by these nightmares.

He's an alcoholic.

His wife invites him.

He first turns her down, but then he ends up going to the Billy Graham Crusade, and Louis Zamparini comes to Christ.

And here's what here's what Laura Hildenbrand says about his life when he comes to Christ.

It says, when Louis thought of his history, what resonated with him now was not all that he had suffered, but the divine love that he believed had intervened to save him.

He was not worthless, broken, forsaken at all.

But he was a man that God loved.

And so even though he had been tortured by the bird or the prison camp, the prison camp guard, he realized that this man no longer had power over him.

In a single silent moment, his rage, his fear, his humiliation, and his helplessness had fallen away.

That morning he believed he was a new creation.

Now I love this, and most of us can't identify completely with Louis Zamparini and all the drama of his life and this forest gump type of story made for Hollywood and turned into a book and a movie.

But I think all of us can identify with the fact that we've been hurt by somebody else.

There's somebody that has caused pain in our life.

It's maybe somebody in our family.

And when we think of them, we don't think of them as a family member or a friend, or we don't think of them as a coworker or just a schoolmate.

We think of them as an enemy because, man, they have hurt us.

They have broken us.

They have caused deep pain in us.

And so I think before we dive into this passage of scripture where Jesus is going to encourage us with this incredible, difficult, tough truth to love and to pray for our enemies, we need to ask the question, who are our enemies?

Now, as you know, a lot of times we think because we live in a certain country like the United States of America, our enemies are across the ocean, our enemies are Russia, our enemies are China or North Korea or maybe an Islamic terrorist organization.

Those are enemies.

No, but a lot of times our enemies are much closer to home.

Our enemies are someone in our family, our enemies are someone that have hurt us.

Our enemies are somebody that works down the hall from us.

Jesus wants us to understand this.

In the context where Jesus is preaching and teaching the Sermon on the Mount, the obvious enemy would have been the Roman oppressors.

So it could have been, it could have been these people who were oppressing them.

It could have been people who were religious leaders or neighbors.

It could be any number of people.

Jesus is giving us this sermon on the mount.

And I love what one writer says.

He said it's the kingdom manifesto of what it means to be a citizen in this new kingdom, in this new life of following Jesus.

And Jesus has been giving us these antithetical statements as we have been going through them.

And this is the final one.

You know, he says, he says, You've heard it said, you shall not commit murder, but I say to you, if you have anger in your heart, you're just as guilty of murder.

And so he says over and over these statements.

You've heard it said.

And what he's referring to is how these religious leaders have taken the commands of God that call us to a righteousness in God, and they've twisted it and they've manipulated it into an external or exterior kind of behavior, behavior modification.

And so he walks through these difficult statements and we've been taking them one by one each week and looking at how Jesus says, you've heard it said, but I say to you.

And so this one he's about to give us is the final one.

And here's the big idea is if we want to follow Jesus, if we want to be changed, we want to understand what it means to be a citizen in the kingdom of God and to understand the way of Jesus, we've got to learn to love our enemies.

And so loving your enemies is the way of Jesus.

Loving your enemies is the way of Jesus.

And see, you've got to define who your enemy is.

Is it somebody that's hurt you?

Is it somebody that's abused you?

Is it somebody that has that said something about you?

Is it somebody that's insulted you on social media?

Who is your enemy?

You have to decide that, and then you've got to listen to what Jesus teaches here.

Let's read the scripture here.

Matthew 5, verses 43 through 48.

Matthew 5:43–48

He says, You've heard that it was said, You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.

But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven.

For he makes his son rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.

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

Do not even the tax collectors do the same?

And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others?

Do not even the Gentiles do the same?

You therefore must be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.

And here's the first thing I want you to see out of this passage is we we just like we've talked about all through these sections of Scripture, we've got to be aware of how the Word of God can be twisted for our own personal ambitions and interests.

And here's what I've come to realize.

Sometimes we have a difficult time understanding the text.

We have a difficult time understanding what the Bible says.

But let's be honest.

Most of the time we understand what it says.

And it's clear.

We just have a difficult time accepting it and applying it to our own life.

Jesus says, You've heard that it was said, you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.

And so we we understand this part about loving our neighbor.

