The Mercy of God

Good morning. Good morning, thank you. As we heard the sermon text, you can imagine we're gonna be discussing what to do in conflict, difficulty, when opposed with an enemy or in a fight. Sun Tzu's Art of War gives us, I'm just gonna pick five gems to think about. Supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting. Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win. Appear weak when you're strong, and strong when you're weak. To know your enemy, you must become your enemy, and then one that we've all heard and know well, Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. There's a few gems from the art of war and we can appreciate the wisdom. We can actually embrace these. This sounds good. I'm in control here with my strength, with my battle, with my enemy. Today we're looking at a completely different kind of strategy. Jesus says, love your enemy. to those who seek to do you harm. Jesus offers a completely different strategy for believers. We are the church militant, longing to be the church at rest. Here's the strategy for how to respond to those who act like enemies. It forces some very difficult questions because these are weighty commands of Christ. Is Jesus trustworthy here with these commands? Can we trust him? Does Jesus have the authority to give these commands? Can he really expect this of us? Does his promises make it worth it? Because we have to see here, there's a command, love your enemy. Do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who abuse you. There's a warning. And the focus is on reward. The benefit. The credit. There's a reward. Is God's goodness and his promise and his authority worthy of meditating upon such a clear, difficult command? If you're looking for a one-sentence summary of what the text is saying, I believe it's this. Love your enemies as God loved you to be his children. Love your enemies as God loved you to be his children. We're gonna look at three different parts. First, the command, that's verses 27 to 31, the command. Then the warning, 32 to 34. And then finally, the reward, 35 and 36. If you're new with us, we're walking through the book of Luke. Luke's gospel, we began way back last Christmas. I was gone for six months. We came back to it and we've seen Jesus's temptation, his baptism, Now we've come to this particular text, and if you're opening your Bibles in Luke 6, from verse 20 all the way through the end of chapter 6, that's what we call the Sermon on the Plain. Jesus' Sermon on the Mount is a bit more well-known. That's Matthew 5 and following. Here's a different sermon, but as most preachers, if we travel around, we say very similar things. There's a lot of things that are similar here, and last week we looked at the blessings and the woes, and well, unlike Matthew's Sermon on the Mount, he's not speaking of poor in spirit, he's speaking of poor in pockets. We saw there the blessing, the upside down living, the call for gratification, delayed gratification. There's a warning about being rich. It's spiritually dangerous. There's a blessing about being poor. Well, this week we come to another difficult teaching. These things are difficult. We just need to acknowledge that. He calls us to love our enemies. Now, let's just be very clear. He's speaking to his disciples. Look there in verse 20. Before he begins to speak, he's called his disciples. We see the list of the 12 very specific disciples. He's come and he's done great work among the disciples and the crowds. And then he lifted up his eyes. He's speaking to those who are claiming to be his disciples. He's speaking to those who are wanting to follow him as disciples. This is for the church. we don't go out and tell our neighbors who aren't Christians that they should behave this way. That would be upside-down moralism. No, we as a church, we as disciples of Christ, receive this. And notice how he begins even this section. I say to you who hear. Are we listening? Are we listening? He begins, love your enemies. This is significant. We misunderstand this word and we misunderstand everything about the weight of this command. God commands our loves. Love isn't something passive about us. It's not the idea of this romantic love that it just kind of flows wherever it would go. No, there's a way in which God is directing all of our affections. The whole Christian life can be summed up in love commands. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your strength. Love God with all that you are. He is worthy of all of your great love. And as we love God, we love our neighbor as ourselves, that qualification, that our neighbor is just like us, made in the image of God. Love one another as Christ loved you, the church. That's the command for the internal love of the church. And then here we see, love your enemy as God loved you. But we look at it at the end, his kindness is to the ungrateful and the evil. Be merciful as your father's merciful. We're supposed to be emulating the love we've received. Love your enemy. Well, who is that? I believe these four commands are all in parallel together. They're all informing one another. They're not speaking of four different kinds of people that we act and treat in four different ways. It's all the same. Your enemy, the one