You're listening to the Providence City Teaching Podcast. Further information about Providence City and this Sermon series can be found on our website providencechurch.org.au or by emailing
[email protected]. All right, well it's great to have the kids in the service with us. And this first bit is for you and it's either going to show you how out of touch I am or not, but we'll see how we go. All right, so we're going to have five characters on the screen and I want you to tell me kids or adults if the kids don't know, which show the characters from or what their name is. Okay, so here's the first one. All righty, anyone know who this character is? Yes, anyone? Who we got? Yep. Yep, from? Yeah, well done. Cool. Number one. All right, next one. All right, who we got? Back there. Yep, from Paul Patrol. Yep, nice. Mayor Humdinger, that's it. All right, next one. Yep. Yep. Nice. Three from three. All right, here we go, next one. Anyone? Adults. Yep, from? Well done. Nice mat. All right, next one. Last one. Who you got? Anyone got this? Yep, right in the back. Yep, brilliant. All right. Cool. That went better than I thought it might. Well done, kids. That's awesome. Anyone tell me what all those characters have in common? Yep, Kera? They're all the bad guys. That's right. They're the villains. They're the enemies of the main character. So you probably figured out from today's Bible reading and that little exercise, I guess, that that's what we're thinking about. We're thinking about this concept of enemies. Now, Hillary kind of alluded to this in her little invitation to Easter, but you could have had one of these kind of reactions to this concept of enemies. Maybe you thought, "Who are my enemies? Do I even have any enemies?" And maybe your mind goes to the news, maybe to governments or people groups who perhaps oppose our quite unquote way of life, Western liberal democracies. Or maybe your mind goes to people you find difficult. You know, people that put coriander on food. Or those people who just can't seem to understand around about. Yeah, there we go. Maybe it's a work colleague, a family member, someone you just don't get along with kids. Maybe it's someone in your class that gives you a hard time. Or even a teacher who gives you a hard time. But even as you think about it, these enemies in the news, they kind of seem to abstract, distant, far away. There's no sort of relational connection. And even the people that you find difficult kind of feels like a stretch to call them your enemy. Because I think an enemy is someone or something who is openly hostile to you. Or actively working against you or out to harm you. Now, when you hear that definition, I think some of you, this is perhaps a very real thing. Things might have escalated with a neighbour, a friend, a workmate to the point where you feel they may actually do bad things to you or want bad things for you. Or you might be from a country or a context where the government actively worked against you or your people group. There were people out to harm you and maybe you even felt like it was your right to harm them. Or at least defend yourself. You could have been literally an enemy of the state. But whatever your situation today is, Jesus is calling his disciples to a kind of love the world struggles to conceive. Loving not just our friends and the people that love us and the people that we like, but loving our enemies too. Now, if you're sort of in that first camp and you're like, "I don't really feel like I have any enemies," or, you know, it's not something maybe that applies to me. My experience of the Christian life is that when I kind of tend to dismiss things like that, or I think they don't apply to me, or I've sort of kind of overcome that thing, I get a very real opportunity to live it out kind of very quickly. And again, my experience of the Christian life is the theory and the reality are quite different. And when you're in a situation in the heat of the moment, it can be very, very hard. So sometimes it's helpful to store things away in your mind and think about it, ruminate it on it, because there might be an opportunity in the future to apply. Now, we're in the sermon on the Mount. Can you remember the context where Jesus' feet kind of sitting on the side of a mountain hearing him teach? Jesus is outlining to his disciples the blessings of the kingdom of God. He declares that the kingdom of God is where they will find God's grace, where they will find justice, where they will be made whole. The kingdom of God is the source of all human flourishing both in this life and the life to come. But, being part of the kingdom of God comes with the responsibility. There's a role to play here. Jesus calls his disciples to be salt and light in the world, a presence in their community that actively points people to this kingdom. As part of being salt and light, Jesus calls them to a greater righteousness. He wants his disciples to be wholeheartedly oriented to God, both in their external obedience and kind of how people see them, but also in their internal thoughts and desires. So to help his listeners understand this, Jesus, he's taken six kind of case studies of Jewish law and he's unpacked them. And, as I said, he's not just calling for an external obedience, but a heart-oriented, greater righteousness, where both what people see in public and what they are in private are aligned. It's a really important concept in all of this. So, as we get to today's passage, the first thing I think you'll see, if you've been with us for the last few weeks, is a familiar structure. We have this kind of common saying, you hear it said, and then Jesus moves to this demand for a greater righteousness, but I say, and then he provides a little bit of application to help his listeners understand what it is that he's getting. So, verse 43, "You hear it say, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.'" Firstly, it's worth noticing that Israel knew what it was like to have enemies. Today, Garth talked about Jesus riding in on the donkey, and the people's great hope when he was doing that, when Jesus was riding in on the donkey, was that Jesus was going to free them from the Romans. That was what they were hoping. The entire kind of existence of Israel had been characterized by threats, invasion, exile, occupation. There were also social enemies, people who weren't welcome in their society. The good Samaritan, that parable that Jesus tells, kind of finds its pinch point because of the Israelite enmity towards the Samaritan people. So, these are laterally understood what it meant to have enemies. Secondly, the first part of the saying, "Love your neighbor." That's definitely from the Old Testament, so that can be found in the Bible, Leviticus 19, 18. But the second part, "Love, hate your enemies," is not found anywhere in Scripture. So, it seems like a view had been formed from reading parts of Scripture where individuals had spoken of hating their enemies.
