Rory Shiner - Love Your Enemies - Easter: Love Your Enemies

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]. Genghis Khan, the Great Warlord, was giving some advice on happiness, I thought I'd share it with you as we start. So the happy life according to Genghis Khan, the greatest quote for your screensaver or whatever, the greatest happiness is to scatter your enemies and to drive them before you and to see their cities reduce to ashes and to see those who love them shrouded in tears. That's Genghis Khan. He's commending something that is actually true, although you don't want to say it out loud, which is that enemies give you a great sense of purpose in life. There's nothing more focusing, more energy clarifying, more invigorating than knowing that you have an enemy. Genghis Khan, things that's true. So, there's Christopher Hitchens, the late great Christopher Hitchens, my favorite atheist has written eloquently, wrote eloquently on a sense of purposefulness that came into his life after September 11. So September 11, the planes crash into the World Trade Center. And Christopher Hitchens, several years later, was writing and reflecting on this. And he said he experienced all the things that people who witnessed that experience, which were rage and nausea. But he also discovered another sensation, and this is direct quote, he says, "To my own surprise and pleasure, it turned out to be exhilarating. I realized that if this battle went on until the last day of my life, I would never get bored in prosecuting it to the utmost." We're thinking about enemies, and Jesus says, "You're allowed to have them." In fact, he's going to be expecting you to have them. You just have to love them. So let's pray as we work out what Jesus is saying to us in that. Father, we do pray that as we open your word that you would help us to be good students of Jesus, to understand what it is that he calls us to do as your disciples and to live it joyfully. In Jesus' name. Amen. Well, over the term we've been working through this sermon on the Mount. And we're taking a pause actually after tonight, and moving to Genesis chapter 4 to 11 next term, and then resuming sermon on the Mount. Second, well, third term of this year. So taking a pause, doing it slowly, so we allow it to get into our bones and pours and so on. And we're pausing, and I think what is a good time, because we're coming to the end of the first big section of teaching and instruction in the sermon on the Mount. So if you remember, if you're with us, the sermon on the Mount is structured like concentric circle, so you have in the middle of it, you've got the Lord's Prayer, that's the heart of the sermon on the Mount. And then if you think about brackets or circles that go outward, on the outermost brackets, on the beginning and the end, you have the beginning, which is the blessings, the Beatitudes, and at end, with the choices, which is you've got two kinds of trees, two kinds of roads, the wide path and the narrow path, two kinds of prophets, the false prophet and the true prophet, two kinds of houses, at his lives, lives that are built on sand and lives that are built on rocks. And so the sermon ends by saying choose, like, binary, two choices, this or that, that's where the sermon's going, just so you know, as in where the sermon on the Mount is going. And at the beginning there, so there the two brackets, blessing, come on in, choice, choose one of these two ways. And then as he comes in from chapter five, he says that to his followers and to us, he says to them, you are, gives them a mission, you are the light of the world. Which is interesting, because it's one of those things you think with Jesus would say about himself, right, I am the light of the world, he also says that. But he says to us, you are the light of the world. That is, he's giving us a mission to let your light shine so that they will see your good deeds and glorify your father in heaven. So that's the mission of the followers of Jesus. And then in those next two circles around the Lord's Prayer, which is at the very center, on the outside of the Lord's Prayer, you have how to be religious according to Jesus, which is chapter six, how to pray, how to fast and how to give the three big religious obligations. And he's teaching us there in chapter six, which we look at how to religion according to Jesus, piety, relationship with God, prayer, fasting, giving. And here, chapter five, it's not so much how to be religious, but how to be righteous, how to live righteously. And he's standard for us because he wants us to be the light of the world is to have a righteousness, a lived righteousness that is greater than the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, that the Pharisees teach the law, they're not the ceiling, they're the floor. And unless our righteousness exceeds theirs, we won't be able to be who we're supposed to be, which is the light of the world soon, a hill, salt of the earth. That's the logic of what he's saying is given us these six case studies from the law, you know, like divorce and adultery and truth telling murder and go all the rest of it working through the law. He always quotes the Old Testament and then he says, but I say to you and then he shows you what it would be like for your obedience to be maximum, not minimum, exceeding the Pharisees teach the law so that we can be sitting on a hill light of the world. That's where the whole thing's going. And the end game, get verse 45 is that so that we may be perfect. That word means mature or means a whole, he integrated because God is