who hates you, Your enemy, the one who curses you. Your enemy, the one who abuses you. Love them. Do good to them. Bless them. Pray for them. Christian. There's many ways in which we could talk about the uniqueness of Christianity. We believe in a triune God, Father, Son, Holy Spirit. That's very unique to Christianity. We believe in a God who became flesh, that's very unique to Christianity. We believe in a God who became flesh to die on the cross and He rose again, and now we have a Savior who washes away our sin by mere belief in Him. That's unique to Christianity. This command is a unique ethic of Christianity. Love your enemies. Love your enemies. Now, a warning. and I hope I'm not projecting my own problems here, a warning that there's gonna be a desire for our justice, our own vengeance, our own self-protection, to put up a fight against this verse today. There's going to be a prickliness that wants to kind of figure out qualifications and loopholes. Jesus says to you who hear, Let us pray that we would be given the grace to submit fully to this clear teaching of our Lord and Savior. He's speaking to his disciples, and to be very specific, this is how Christians behave when treated badly. This isn't how we're gonna behave when everything's great. This is speaking of it specifically. When we are treated badly, he's giving us a strategy for how to behave. Love, do good, bless, and pray. Love is one of those words, again, we've really messed up. If we only think about this word romantically, love just gets pulled away in different things, right? Love just gets pulled and drawn to what we find attractive. We're just vessels on a stream going every which way depending on where our love takes us. Well, the biblical understanding of love is that it's attached to our affections. We can direct it. We don't have our love pulled, we push it. Love is being commanded. An enemy, that's an adversary. This isn't your neighbor who's irritating. This isn't the neighbor who either doesn't know his yard or his trash blows into your yard. It's not the irritating, this is somebody who's seeking to do you harm. They're personally opposed to you. They speak ill of you. They treat you poorly. This is speaking of somebody who is personally, physically, emotionally, verbally, relationally against you. And it's startling. Jesus says, love them. Do good to them. The person we imagine is most undeserving of love and kindness and goodness, that's who is in view here. Anytime we love somebody, we do make ourselves vulnerable. We understand that, right? To love is to make yourself vulnerable towards somebody. Here, he's saying, make yourself vulnerable to him who is most dangerous, the person against you. Last week, if we go back to verse 22, blessed are you when people hate you, when they exclude you, when they revile you, and spurn your name as evil. out of my name. Persecution is clearly in view from that passage. He says rejoice, leap for joy. I believe persecution is at the center of what we're talking about, but he also expands it out to everybody. It's not just those who persecute you for the name of Christ that you love, it's anyone who mistreats you. But instead of the call to rejoice, it's we rejoice to God because we have the honor of being persecuted for the name of Christ. It's not looking out and saying we're gonna love, we're gonna do good. This is waiting. We do this if and only if and because we are sons of God. This is what is expected of a child of God. This is what demonstrates we are children of God. Let's just jump down to the ending. But love your enemies, verse 35. Do good, lend, expecting nothing in return. He's just summarizing all the commands he's already given. And then your reward will be great. And you will be sons of the Most High. This is the behavior that demonstrates and marks out who belong in the family of God. Simple statement we can, I think, draw from this. We are not sons of God if we do not love our enemies. So who is your enemy and how do you respond to them? The typical ways we respond, we either fight or flight. We give it back or we run away. Jesus provides here a clear declaration and some pretty clear examples of what he means. Look at verses 29 to 31. To one who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also. To one who's trying to physically harm you, and this is more of a humiliating strike rather than a criminal physical trying to do violence. It has more humiliation tied to it, but still turn the other cheek. Offer the other. For the one who takes away your cloak, do not withhold your tunic. Give to everyone who begs of you, or the word there might be demands of you. And for one who takes away your goods, do not demand them back. And then what we know as the golden rule, and as you wish the others would do to you, so also do to them. We usually think of this, if I want people to do good to me, then I'll do good to them. I need to think about my neighbor and just how to go into a new class, a new setting, a new school, a new job, and make friends. I want to do good to them. I'll treat them like I want them to treat me. That's not the actual context. The them is the evil person who's seeking to harm you. Don't do to them as they are doing to you. Do to them as you