3. The Greatest Commandment
February 28, 2010
Love your Enemy
Mrs. Jones wanted her fourth grade class to learn some valuable life lessons so one day she gave them an assignment. Each student was instructed to get their parents to tell them a story and they would be expected to find the moral of the story. The next day the kids came back to class and one by one they told their stories. Kathy said: “my dad is a farmer and we have lots of egg laying hens. One time we were going to the market with a basket of eggs in the front seat when the truck hit a bump in the road and all the eggs broke and made a mess.” “So what is the moral of the story asked the teacher?” "Don't put all your eggs in one basket!" "Very good," said Mrs. Jones. "Now, Lucy?" "Our family are farmers too. But we raise chickens for the meat market. We had a dozen eggs one time, but when they hatched we only got ten live chicks. And the moral to this story is, don't count your chickens before they're hatched." "That's a fine story Lucy," she continued. "Johnny, do you have a story to share?" "Yes ma'am, my daddy told me this story about my Uncle Bob. Uncle Bob was a Green Beret in Vietnam and his helicopter got hit. He had to crash land in enemy territory and all he had was a bottle of whiskey, a machine gun and a machete. He drank the whiskey on the way down so it wouldn't break and then he landed right in the middle of 100 enemy troops. He killed seventy with the machine gun until he ran out of bullets, then he killed twenty more with the machete till the blade broke and then kill the last ten with his bare hands." "Good heavens," said the teacher, "What kind of moral do you get from that horrible story?" Little Johnny replied: “Don't mess with Uncle Bob when he's been drinking."
I think most families probably have an Uncle Bob. We certainly all have someone in our lives who can be a challenge to love. So what do we do with people that like that. My mother refers to some people as EGR’s extra grace required because dealing with them tends to demand a lot more patience than most people require. Our goal as a church is to become passionate followers of Jesus and in order to do this we have to learn how to love. Love is what makes us like Jesus. We can learn to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. We can even learn to love our neighbor as ourselves and still be missing something. If you look at Matthew 5:43 we see there is one more group that we are instructed to love. For some of us this will be the most difficult group to love. Jesus is in the beginning of His sermon on the mount and is in the process of revolutionizing the way people look at the world. Over and over again in this sermon we hear Jesus say: you have heard it said; but I tell you. Often times we look at the New Testament as gracious for it does away with the Old Testament and makes the Christian life easier. The problem with that is if you look through the sermon on the mount what you will find is that Jesus increases the demands of the law. You have heard it said: do not commit murder but I tell you don’t even be angry or you are a murderer. You have heard it said do not commit adultery but I tell you if you even look at a woman lustfully you commit adultery in your heart. So guess what guys, we are all adulterers. Ladies, I didn’t forget about you, guess what, you are all adulterers too. Jesus extends the demands of the law making them about more than just the action you take but about the truth that lives in your heart. Now you can’t just avoid doing the wrong things you have to avoid being wrong in the depths of your heart. You have heard it said, but I tell you is exactly how He will begin this text.
Mt 5:43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ Mt 5:44 But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, Mt 5:45 that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. Mt 5:46 If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? Mt 5:47 And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Mt 5:48 Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
You have heard it said love your neighbor and hate your enemy. In Leviticus 19:18 we are commanded to love our neighbor. There is however not a single passage in the Old Testament that instructs us to hate our enemy. This is a result of bad reasoning. If God says love your neighbor then it is obviously implied that He would want us to hate our enemies. Their reasoning seemed to be if you are to love the people who love you then you should hate the people who hate you. Jesus says no. This is not ok. As Christians we are to live a different kind of life. Pagans may hate their enemies but that is not ok for the children of God who have been redeemed and overwhelmed with the depths of His love. As children of God our response should be to love our enemies.
The first logical question we should have in reading this text where Jesus tell us to love our enemy is: who is my enemy? How about wicked evil men like Jeffrey Dahmer who kidnapped and murdered innocent people? I guess Dahmer could be my enemy. Or perhaps an ever more dangerous man like Hitler who was responsible for killing 6 million Jews and sending the world into a great war where millions more died. I suppose Hitler would be my enemy. What about Bin Ladin who hates America and helps support and train terrorists to come over here and kill innocent people. Bin Ladin and those who follow his way of thinking certainly would hate me so I guess they are my enemies. Oh, I know all those wealthy corrupt businessmen who did unethical things and crashed the economy. A lot of these guys have more money then they could hope to spend and yet because of their greed the so many have lost jobs and suffered financial hardships. It is possible that those people are my enemy. But you know its not really that hard for me to love those people. Sure Hitler was a terrible man but he didn’t hurt me. Al Qaeda may try to strike terror into our country but they have never done anything to me personally. Those wealthy businessmen didn’t really steal any of my money so honestly if they are my enemy they aren’t really that hard to love. People who live far away have never been that difficult for me to love. I can love them, pray for them, even hope that they will find a relationship with God and enter into eternity in paradise. No those people are not really my enemies at least there not really the enemies Jesus had in mind.