But there is this section that was added by the Pharisees and the Sadducees where it says, Love your enemy and hate, love your neighbor and hate your enemy.

God never said that.

If you read through all of the Old Testament, God calls Israel to be a light to the nations.

He wants them to be an example for other nations.

And so he says, You are to, um, you are to, even against people who believe differently, you are to represent me.

You're my ambassadors, you are my representatives.

And so it never said in any of the commandments that God gave, that you should love your neighbor and hate your enemy.

What they had done, the religious leaders had added that as an amended part of the scripture to give them this personal permission to hate their enemy.

And so Jesus is saying, no, you shall love your enemy and pray for them.

Leviticus 19, 18 says, you shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself, I am the Lord.

And so when they hear Jesus give this command, this is the scripture they would have thought of.

It's what would have come to their mind.

But what the religious leaders added, they said, You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.

God never said that.

And so Jesus is trying to bring clarity for us as we follow Jesus in this new way of life and as new citizens and in this new kingdom.

You're to love your enemies and to pray for them.

And so Jesus is correcting and realigning this new kingdom manifesto with what God originally intended for us to follow.

You've heard of the story, The Good Samaritan, where Jesus takes the Samaritans, which was a hated group, a people despised by the Jewish people.

They had fought, they had taken what it meant to be a good Jewish follower of God, and they had twisted the faith, and also they had intermarried with some oppressors and some people from other countries.

And so there's this new race of people called the Samaritans.

And so Jesus uses that example and the story of the Good Samaritan to teach us that we are to be good neighbors with people that believe differently than us and may look differently and act differently from us.

And so Jesus is saying, this is a new radical way of living.

Jesus gets radical.

He says, You're to love your enemies.

And when you love your enemies, you will demonstrate and show this that God is your heavenly father.

That's how we're to demonstrate that we follow the creator of the universe, that we follow Jesus, that God is our heavenly Father.

He says, But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven.

For he makes his son rise on the evil and on the good, and sends the rain on the just and on the unjust.

So Jesus has given us, man, some hard truths.

And if you look at the Sermon on the Mount and the other gospels where Jesus is sharing, he gives us a list.

He says, number one, you've got to love your enemies.

Number two, you've got to pray for those that persecute you.

I love what Charles Spurgeon said.

He says, prayer is the forerunner of mercy.

So if we're going to share the mercy of Jesus, we've got to be willing to pray for people that maybe that we don't just naturally get along with.

He says, Jesus says, do good to those that hate you in Luke chapter 6.

Luke 6 · chapter mention

He says, bless those who curse you.

Pray for those that abuse you.

I've shared the story of losing my brother many times with our church family.

So if you've never heard this, I'm one of three boys, and we we we grew up in a family that didn't go to church.

Um and so all three of us came to Christ at different times.

As a matter of fact, I came to Christ really through the influence of my two older brothers.

But when I was in my 20s, um my the middle brother, uh Eddie, he passed away tragically in 1992.

Um there was a couple that had become friends of mine and my older brother, Butch, named Dennis and Judy Rogers.

And so they came to minister to us in our time of loss, in our time of hurt.

And here's their story.

Um, their daughter was driving through the city of Atlanta, and she stopped at a red light in downtown Atlanta, and a man came and carjacked her and shot her and murdered her right there on the streets of Atlanta.

And so people, Dennis and Judy, they understood pain and hurt and loss.

And so they went to the trial, they went through the whole process of this criminal, this man that took the life of their daughter.

They went through the whole process where he was sentenced to spend life in prison.

And while they were in that courtroom, they were given the opportunity to publicly forgive him.

Now, I I would I would love to say that they would they would tell you that the pain just went away.

No, they've had to wrestle with that pain their entire life.

But to watch and to hear how they went through that was such a ministry to me and my brother in our time of pain and loss, and it was an example of a supernatural love that only comes through Jesus Christ.

You know, there's um in the Greek language, this is the beauty of understanding how the Bible was written.

You know, the Old Testament primarily written in Hebrew, and the New Testament primarily written in Greek.

Um, there's three words in the Greek language that are translated in the English language is love.

And um one of them is phileo, and it's this idea of brotherly love.

Another one is eros and it's this idea of erotic or sexual love.