wish they would be doing to you instead of harming you. Do not return evil with evil, but return evil with good. That's from Romans 12. The context here, we don't respond to evil with evil. We respond to evil with kindness. Feeling prickly yet? Should be. This is difficult. Does Jesus have the authority to demand that you get punked the entire rest of your life? Does he have the authority? I'm not saying that's what he's telling you, but does he have the authority? Does He have the authority that when somebody is coming up against you with evil, to take it and not respond with evil? How much authority does Jesus have? We really have to weigh in who's speaking and why He's telling us this command. I don't believe He's telling you to be treated poorly the rest of your life. But we do have to take in the fact that this is God our Savior, the one who has all authority, and this should be waiting. Does Jesus have the authority to send you into absolute clear danger? Ben just preached for a pastor. We'll call him Chariot. He's one of the best friends of Mark. Police visited his church. last night or their morning. We're gonna get to gather at a members meeting tonight, and it's gonna be great. We're gonna hear testimonies from four new members, vote in five new members, talk about missions, we're gonna talk about a budget. You know what the members meeting of that Chinese church looks like now? Who's going to take care of the kids of the pastor? That's weighty. God sent them there, God has placed them there to be in danger. They've submitted to the call that they are going to preach the gospel regardless of the danger. Romans 12 tells us, bless those who persecute you. Bless and do not curse them. First Corinthians, when Paul is confronting the church about suing others in the church, he says, is it not better to be defrauded and dishonored? Are you willing to be mistreated and misrepresented for the name of Christ? For the worth of his name? I believe here the focus is on persecution. Those who are seeking to persecute, I believe the focus on those who are dishonoring, It goes outside of that scope, those who are demanding of you and taking of you. The enemy, they're the ones taking and taking and taking. The killer teaching is that we seek to show love, kindness, just like our father's kind. I wanna pause here. I am really hesitant to give qualifications for when this does not apply. Mainly because we all want these loopholes. That's the whole point of the Good Samaritan parable that Jesus teaches. We want to figure out who's not our neighbor that doesn't deserve our love. We want to figure out what enemy doesn't deserve our love. We want to know when we can lash back out. So I'm hesitant of qualification, but we do need to make sure there's something clear here. I do not believe this means you are meant to live and remain in a physically, emotionally, or sexually abusive relationship. If that's you, please talk to an elder or another member right of the service. This does not mean you never appeal to protection. God has blessed you, Lord willing, with pastors and police who can come protect you. Yes, love covers a multitude of sins, but there's a point when you confront a brother, as Jesus prescribes. There's a point in which we silence the false teacher and those who are abusing others, as Paul prescribes. We do see the clear teaching that others come around us and we do seek protection. The danger is when we want to take justice into our own hands, when we want to come up with our own vengeance. The call here, not to be vindictive, not to make sure someone feels the hurt they've put on you, not to insist on our own immediate gratification of justice, not to give them back what they gave to us. These rules are not meant to be mere moralism or mechanical. There's a posture. Those who have received such mercy from God show such mercy to others. It's a challenging passage. Notice we do not flee out of fear of the person. We do not just take it passively out of fear of the person. We do not fight back out of fear of our own rights Notice verse 36, the clear principle that's grounding this entire passage. Be merciful even as your father is merciful. We are willing to receive being wronged because we know the God who has shown us great mercy. Notice here it's reverence for the God who will bring true vengeance. The God who is righteous in every way. It's our faith in him and our reverence for him that allows us to proactively be kind and love those who are against us. It leads to kind of our values. What gets us more worked up when somebody cuts us off in traffic? Or when somebody uses the Lord's name in vain? What gets us more worked up when somebody's attacking us or putting pressure on us versus taking the name of the Lord and misrepresenting Him? I want to push us to the fact that our love for God is what leads us to be able to love our enemies. Or actually what our text says, receiving His love for us. is the only way in which we would ever be able to love our enemies as Christ loved us. If you're not a Christian, notice how it describes God in verse 35. The command is love your enemies. The promise is your reward will be great and you'll be sons of the most high. Notice how it describes God. He, that is