personal enemies and they'd also read parts where God had called them to a sort of a purity and to remove those people who were opposed to God. So I kind of get it, I kind of get how this conclusion, how they come to this conclusion, it could seem like the enemies of God were at the very least to be ostracized and in some cases it could be like they were supposed to be killed. Is that the conclusion we're supposed to come to as well? Well I think what's happened here is God's call for justice and purity has been used by some for personal benefit, to allow for the mistreatment of people deemed unworthy in their society. So when you read through the Old Testament you will also find countless examples of Israel being called to a role in pointing the nations to God. God chose Israel for a reason, not least of which was to be a light to the nations, to reveal his salvation to the world, even those they deemed as enemies. But unfortunately sin, humanity so often makes us forget that the good things we've been given come with a role and a responsibility. In this case some of the Israelites, the leaders had taken God's selection of Israel and his desire for purity and holiness twisted it and made it more about social convenience and in doing that distorted their view of their own righteousness, justified their hate towards people they deemed as enemies. And this had nothing to do with the devotion to a holy God or the good of his people. So as we move through we find the second part where Jesus calls for this greater righteousness, he lifts the bar. But I tell you love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. Now loving one another is a very kind of consistent refrain throughout the Bible. We read it all the way through, we read it in the Gospels and as we read it, as we work our way through the Bible it becomes more and more cross-shaped. That is we realize biblical love is characterized by putting the needs of others before our own. So we find Jesus calling his disciples to think about their enemies in this way, to think of the good of their enemy. But he just doesn't want to leave it as this sort of abstract concept up here. He wants to bring it down into a lived reality for his listeners. And he calls them to pray for those who persecute them. Now at this point I can imagine all of a sudden it becomes real, names, faces, instances of persecution would be coming into their heads. And maybe perhaps they're coming into your heads too. Difficult situations, conversations, really hurtful circumstances may be coming to mind. I meant to pray for this person who did this to me. But Jesus knows that one of the most powerful ways to realign the heart towards someone is to genuinely pray for them. Unfortunately I've seen this in my own life. So there is this kind of conflict that you can get into where you're so far apart that you're never going to totally resolve it. It's so difficult and perhaps the other person feels so hurt that you're never quite going to fully resolve it. It's very painful and it can be quite dangerous. Dangerous in the way that you can really start to be sinfully angry towards someone which can lead to out and out hate and long-term bitterness. And as I said I've been in a conflict like this and experienced some of those things. It is very painful, it is very time consuming, and it's literally sleepless nights. It actually took someone older and wiser than me to help me navigate it. And their guidance was to stop my doing my instinctive thing which is to manage it and fix it that's kind of what I do and pray for them. And as I did that it was like pouring boiling water on ice. When you do that the ice just melts straight away. And I think that's what prayer does to sinful anger. The two can't coexist. Now you may not totally resolve that relationship. There's not some sort of neat little bow situation here. But I think you're far less likely to have sinful anger or hurt towards that person. Easier said than done. But praying for someone as I said it might not change the conflict. But I think it starts to change our hearts. And that's what we're about here. Changing our hearts because loving those who don't love us is part of being in the kingdom of God. And Jesus isn't just looking for an outward kind of platitude. He wants this heart realignment so that the outward and the inward are together. And I think this goes some way to being perfect as God is perfect, as your father is perfect which we find at the end of our passage. Whole inwardly inwardly and outwardly. As Jesus has done the previous five times he now provides some application. So my two year old son Rath he is going through this phase of wanting to do all the things that we do. So yesterday his grandparents came over and he went to his little microwave and he made them a coffee and he did this seven times. And he sees us cleaning at the moment so he wants to grab his own little spray bottle and his own little cloth and clean. He's really bad at it. He also wants to drive a car and so we let him sit in the front and not obviously while the car is moving. But press all the buttons and run the battery down. At this point though in Rath's little life he is learning by imitation. He children learn by imitating their parents. And I think this is what Jesus is getting at in verse 45. He wants his readers to remember that they are children of God and that means imitating God by loving those who oppose him. How does God love those who oppose him? Well every day he provides for them. God blesses those who oppose him by shining the sun on them, warming their back, growing their crops, powering their homes. He sends rain to water their plants and gives them life sustaining water to dream. God loves those who oppose him day in and day out by providing for them, providing for the unrighteous and the righteous. So if I heavenly Father is providing and caring for his people, people, friends and people opposed then this too must be the attitude of his children. With a touch of irony in verse 46 Jesus points to the people the Pharisees considered persona non-grana, the people he deemed unwelcome. And he showed that they were actually living just like them. The tax collectors, pagans, those who were considered enemies, those were the people that were living exactly the same way as the people who considered themselves righteous. But this isn't the greater righteousness that Jesus calls for. It's simply the ordinary pattern of the world shared by those who oppose him. For God's people, he's
