Monday, April 02, 2018

Keys to the Kingdom – The Sermon on the Mount - 07 LOVE

Words that comfort – God loves His enemies! Rom 5:6-11
Every day that the sun rises, we are reminded that God loves His enemies. He sends His sunshine on the evil and the good. Each time the rain falls, we remember that He waters the lawns and the fields of both the just and the unjust.
Words that challenge – We are to love our enemies! Matt 5:43-48

It’s easy to love those who resemble us, those who favor us, and those who greet us. But what about those who don’t? The scribes cared only about their “neighbor,” as they defined the term. Then they added the flip side – “and hate your enemy.” Jesus declared, though, that one essential key to the kingdom is the God-like love we offer our adversaries.
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Do you have any enemies? Who are they? In your family – in-laws or even siblings or spouses! In your work. In the church. Why do they hate you? What’s the problem? And what are you going to do about it?
Reading: Matt 5:43-48
Greater Righteousness: 6 Contrasts
Murder – Adultery – Divorce – Oaths – Retaliation – Love
Not to abolish, but to fulfill.
“You have heard, but I say …”
Scripture (mis)quoted.
From the heart to the hand.
From “Do not!” to “Do!”
No one can stand in your way!
In each case we have discovered something remarkable. No one can make you hate or kill them. No one can make you lust or commit adultery. No one can make you destroy your marriage. No one can make you break a promise. No one can make you respond to evil with more evil.
And now … No one can force you to be their enemy. No one can stop you from loving them.
As Augustine put it, ‘Many have learned how to offer the other cheek, but do not know how to love him by whom they were struck.’ For we are to go beyond forbearance to service, beyond the refusal to repay evil to the resolve to overcome evil with good.
Alfred Plummer: ‘To return evil for good is devilish; to return good for good is human; to return good for evil is divine.’
Your attitude and your behavior demonstrate that you have been with Jesus on the mountain and that you are building your life on solid rock by putting into practice what you have heard.
By the way, if all the people of the world would do that very thing, there would be no wars, no crime, no divorce, no issues with guns, no “me-too” movement, no abortion, etc. Spiritual cancers cannot be treated with purely political, man-made laws and decisions.
At the same time, we should not be surprised that the worldly-minded people do not follow Jesus’ teachings. Why? We all act based on what we believe. If – and to what extent – we believe in the cross and the tomb, we also believe in the message of the One who died and rose. That’s the reason that, like the wise builder, we strive to put into practice what we have heard on the mountain.
“Love Your Neighbor.”
Mt 5:43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’
"Love your neighbor." What could be wrong with that?
The words were true, quoted from Lev 19:18.
But the scribes omitted “as yourself.” They lowered the high standard God gave.
And they added “and hate your enemy.” They narrowed the objects of love.
How could they be so blatant and obvious?
Based on Lev 19.
Le 19:1 Then the Lord spoke to Moses, saying: 2 “Speak to all the congregation of the sons of Israel and say to them, ‘You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.
Le 19:17 ‘You shall not hate your fellow countryman in your heart; you may surely reprove your neighbor, but shall not incur sin because of him. 18 ‘You shall not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the sons of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself; I am the Lord.
So what’s wrong with what they did?
Did they intentionally overlook Lev 19:34?
“You shall love the stranger as yourself.”
They apparently ignored, from the same chapter, Lev 19:
Le 19:10 ‘Nor shall you glean your vineyard, nor shall you gather the fallen fruit of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the needy and for the stranger. I am the Lord your God.
Le 19:33 ‘When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. 34 ‘The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt; I am the Lord your God.
Also:
Ex 12:48 “But if a stranger sojourns with you, and celebrates the Passover to the Lord, let all his males be circumcised, and then let him come near to celebrate it; and he shall be like a native of the land. But no uncircumcised person may eat of it. 49 “The same law shall apply to the native as to the stranger who sojourns among you.”
Ex 23:3 nor shall you be partial to a poor man in his dispute. 4 “If you meet your enemy’s ox or his donkey wandering away, you shall surely return it to him.
Same as for a brother: Dt 22:1-4
Also, as we have already seen:
Pr 25:21 If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat; And if he is thirsty, give him water to drink; 22 For you will heap burning coals on his head, And the Lord will reward you.