God. He is kind. Kind to whom? the ungrateful and the evil. That's all of us. We refuse to give God honor and thanks. That's how Paul describes sin in Romans one. We all have refused to give God the proper thanks and the proper honor and the proper worship. We are all ungrateful and evil. We all deserve his wrath. We all deserve his punishment. We all deserve justice. Here's the good news this morning. That Father who is merciful sent his Son to become like us in every way except for sin, so that he would die on the cross, so that he would rise again, so that we might put our faith in him, and then, and only then, receive the mercy that forgives all the sin. that leads to thankfulness, that leads to goodness, that leads to us recognizing we are loved by God and we love him. We're loved by God and we love our neighbor. We're loved by God, who were once his enemies. And that's why we also can then love our own enemies. And only them. Implications for disciples regarding this command. The one thing that this culling excludes is our tendency towards self-victimization. There is real harm done to other believers in this body. There's real harm that has been done. There's real pain. Self-victimization is the turning inward and simply saying, well, it was me. Self-victimization that I want to exclude is the tendency to make our ID. We're victims. We're not worthy. We're simply just gonna focus in on the hurt done. We keep long records and we recount them. That's not what God calls us to do. He calls us to realize he does not keep our record. He forgives us. He calls us to keep, not keep those long records and not recount them. Paul in 2 Corinthians 4 gives a fantastic teaching there of those who are really persecuted. We're afflicted in every way, but not crushed. We're perplexed, but never driven to despair. We're persecuted, but not forsaken. We're struck down, but not destroyed. There's real danger. There's real enemies. There's real pain. But there's never hopelessness. There's never hopelessness for those who know God. The victimization is dangerous because if that becomes our identity, we're not able to rejoice in the love of God, and we're not able to show the love of God. The high calling, how can we love our enemy? Again, I want us to look back to verse 35 and 36. The only way for us to truly love our enemy in a way that honors God is to first see he loved us while we were enemies. We will only be able to love our enemies as we've received the mercy of God to see that he loved us while we were enemies. The only storehouse we have of mercy is God himself. If we think about how stubborn we are, how slow we are, how impatient we are, how God held out His hands all day long to a stubborn obstinate people. How merciful He was. How steadfast in love He is. He's the fount of infinite perfect mercy. He doesn't run dry. He's quick to give. It's only as we come to know this God that we're able to be like Him in showing mercy. one particular command here I wanna really focus in on, verse 28. There's four commands, love your enemy, do good, bless, pray. That one is important, it's the last one. If we were to commit to loving our enemies with prayer, that's where the heart work's done. It's difficult to love enemies, it's difficult to love certain enemies. That's where prayer comes in. Prayer is actually going to God and asking him to align your heart with his. Prayer is going not to say fix that enemy or bring justice down upon him all of a sudden. First and foremost, it's God, give me the grace to show grace. Father, give me the mercy I need to actually bless this person and Lord, bless them. If you want to know some examples of how to pray for your enemy, for those who abuse you, the Psalms are full of these prayers. Praying for those who do evil. We can even hear our own Savior make this prayer. Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. The command for us as Christians is love, do good, bless, pray. Let me be very clear that if you are an abuser, you need to hear a warning. You will be judged. The God who is perfect in vengeance, He's standing, as James tells us, ready to come and bring vengeance. There's a hope for you as church to hear. There's a God who's listening and hearing, and if you are an abuser, you need to understand, there's a God who's listening and hearing. Be warned, repent. The God of mercy can save you. Christian, I challenge you, I encourage you, there were so many other texts we could have read this morning. Romans 12 says never avenge yourselves. Do not repay evil with evil. Do not be overcome with evil, but overcome evil with good. Conclusion, the children of God loves enemies as God loves them. Let's now see our second point, the warning. Verses 32 and 34. If we're to look at this text, we actually, there's two halves, but I'm gonna break it into three parts. There's two halves, there's the command and then there's the reward, but this first part of the reward really functions more like a warning for us. Listen to these conditional statements and then the conclusion, there's three. If you love those who love you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what benefit is that to you? Four, even sinners do the same. And if you lend to those from whom you expect