integrated. And God is the same toward us as he is in himself and he wants us to be the same person on the outside as we are on the inside. That's the holiness that he's after. And I wonder if you agree that there's maybe a bit of a momentum here, whereas I feel like this one is the hardest one, or the most counterintuitive, or the one that you think wow, because Jesus tells us to love our enemies. He does that by the quote in the Old Testament, verse 43, this is how he gets there. He says, you have heard that it was said, love your neighbor and hate your enemies. So, love your neighbor. That's the first bit. That's from Leviticus 19, 18, Jesus' favorite memory verse. Love your neighbor as yourself. He loves that verse. He quotes it all the time. And this is what is quoting here. And then this is, and hate your enemies. Now, that's not in the Bible. So, if you look up that, if you look up where does it Bible say hate your enemies doesn't say that, that's not a thing. There are things some people thought maybe it's like some of these Psalms that are a bit about the judgment of God and so on. But definitely not. What it is is that Jesus is quoting from his context where you go to synagogue on the Saturday and the sermons from Leviticus 19, verse 18, love your neighbor. And then you come out and you have been covered tea afterwards chatting. So, that's good. The rabbi was good today. That's good, good to have an and so on. I really interesting. Love your neighbor. And then you wink at each other and hate your enemies. Like that, that's the joke that the command to love your neighbor. You think, okay, who is my neighbor? Classic, a fight question. And you say, who is my neighbor? And we can love them. But obviously not our enemies. And that's the thing that Jesus is addressing. Now, notice that the word there enemy is in the singular, not the plural. Go to the plural, but it's there in the singular. Love your neighbor and hate your enemy. That's because Jesus is speaking into a context where enemy isn't theoretical, but everyone knows immediately who he's talking about. It's one of the challenges for us understanding this because I think a lot of us don't have at least, we don't know that we've got enemies. So maybe 10% of us, you immediately think of that person that is your enemy, the person that has it in for you at school or at uni or at work and you know you're already away. You're thinking, okay, I've got to understand this. But for lots of us, you think, do I have enemies? Is that a thing? Here, Jesus doesn't have to persuade them that they've got enemies because enemy in the singular with the love your enemy. Everyone knows because I come out after it's in the Gorgian, you can see the Roman garrison up there and you can see the soldier walking past because Israel is occupied territory in the first century and the Romans are everywhere and they are the enemy. And Jesus comes and he's preaching the kingdom of heaven that the kingdom of heaven has come near that the rule of God is going to be reestablished in Zion through Israel. And one of the things that you immediately think is, oh, what's he going to do about our enemies, which is the Romans? Now, notice enemy there is objective, not subjective. Like they are the enemy, but how you feel about them could change. A lot of people in the first century, Israel got on okay with the local Roman soldiers. Like I have a bit of a friendship, you could get on all right with them, how you felt about them would range from, you know, from, you know, get on quite well, likely aqueducts, appreciate the roads, right through to what have the Romans have done for us. gonna smash your head. and they did what most occupied countries do, which is you'd have some people. So the Pharisees said, we're gonna cope with being surrounded by enemies by separating from them, by just getting out into our own communities. The zealots were like terrorists or freedom fighters, could have been so you're on. They, their strategy was guerrilla warfare. They let's kill Romans until it's so unpleasant for them to be here that they leave. And most people were in the middle of the bell curve and just said, this is lame, I don't like it. I hate the way they made my dad, who's really old, carry the load for a whole mile, but we just, just a mile, and then we stop, and then we do the bare minimum of what they require us to do. Hate them in our hearts, just kind of put up with this terrible situation. Put up with it, fight against it. And Jesus comes in with a third option. He says, we're gonna love them. We're gonna love our enemy. Now, to do the act to know what it is to obey Jesus in this area, you wanna be clear on what he means by love. I had some friends a few years ago who moved to Australia from Northern Ireland to the came here, and they'd only been here about five days, like not even a week, and they were invited to someone's house for supper. So these people said to them, Australians to Northern Irish people said, oh, come around to our place for supper at about eight o'clock, and we'd love to welcome you and your family to our country. And they thought, oh, good, to turn to the kids, but we've been invited around for supper, and it's at eight, so that's later than we normally eat, but I guess they're all a bit euro down here, and they eat later, and so that's the way the culture is kids, so we're just gonna hang in there a bit, and then we'll have supper with these guys at eight, and they go around there with the kids, and the kids are like three, five, and seven, and they're at a clock, and sure enough, the Australians give them supper, which in Australia means like a couple of crappy pikes, and an Arnold Scott Schringer biscuit and a cup of tea. And the kids are just like going, you know, hangry ballistic, because they've, you know, and the problem is the word, right? 