How could the scribes justify hating your enemy?
Based on the “Holy Wars” against the Canaanites?
These wars were commanded by God as the just judgment for the nations that worshiped idols and practiced abominations before the Lord.
Based on the “imprecatory psalms,” in which David spoke of hating God’s enemies?
Ps 139:19 O that You would slay the wicked, O God; Depart from me, therefore, men of bloodshed. 20 For they speak against You wickedly, And Your enemies take Your name in vain. 21 Do I not hate those who hate You, O Lord? And do I not loathe those who rise up against You? 22 I hate them with the utmost hatred; They have become my enemies.
This “utmost hatred” relates to God’s enemies, not one’s own enemies.
Note the very next prayer, that one’s heart may be right with God.
23 Search me, O God, and know my heart; Try me and know my anxious thoughts; 24 And see if there be any hurtful way in me, And lead me in the everlasting way.
Stott: So there is such a thing as perfect hatred, just as there is such a thing as righteous anger. But it is a hatred for God’s enemies, not our own enemies. It is entirely free of all spite, rancour and vindictiveness, and is fired only by love for God’s honour and glory. It finds expression now in the prayer of the martyrs who have been killed for the word of God and for their witness. And it will be expressed on the last day by the whole company of God’s redeemed people who, seeing God’s judgment come upon the wicked, will concur in its perfect justice and will say in unison, ‘Hallelujah! Salvation and glory and power belong to our God, for his judgments are true and just … Amen. Hallelujah!’
So they twisted, even reversed, God’s Law. Jesus would fulfill it.
How Do You Define “Neighbor?”
Stott: Easy enough for ethical casuists (consciously or unconsciously anxious to ease the burden of this command) to twist it to their own convenience. ‘My neighbour’, they argued, ‘is one of my own people, a fellow Jew, my own kith and kin, who belongs to my race and my religion. The law says nothing about strangers or enemies. So, since the command is to love only my neighbour, it must be taken as a permission, even an injunction, to hate my enemy. For he is not my neighbour that I should love him.’ The reasoning is rational enough to convince those who wanted to be convinced, and to confirm them in their own racial prejudice.
Luke 10:25-37
Luke 10 - Good Samaritan. We become a neighbor to our enemy when we see him in the ditch, we feel compassion, and we give what we have to serve and heal him.
Got Enemies? Give it to ‘Em!
44 “But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,
To God, “Love your neighbor” means “love your enemy.”
Love, pray for, and do good to your enemies.
Our enemy is seeking our harm; we must seek his good.
Not, “Ignore your enemy.” Not, “Refuse to harm your enemy.”
But, “Find a way to help, to bless, to encourage your enemy!”
Which enemies?
Even those who persecute you! διωκόντων 
Who malign, beat, injure, attack, torture, and even kill you.
Stott: So Jesus contradicted their addition as a gross distortion of the law: But I say to you, Love your enemies (44). For our neighbour, as he later illustrated so plainly in the parable of the good Samaritan, is not necessarily a member of our own race, rank or religion. He may not even have any connection with us. He may be our enemy, who is after us with a knife or a gun. Our ‘neighbour’ in the vocabulary of God includes our enemy. What constitutes him our neighbour is simply that he is a fellow human being in need, whose need we know and are in a position in some measure to relieve.
What, then, is our duty to our neighbour, whether he be friend or foe? We are to love him. Moreover, if we add the clauses in Luke’s account of the Sermon, our love for him will be expressed in our deeds, our words and our prayers.
Lk 6:27-36 Love, do good, bless, and pray.
Richard M. Nixon, 37th president of US (1913 - 1994), in his White House farewell:
 “Always remember others may hate you but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself.”
When we hate our enemies, we are giving them power over us: power over our sleep, our appetites, our blood pressure, our health, and our happiness. Our enemies would dance with joy if only they knew how they were worrying us, lacerating us, and getting even with us! Our hate is not hurting them at all, but our hate is turning our own days and nights into a hellish turmoil.
Not self-conscious and patronizing philanthropy.
Not sentiment but service—practical, humble, sacrificial service.