Um, but the kind of love that Jesus is saying here, when he says, pray for your enemies, um, love your enemies and pray for them, he's using the word agape, which is only explained as a supernatural love that comes straight through our relationship with Jesus Christ.

It's Holy Spirit-empowered love.

It's a love that you can't muster up.

It's a love that you can't come up with in your own power.

It's a love that you only invite into your life through Jesus and you live and lean into it and depend on Jesus for it.

And so here's what I've learned is you you can't you can't depend on your feelings when it comes to when it comes to dealing with people that have hurt you.

You've got to make a decision to love them.

See, not one time does Jesus refer to um this section or sections like this where he refers to how we feel.

He's saying love is a decision.

And Jesus, when he decided to love us, he went to the cross.

He wrestled with God a bit in prayer when he said, when he when he prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, he says, God, may this cup pass from me, but not my will, but your will.

That's the kind of love that provides us the means by which we are to love our enemies and pray for them.

Now, here's a caveat.

Many of us have gone through difficult times.

We've been hurt, we've had, we maybe, maybe you're like Dennis and Judy, and someone in your family uh has been taken from you through crime, or maybe you've been you've been abused as an adult or as a child.

Listen, those situations you need to go seek counsel.

You need to talk to a pastor, talk to somebody who can help you unpack that so you can get to a place where you can obey this command of Jesus.

I love what Paul says in Romans 12 in verses 17 through 21.

He says, Repay no one evil for evil, but give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all.

If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.

Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.

To the contrary, if your enemy is hungry, listen to this, feed him.

If he's thirsty, give him something to drink.

For by doing so you will heap burning coals on his head.

Do not be overcome with evil, but overcome evil with good.

By the way, where it says you will heap burning coals on his head, that is not a bad thing.

That is a good thing because in that, in their culture, if somebody gave you coal to burn in your in your stove and to keep your family warm, that was a good thing.

This isn't that that wasn't meant to be a bad thing.

We've misunderstood that.

I love this quote from Martin Luther King Jr.

It's a famous quote.

He says, darkness cannot drive out darkness.

Only light can do that.

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

By the way, just to just to continue to reinforce that that Jesus is giving us this new ethic for our personal relationships.

There is a place for civil government to make sure that criminals pay when they break the law.

So we know that.

We understand that.

Romans 13 says civil authorities are to come in and make sure that those that commit crimes pay for their crimes.

And so let's come back to this.

So Jesus is saying that loving your enemies is the way of Jesus.

Then he says, to be like your father in heaven.

And so he's giving us this standard that is so beyond what I could imagine trying to live up to my own human strength.

And what he's saying is this he's saying, your father in heaven, he gives rain to those that are just, and he gives rain to those that are unjust.

And so imagine two farms in ancient life, and so one farm is owned by a man who loves God with all of his heart, and this other farm right next door is owned by a man who is just mean and full of hate and just hard to get along with.

And so when the storms come and the rain comes to uh to send water and to send uh uh uh rain on their farms, there isn't Like a dividing line where God sends rain to the good guy and he doesn't give rain to the bad guy.

No.

What God is saying here, what Jesus is saying here, he's saying, listen, God gives what we call common grace to those that deserve it and those that don't deserve it.

And so God, he's saying, when you when he's saying, be like your father in heaven, he's saying you are good to those people that deserve it, and you're good and you love and you pray for people that don't deserve it.

You know, two men wake up at the same time in the morning.

One man loves Jesus and the other man doesn't love Jesus.

But man, both of them have a heartbeat.

Both of them are awakened, and both of them are given life for a new day.

And Jesus is saying, be like your father who gives what we call theologically common grace to the just and to the unjust, to those that deserve it and those that don't deserve it.

And so let your love shine to all people.

Let your love shine to the people that you would say are your friends, and let your love of Jesus shine to the people around you that you might even consider enemies in your own personal life.

He says this to come to a close.

Now, see, first of all, that's the desire that God has for every one of us.

That we would be like our heavenly Father.

And since our heavenly Father is perfect, we're to be like our Heavenly Father and to be perfect ourselves.

Now that's something I can't, I can't just kind of wrap my head around.

I can't wrap my arms around that.

You know why?

Because there's no way I can be perfect.