'Cause supper, Northern Ireland, and most other places means like dinner, not pikelets. Now, Jesus says, love your enemy, and you wanna be clear what he means by love, because I think we hear the word love, and think it means something like, feel affectionate toward. Like, feel a bit gooey, butterfly. Like, oh, they're here, I don't know how to do my breath. Like, that, oh, he's saying, love your enemy, that is, feel differently, feel affectionate warm tender toward your enemy. And that's not what he's saying. For multiple reasons. Number one, just, it's just hard, basically, it's hard to command an emotion, right? If you say to someone, hey, feel this way, you're like, dude, mate, I can barely control my own emotion to let alone you telling me how I'm supposed to feel about any given situation. You kind of can't really command emotions. Secondly, I think it pushes you toward, if you think love your enemy means feel gooey and affectionate toward my enemy, it kind of collapses into a sentimentality that you're supposed to think about your enemy in this, these affectionate, kind of familial terms and feel about them in ways that are, somewhere between unnatural and, I think, in some cases, like insane. Like, if you're actually oppressed, if a person is an actual threat to you, and you think that what Jesus is saying, like, feel gooey about them, feel affectionate about them, it's not only, like, impossible, but also to use the modern parlance like unsafe, 'cause it can be used in some Christian context to push people toward someone that you ought not to be near for your own safety and for a bunch of other reasons. But Jesus does say to love your enemy. He really does want you to do that. And I think what Jesus means when he says, love your enemy is that he wants you, and this is hard, I'm not saying it's not gonna be hard, he wants you and he wants me to will and to act for the good of the other. Jesus wants you when it comes to your enemy, to will and to act, that is to want them to want their good and to act toward their good as you have opportunity to do that. So it is a hard thing 'cause he wants you to think about your enemy and say, I want their good and when it's possible to act toward their good, that their approximate life, like the things that happen to them would be good, and that ultimately they would find their significance and security and purpose in God, that they would know the blessing of God and creation and salvation, that their life would be good, that is that it would conform to the goodness of God. Not indulgent, love your enemy doesn't mean give them what they want. Love your enemy can coexist with reporting them to the police or calling them out, or saying you ought not to do that, because indulgent isn't love, it's kind of love gone feral, you know when parents are indulgent on the kids and just let them do anything, that's not loving because you're pushing them toward a bad end. But if you think, what is the good, how could this person be conformed to the purposes of God in their life so that they'll flourish in this world and the next, and then you want that to happen, and as you have opportunity, you act toward that happening. Jesus is telling you and me to do that for our enemies. He puts flesh on that, notice verse 44, chapter five verse 44, "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." Sometimes with an enemy it's just not possible or advisable to enter back into the fray of their life for circumstances. But Jesus gives us the ultimate freedom, which is the freedom to pray for someone. One of the great things about freedom, about the freedom of prayer is that no one can stop you. They can block you, they can be mean to you, they can ignore you, they can't stop you praying for them. And praying, not generally, but praying for their good. Don't know if you've done that. I reckon probably in this room, I'd say probably 10, 20, 3% of us have actually done this 'cause it's a thing that almost always happens if you follow Jesus, that it will be some point where there's someone in your life that you just at a visceral level think that person has always got it in for me. That the way they've treated me, the way they've treated other people, the things that they've said, the things that they've done, the things they haven't done, it's just at some low level gaslighting, kind of awful way, it's just really bad. And it's an extraordinary thing to pray for. I had this experience, but mind's not, maybe it's bad as some of yours. I think a few years ago, we just someone, like a really low key way, I kind of feel like they were definitely, say anything's about me, or kind of working to under, anyway, now I sound insecure, it was them, not me. And, but they were just like at some level, I think, do you age just always every time, like taking every opportunity to just take me down, that's how I felt, and then I was reading this. And so I used to say, I remember this, 'cause it used to be on Wednesdays, and every Wednesday my phone would say, it's time to pray for them. And it's quite the experience, 'cause you're a whole bunch of emotions of like, oh, I just pray that, I hope that, their car breaks down and that all their friends turn against them and that they just like, everyone realizes that they're a total loser. And, but then you can't