Words can also express our love, however, both words addressed to our enemies themselves and words addressed to God on their behalf. ‘Bless those who curse you.’ If they call down disaster and catastrophe upon our heads, expressing in words their wish for our downfall, we must retaliate by calling down heaven’s blessing upon them, declaring in words that we wish them nothing but good. Finally, we direct our words to God. Both evangelists record this command of Jesus: ‘Pray for those who persecute (or abuse) you.’
Chrysostom saw this responsibility to pray for our enemies as ‘the very highest summit of self-control’. Indeed, looking back over the requirements of these last two antitheses, he traces nine ascending steps, with intercession as the topmost one.
Nine Ascending Steps
First, we are not to take any evil initiative ourselves.
Secondly, we are not to avenge another’s evil.
Thirdly, we are to be quiet, and
fourthly, to suffer wrongfully.
Fifthly, we are to surrender to the evildoer even more than he demands.
Sixthly, we are not to hate him, but
(steps 7 and 8) to love him and do him good.
As our ninth duty, we are ‘to entreat God Himself on his behalf’.
Such intercession is the summit of Christian love. ‘This is the supreme command,’ wrote Bonhoeffer. ‘Through the medium of prayer we go to our enemy, stand by his side, and plead for him to God.’2
Moreover, if intercessory prayer is an expression of what love we have, it is a means to increase our love as well. It is impossible to pray for someone without loving him, and impossible to go on praying for him without discovering that our love for him grows and matures. We must not, therefore, wait before praying for an enemy until we feel some love for him in our heart. We must begin to pray for him before we are conscious of loving him, and we shall find our love break first into bud, then into blossom. Jesus seems to have prayed for his tormentors actually while the iron spikes were being driven through his hands and feet; indeed the imperfect tense suggests that he kept praying, kept repeating his entreaty ‘Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do’. If the cruel torture of crucifixion could not silence our Lord’s prayer for his enemies, what pain, pride, prejudice or sloth could justify the silencing of ours?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote his exposition before the outbreak of war. He could see where Nazism was leading, and he died for his Christian testimony against it.
He quoted a certain A. F. C. Villmar of 1880, but his words sound almost prophetic of Bonhoeffer’s own day: ‘This commandment, that we should love our enemies and forgo revenge, will grow even more urgent in the holy struggle which lies before us … The Christians will be hounded from place to place, subjected to physical assault, maltreatment and death of every kind. We are approaching an age of wide-spread persecution … Soon the time will come when we shall pray … It will be a prayer of earnest love for these very sons of perdition who stand around and gaze at us with eyes aflame with hatred, and who have perhaps already raised their hands to kill us … Yes, the Church which is really waiting for its Lord, and which discerns the signs of the times of decision, must fling itself with its utmost power and with the panoply of its holy life, into this prayer of love.’
Because that’s what proves your sonship.
45 so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.
As I saw the sun rise today, I knew that God loves His enemies.
God loves His enemies. That’s reassuring!
We must love our enemies. That’s challenging!
It’s one thing to pray that God will change our enemies to make them easier to love. It’s quite another thing to pray that God will change us so we will love our enemies whether they change or not.
Be thankful for your enemies! Here are four reasons:
1. They may help you see your faults – as friends may not – so that you may correct them.
2. If they are your enemies purely because you are doing what’s right, your enemies will cause God to bless you.
3. Your enemies give you an opportunity that your friends cannot – to act like God!
4. Your enemies are the very ones you may win to Christ through love.
Only by loving our enemies shall we prove conclusively whose sons we are, for only then shall we be exhibiting a love like the love of our heavenly Father’s. For he makes his sun rise (notice, in passing, to whom the sun belongs!) on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust (45). Divine love is indiscriminate love, shown equally to good men and bad.
“Common grace,” not “saving grace:” rain and sunshine. Food, drink, family, pleasure.
Not “so that they may leave you alone,” though they may.
Not “so that they may become your friends,” though they may.
Not “so that you may kill them with kindness,” though you may.
But “so that you may be sons of your Father in heaven!”
Love is a decision to will and to act in the best interest of another person.
Because that’s what makes you different.
46 “For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? 47 “If you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?