When we first moved to our house in St. Louis we were in a developing neighborhood. We were putting a pool in the backyard while they were marking out their backyard for sod. Well the company who came out to dig the hole for the pool drove a tractor around and ran over the back corner of their yard leaving a tire mark and breaking one of their little wooden stakes in half. This woman called my mother and started yelling at her for like 30 minutes saying that she was a terrible neighbor and a bad person because of this tractor incident. She never knew it but her little temper tantrum made my mother cry a lot. I was furious. It was about all I could do to stop myself from knocking on her door and giving that woman a piece of my mind. I held resentment in my heart against them for years because of how they treated my mom. So they became my enemies. The enemies that Jesus has in mind are not enemies of the nation but personal enemies. They are specifically those who persecute us.
Our real enemies are not the people who hate us from afar but never really have any direct impact on our lives. Our true enemies are the people who are harder to love than anyone else. They are you know every driver from Kansas. See it is not that hard for us to love people who are far away but that driver who seems determined to cut you off and make you late for work. It’s that lady in the office who shares information you trusted her with. Your true enemies are the people who have done real harm to your life. The hardest people in this world to love are not far away enemies, honestly they are the people who are closest to us. The neighbor who has loud parties until early in the morning keeping you from your sleep, the co-worker that is lazy which makes you have to work even harder. Our enemies are the people in our lives who are difficult to love.
There are people in our lives who mistreat us. There are people who deliberately cause us pain and those are the ones who are hard to love. Some people are just rude, inconsiderate, selfish, overbearing, unkind, hypocrites, liars, gossips, and cheats. There are unlovely people in this world. People will treat you in unloving ways. The problem with these people is not that they are unlovable but that they are unloved. Those unlovely people, they need love more than anyone. Loving God can be easy because God is loving and good and He blesses and provides for us every day. God can be easy to love because of who He is and all the things He has done for us. Our friends and family can be easy to love because these people love us as well. Sure you have conflicts and fights sometimes. You probably even have times where you want to just kill them but deep down you love them and you know they love you. The real challenge is not loving lovely people or loving the people who love you. The real challenge is to love those who hate you. Jesus commands us to love even our enemies. We love God, love our neighbors, and love our enemies. Basically we are called by God to love everyone and in John 14:15 Jesus tells us: Jn 14:15 “If you love me, you will obey what I command. If we don’t love our neighbor then we don’t love God. If we don’t learn to love our enemy then we don’t love God because He has commanded us to love our enemies.
Love is not easy. In fact even when you are loving lovable people love is not easy. But love does not mean you are filled with warm fuzzy feelings about the person. Love does not mean you don’t stand up for yourself or you let people walk all over you. Love does not mean you don’t set up boundaries or tell people no. In fact love does not mean you have to be close friends. When you love someone the result is that you do good things for them, you pray for them, and you are concerned for them. You do not have to invite a persecutor into your home to cause you pain but you do have to love them and that means you do not rejoice when they fail or suffer. We are to love them which means we care about them. We love them not because of who they are but because of who God is. Our enemies don’t deserve our love. They have not earned the treatment that we offer them any more than we earned that grace that was given to us through Jesus. Our love must be a gracious love in that we love even though it is undeserved.
Romans 5:8 tells us that God showed His love for us in this: while we were still sinners Christ died for us. Now that we have been justified by his blood how much more will we be saved from God’s wrath through Him. For if when we were God’s enemies God sent His Son to die that we might be reconciled to Him how much more would He save us now that we have been reconciled.
When we love God we naturally love people even those who are our enemies. You see when you love God you invite so much love into your life that you cannot contain it. You cannot hold it in. The love of God creates an unconditional love within us that we show to others not because deserve it but because they don’t deserve it. When we love them like God loves us we show them what Jesus looks like. Jesus didn’t just tell us this He showed us this. The last thing Jesus did on the cross was to pray for the people who put Him there. Beyond that in coming to earth in the first place we were His enemies and He gave His life to save us. That is what loving your enemies looks like. There is power in that kind of love. That is the love that changed your life. When you offer that love to your enemies you might even change their lives. Even if you do not we love in response to God’s love. Just because they are your enemy doesn’t mean that you don’t have to be Jesus in their lives.