say that to God, 'cause you think, oh, okay, well, like I can think that, but now I'm talking to God, and God was kind to me, and he loved me when I was his enemy. And now you're having to construct these prayers, and if you need to do that, the more specific, the better. Like, I really pray that someone would come into their life, and whatever. Love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you. And it's had your hard command that Jesus gives us two related reasons. Jesus doing theology, which I just love so much. Jesus, giving you and me the reason why we should love our enemy. They're in verse 45. He says, you should love your enemy, because when you love your enemy, you look like God. Verse 45, "That you may be, love your own people, and you pray for those who you are, that you may be children, sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his son to rise on the evil and the good and send rain on the righteous and the unrighteous." Why should you love your enemies? He says, "Because when you do that, you're like God." And fortunately, just some of the five months of no rain and just the last two days, it's been raining pretty constantly. And so, what are the good things? Because I was preparing this message. And so I got to do actually test God on this in real time, like do an actual experiment on God. And so I did it. I went for a run, one morning as I was working on this, a run in the rain. And I went all around our suburb and Jesus was right. Like I went all through. And it wasn't the case that there's the house where they don't worship God and there's no rain. And there are no those people when they go to our church and there's rain on their place and their garden's happy and their garden's sad. And you can just see it. I was thinking to be so cool, right? It's not really cool. But it's sort of cool. If on the night, on the news, there was a weather forecast and they're like, "Oh, we just cannot make sense of these weather patterns." It's cyclone came. But as we looked at it, it was just, it was only falling on Christian households and all their gardens were coming up and everyone else was just barren and like it was just obvious. You could see it because it was falling down in these kind of quarter acre block increments. And to me, if I was running the university, it'd be brilliant, right? Because then everyone would like, you know, there's 800,000 people who live close to us. We want them to know Jesus at our mission field. And it'll be like, just next day say, "Hey, how's that working out for you guys? Not worshiping God? Get with the program people because God has clearly shown that there are huge, like material advantages to worshiping Him. And you're not part of it because He's being kind. He's responding to your responsiveness to Him." And so you should do that. And Jesus' point is that that's not, that's literally the opposite of what God does. It was just all I went for a run. It was all over the place. Like His rain was everywhere. I think this belief, what Jesus says, means that there are, there's a thing, it was two things I think that you cannot consistently believe as a disciple of Jesus. Now you can inconsistently believe lots of stuff because humans are very good have been inconsistent. But you cannot consistently, here's the first one, you cannot consistently believe the prosperity gospel. And what Jesus says in the sermon on the mount, they're mutually incompatible. Obviously, right? Because the prosperity gospel says, "Hey, one of the ways that you know that God is real is that He brings prosperity to Christians and not to non-Christians." And He brings healing to Christians and not to non-Christians. And you can just look at the world and you can say, "God is definitely true because look, they're Christian and they're doing well and they're not Christian, they're not doing well and like do the maths and you can work out what should be going on and then of course, which is one of the problems with the prosperity gospel, they say, "But they Christian and they're not going well and they're well, they haven't got enough faith." And because they haven't got enough faith, that's the problem. So you've got this kind of endlessly self-justifying kind of theology because if not healed or prosperous, no faith or whatever, just notice that this is, this is completely impossible to believe consistently if you're a disciple of Jesus. So if you do believe that, which I don't think many people here would, but just if you do, that's just like, do not pass, go, do not collect $200 bad news all the way down, just get it out of your life because it's bad, but I reckon that for most of us in like Tichii, you know, whatever we are land, the I can have problem, certainly my problem was not that I think the prosperity gospel was a thing, but I just think I noticed this, just think, we're thinking in a really secular way, like functional atheists, that it was raining and it never occurred to me to think, oh, that I'm going to learn something about God in the weather pattern, that God's doing his thing again, but Jesus doesn't think like that at all, it doesn't think like me at all, he just thinks, he causes his son, do you love that phrase? He causes his son, God's son, at SUN, to shine on the wicked and the righteous, he causes his reign to fall on the godly and the ungodly. And Jesus looks at that at the grace of God in the weather patterns and says, that's what God's like. Our God is the kind of God that is kind to people who aren't kind to him. He's the kind of God that on purpose, not just because that's