For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Or what credit is that to you? ‘Even sinners love those who love them.’
No Calvinistic “total depravity” here. Man is not born in sin, without the capacity to love or to do good.
Stott: Unredeemed sinners can love. Parental love, filial love, conjugal love, the love of friends—all these, as we know very well, are the regular experience of men and women outside Christ. Even the tax collectors (the petty customs officials who because of their extortion had a reputation for greed) love those who love them. Even the Gentiles (those ‘dogs’, as the Jews called them, those outsiders who loathed the Jews and would look the other way when they passed one in the street), even they salute each other. None of this is in dispute.
But all human love, even the highest, the noblest and the best, is contaminated to some degree by the impurities of self-interest. We Christians are specifically called to love our enemies (in which love there is no self-interest), and this is impossible without the supernatural grace of God.
If we love only those who love us, we are no better than swindlers. If we greet only our brothers and sisters, our fellow Christians, we are no better than pagans; they too greet one another.
Jesus asked: What more are you doing than others? (47). This simple word more is the quintessence of what he is saying. It is not enough for Christians to resemble non-Christians; our calling is to outstrip them in virtue. Our righteousness is to exceed (perisseusēpleion) that of the Pharisees (20) and our love is to surpass, to be more than (perisson) that of the Gentiles (47).
Bonhoeffer puts it well: ‘What makes the Christian different from other men is the “peculiar”, the perisson, the “extraordinary”, the “unusual”, that which is not “a matter of course” … It is “the more”, the “beyond-all-that”. The natural is to auto (one and the same) for heathen and Christian, the distinctive quality of the Christian life begins with the perisson … For him (sc. Jesus) the hallmark of the Christian is the “extraordinary”.’
And what is this perisson, this ‘plus’ or ‘extra’ which Christians must display? Bonhoeffer’s reply was: ‘It is the love of Jesus Christ himself, who went patiently and obediently to the cross … The cross is the differential of the Christian religion.’
What he writes is true. Yet, to be more precise, the way Jesus put it was to say that this ‘super-love’ is not the love of men, but the love of God, which in common grace gives sun and rain to the wicked.
Because that’s what aims for His perfection.
48 “Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
Luke 6:35 “But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for He Himself is kind to ungrateful and evil men. 36 “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.
Stott: (John Wesley and) some holiness teachers have taught the possibility of reaching in this life a state of sinless perfection. But the words of Jesus cannot be pressed into meaning this without causing discord in the Sermon. For he has already indicated in the beatitudes that a hunger and thirst after righteousness is a perpetual characteristic of his disciples, and in the next chapter he will teach us to pray constantly, ‘Forgive us our debts.’
The “perfection” he means relates to love, that perfect love of God which is shown even to those who do not return it. Indeed, scholars tell us that the Aramaic word which Jesus may well have used meant ‘all-embracing’. The parallel verse in Luke’s account of the Sermon confirms this: ‘Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.’2 We are called to be perfect in love, that is, to love even our enemies with the merciful, the inclusive love of God.
OT – God as holy called for Israel to imitate His holiness.
NT – God as Father calls His people to imitate His kindness.
Because that’s what He did.
Our enemy is seeking our harm; we must seek his good. For this is how God has treated us. It is “while we were enemies” that Christ died for us to reconcile us to God. If he gave himself for his enemies, we must give ourselves for ours.
DO RIGHT. LOVE THEM ANYWAY! – author unknown
People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered;
Love them anyway.
If you are kind,
People may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives;
Be kind anyway.
If you are successful,
You will win some false friends and some true enemies;
Succeed anyway.
If you are honest and frank,
People may cheat you;
Be honest and frank anyway.
What you spend years building,
Someone could destroy overnight;
Build anyway.
If you find serenity and happiness,
They may be jealous;
Be happy anyway.
The good you do today,
People will often forget tomorrow;
Do good anyway.
Give the world the best you have,
And it may never be enough;
Give the world the best you have anyway.
You see, in the final analysis,
It is between you and God;
It never was between you and them anyway.

Possible hymns:
The Greatest Commands
Love Divine, All Love Excelling
The Way that He Loves
Love Lifted Me


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