But if Jesus comes and lives in me, if the Holy Spirit changes my life like he did with Louis Zamperini, he can take hate and turn it into love, and he can take an imperfect person like me, and he can make me perfect like he wants me to be.

I love what Paul says.

He says in Romans 8.29, he says, for those whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his son in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.

And so here's what this verse does for me.

It propels me to depend on Jesus.

You know what it does?

It propels me to the cross.

Here's what I find in all of these commandments and all of these sections of Scripture.

It's almost like Jesus is giving us this nod to what's coming.

The cross.

He's going to give his life.

He's going to die on the cross.

He's going to be buried.

And then God is going to breathe life back into his dead body, and he's going to walk out of that empty tomb.

It's the gospel.

It's the gospel.

Jesus has come to make us perfect, like our Heavenly Father is perfect.

We can only be that way through Jesus.

And so this commandment propels me to depend on what Jesus has provided for me at the cross.

He provides forgiveness.

He provides the empowering work of the Holy Spirit.

That's what he did in my life.

That's what maybe he's done in your life.

That's what he did in Louis Zamparini's life.

After a year of trusting Christ, Zamparini returned.

He went back to that same prison where he was tortured by the prison guard nicknamed the Bird.

And he met with a bunch of his captors.

He went to, and you could find videos of this by YouTube, looking on YouTube.

He goes to each one of these prison guards that had beaten him and tortured him, and he forgives each one of them.

He speaks to them as a whole group.

Now he wanted to find the one that was called the bird, but he couldn't.

You know why?

Because the bird had taken his own life.

So when he figured out that the bird had committed suicide, and this is Laura Hildebrand's words, she writes, Louis felt something that he had never felt for his captor before.

With a shiver of amazement, he realized it was compassion.

At that moment, something shifted sweetly inside him.

It was forgiveness.

Beautiful and effortless and complete.

For Louis, the war was finally over.

Now, let me ask about you.

Have you come to grips with how you can love your enemies, how you can forgive, how you can live and love like Jesus has called us.

We're called to love our enemies and to pray for them.

Let me just give you a couple of specific applications.

It is ask God to give you the power to forgive and to love in a way that you can't do in your own strength.

And then when you think of people in your life that maybe have hurt you, pray for them by name.

Now that's hard.

That's tough.

But here's what I found.

You can't keep hating and you can't keep despising somebody that you're praying for.

And Jesus provides the way for us to be able to do that.

Put on the armor of God every day.

Fight the spiritual battle to love the people that are hard to love.

And be aware of how Jesus gives us beautiful pictures in Scripture, like Luke 18, where there's a tax collector and there's a Pharisee coming both to pray.

And the Pharisee says, God, thank you for not making me like that tax collector.

How prideful is that?

And then the tax collector beats his chest and he says, God, I'm a sinner.

I'm a sinner.

Would you forgive me?

And when we see these pictures and these contrasts in Scripture, ask God to give us the heart that pursues forgiveness and is willing to love and to pray for those that hurt us and may be our enemies.

Can I pray for you right now?

Heavenly Father, I pray for the person that's on the other end of the screen.

And I don't know what's going on in their life.

I don't know, I don't know about the enemies they have.

I don't know about the pain that they've been through.

But I pray that you'd fill them with your spirit.

Lord, I pray for that person that maybe today, for the first time, needs to cross the line of faith, step out of darkness, and step into the light of Jesus.

And admit that they fall short.

To believe and trust in the good news and the gospel.

I mentioned that Jesus is nodding toward his future death on the cross when he's teaching this.

And so I want you to put your faith in Jesus.

Father, would you help that person take their first step of faith and admitting that they're a sinner, admitting that they need grace, and believing and trusting in what Christ did on the cross through the empty tomb to provide it.

And that they would confess Jesus as the Lord.

And if that's you this morning, I would encourage you to text these words.

Start to follow to 9700.

Now, for those of you that know Jesus and you love Jesus, let me encourage you.

There's a world out there, outside of the church building, outside of this video, that is desperately searching for something that will give them meaning and significance.

And listen, maybe the way that they're going to find it is and they're going to know about Jesus is through people that have been deeply hurt, learning to forgive and learning to love their enemies.

God bless you.