the way weather patterns go, but on purpose, God just thinks, oh, they do not worship me, but I'm going to just pour blessings on them, which is why when you love your enemies, you're like God. Notice that's the second bit of logic there that he, Jesus says verse 46, "Are not even the tax collectors doing that?" That is, the tax collectors are loving people who are like them. If you grate only your own people, what are you doing more than others? It do not even the pagans do that. What Jesus is saying is if you're someone who has worked out that you've got a capacity to relate in loving ways to ward people who look like you, same class as you, same race as you, same kind of economic background, same interest as you, if you've worked out that you've got an ability to love those people, then like golf club, well done, you've reached the status of standard issue human. Like you've reached the status of every single human ever. That's just what we do. Any idiot can love, you know, and I'm not saying that's bad rights, you're always nice to meet someone you think, oh, you're understand collecting as well. It's amazing. Nice to connect with people, but that's not impressive. That's not amazing. It's just like super normal, but to love your enemies is not normal. To go, and this is where the rain and the mission connect up. So say you've got an extra neighbour and they're like complaining because you've got this big tree that's like 130 years old and it's getting leafletter into their, you know, guttering and they're like, they're saying, oh, you have to get that chopped down, or chopped or like fix or whatever. It's like going to cost you $3,000 and it's super annoying and it's just like irrational because it's not really going to make a difference to their guttering. Just for example, right? Random thought. And then you look at your neighbour and like, and then I looked, it was me, and it was raining and it was raining on our place and his place. And God didn't distinguish. He was really kind to him and to me. And his garden's looking happy. My garden's looking happy because of the rain because that's how God is. And so if I treat him, and if you treat your enemy, not by repaying evil for evil, but with love, then they'll see something that is like God, which is why he says that this is how you be children of your father in heaven. We often think of being a child of God in devotional terms that God's my father and I is child and that means that we have a really loving and affectionate relationship. That comes up a little bit in the Bible. Maybe Romans 8, I want to tell you other places. Mostly when the Bible talks to us about being children of God, it's not so much to do with the relationship you have with God, but the relationship you have with the world because of God. Because when you're a child of God, you look like God. You know that thing when you're a church and you made a kid of someone that you know the parent, you're like, "Oh, it's just weird because they smile." And you think, "Oh, that's Steve or whatever." And you think, and you can see the person looking back at you. And what Jesus is saying is that when you love your own, your own race, your own class, your people who just like are always really kind to you and so on, then you just look like a human. But when you love your enemy, when you are kind to someone who is not kind to you, then you look like God. And we are able to do our mission of being soul and light because when we live those lives of goodness that include enemy love, then that requires an explanation. Then at that point you are like your father in heaven. Today's Palm Sunday. So this is the end game of what Jesus begins on that mountain up north, comes into Jerusalem riding on a donkey or the fault of a donkey, which is kind of the equivalent of the Jesus coming in on like a tricycle. This tiny little donkey is too small for him, comes in humility into Jerusalem and lives out what he said. And within 300 years, the whole Roman Empire is transformed. This is Julie. Julian the Apostate, one of the last Roman empires that was a pagan and he's complaining to his officials and this is a direct quote from Julian in the 300. He says, "Why do we not observe that it's Christian benevolence to strangers, their care for the graves of the dead and their pretended holiness in their lives that has done the most to increase he could cause atheism which is the tea's word for Christians because Christians don't worship the Roman God and so Christians get called atheists. He said it's increased them, it is a disgrace that no Jew ever has to beg and that the empires Christians support not only their own poor but ours as well." And the thing that Jesus said on a mountain changed the world and I don't know if it changed the world but it could change your week. It certainly changed your soul and changed the community that you're in. So I'm going to pray and then we're going to sing as we go out. I'll give you a bit of time to talk in the quietness of your heart to God. Father, you have loved us when we were your enemies and you every day indiscriminately shower blessings, your kindness on people who have not been kind towards you. So Father, we pray that we would shine like you, that we would mimic you and be your children in being indiscriminate in the love and kindness we show, that in our lives we would will and act toward the good of the other, including the person that is unlike us and including our enemies so that we would be sons and daughters of you, our Father. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.