adopted children are called to something higher. Call to love their enemies, not just outwardly, but inwardly in their hearts to be whole as God is whole. Now many of you are probably wondering, well how does this work in practice, like people who commit crimes against us or bully us in schools or workplaces? Well first of all I want to say what this doesn't mean. Number one, loving your enemies doesn't mean you stop standing for the truth. We should continually stand up for the name of God and the things he stands for. We should fight for the oppressed, the downtrodden, the unjust, and I think we should also speak up for the name of God, especially when it's misrepresented or used in vain. Granted, God can certainly fight his own battles and I'm not calling for some weird war or anything like that. The Bible puts parameters on these things and we can talk about that more but I do think we are to fight for his honour and the truth about who he is. I also don't think that loving our enemies means we stop being angry. There is such a thing as a righteous anger and we should be angry at the things that God is angry about. In justice, corruption, the mistreatment of people, sin, and Paul in his letter to the infusions calls his readers to be angry without sin. We see this perfectly in Jesus' ministry as he clears the temple and fights for justice. Thirdly, loving your enemies doesn't mean you ignore injustice and I'm talking about in a judicial sense here. Our society flourishes when civil justice is upheld and enacted. Paul talks about the magistrate holding the sword in Romans 13, a picture of God's justice all be it often imperfect and abused by humans. So we can hate and emboss sin and we want it to remove it from our community but we can still pray for perpetrators to turn to God and accept Jesus. And again, if you're someone that's been a victim of a crime or this kind of injustice, it might take some time to get to this place but perhaps it's a goal. So if that's what it is and what is it? Well, we talked a little bit about it earlier. It's an imitation of God the Father. This is what it means to be a child of God, to love and pray for those who are made in his image when there are enemies. And we don't just imitate the Father as Christians, we imitate our older brother, Jesus, who lived this out most profoundly when he died for those who killed him. He died for the Jewish leaders and he died for the Romans, just kind of the Bible's way of saying everyone. Jesus loved his enemies by dying for all of us. The passage that Hillary read earlier tells us that we will once enemies of God but we have been reconciled back to him through his death. Jesus called his disciples to pray for those who persecute him. And when we find Jesus on the cross, we hear his prayer, the Father forgive them for they know not what they do. We are here to imitate our Father and we are here to imitate our brother, Jesus, by loving and praying for those who persecute us because that's what's been done for us. Now it might come as as news today, if you know that you are an enemy of God and I still like kind of grappling with it, like a little bit like Hillary said. But what I am sure about is that God loves you, that he provides for you every day and he is provided for you most profoundly in his son, Jesus, so that you can be reconciled to him and call him Father. So that's the thing I want you to take away as you hear all of that. Pray for your enemies, I promise you it will change how you see them, will change how you feel about them. And I think you'll start to get a sense of God going before you into difficult situations, being there with you having committed it, committed it to him. And if you feel like you don't have enemies, pray for those in our world that it seemed like their enemies of God, not yet reconciled to him for governments, for people groups, for those people you find difficult. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German theologian and pastor ministering to people during the Nazi regime. He would eventually become an enemy of the state and be killed by the Nazis. So he knew what it meant to have enemies, to have people out to kill him and the many and kill many of the people that he loved as well. His biography is an amazing read and I highly recommend it. So I want to leave you with this quote. This commandment that we should love our enemies and forego 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 widespread 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 monopoly of its holy life into this prayer of love. Thank you for listening to our podcast. By subscribing you'll be notified when the next one is available. For further information about Providence City please visit our website providencechurch.org.au
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