to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners to get back the same amount. Notice here he's speaking of benefit, credit. And the principle. Why would you keep wanting to be just a sinner? Do you see that? For even sinners do the same. For even sinners love those who love you. Even sinners do that. The point is this. If your disciples, your sons, not expected to keep acting and living as sinners. You were a sinner, but now a disciple and a son of God. There's a change he's expecting. There's that promise here. Remember the first question, does Jesus have the authority? And is this promise worth it? Is there a benefit to obeying these commands? Is there a credit we receive for obeying these commands? And he's saying here, if you just live like a sinner, there's no benefit, there's no credit. Really, I believe what he's asking is this. Why would you keep living as a sinner? you've been saved from your sin. Why would you keep living as a sinner if you've been saved from your sin? To be very clear, we believe we are saved by grace alone through faith alone. That's why we're celebrating the Reformation on October 31st. We believe that we are saved not by our own works, but by God's grace and we respond by faith in the great work of Christ and the accomplished and the cross and his death and resurrection. We rejoice that he has done all that needs to be done for us to be saved. You're not saved by works, but you are saved for works. You're not saved by your good works as if you were to boast, but now we boast in the work of Christ by actually living out that faith with good works. Go back to that Titus 3 reading. You were hated and hateful, grumbling and quarreling, but God, our Savior, saved us. The unspiritual sinner, he lives in mere convenience. That's what 32 and 34 are pointing out. If we're only gonna love when it's convenient, if we're only gonna love when the context is just right, we're no better than a sinner. There's no demonstration that we've actually received a love that's great. Sinners only love when things are going their way. Sons of God love because they know who God is. That's their consistent context. Is your love like running water? It just goes where it's easy. Or we really want to discipline our love the way God calls us to, where we would even love our enemy. There's a great warning here. God is not a God of random acts of kindness. He's a God of purposeful mercy. We are not called to be a people of just random acts of kindness. We're called to be a people who direct and discipline our love. Not because the person's lovely. Not because of what that person is going to give us or do for us. We're going to love them because God loved us. This is the terrifying thing we need to realize. What comes out of us is what was in us. If we respond with sin, if we respond to sin with sin, that shows what's inside of us. If we respond to sin with kindness, we respond to an enemy with love, that shows what's inside of us. There's a benefit and reward to loving our enemies. We are not to just love those who love us, we're to love our enemies. Our final point, reward, verses 35 and 36. If you're looking for a part to memorize, this is it. Because he's now giving us the commands again with the explicit reason. Look at verse 35, that first line, the commands, nothing new there. But love your enemies, do good, lend expecting nothing in return. And your reward will be great. For you will be sons of the Most High. For he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil. Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful. We've discussed these commands, love your enemy, that's difficult. Notice what he's added here. You will have a reward. That reward is explicitly stated as being sons of the most high. Now let's just back up out of the loop. We've seen this phraseology before. When the angel shows up to Mary, what does she tell him? What does he tell her? You're going to give birth to the Son of the Most High. That's Jesus. The one true Son who's always been with the Father for all of eternity. He is the one true eternal Son. We now see that same language applied to us? It's not because we're gods. It's not because we're gonna be gods. It's because we're adopted in the family of God. The Father sent His Son. so that we can now be the children of God. So that we would now be able to receive Him and His love and then show His love. Notice the language here though. The command is rewarded. Obedience to the command is rewarded. That should give us a little confliction. Are we not adopted by grace? Yes. The reward for actually being obedient is that we are the sons of God. I don't believe we earn it. I believe we demonstrate it. I believe what Jesus is telling us here. We demonstrate being children of God by loving our enemies, by doing good, by lending. And if we were to flip this on the other side, if we're not doing those things, we should not have any assurance that that is our actual reward. The true son of God, think about what he did. He came down to his own and his own knew him not. He was mocked, he was spat upon, he was eventually nailed to a cross. The true Son of God came to save us out of the will of the Father, and He was mistreated, and He loved His enemies. The reward in believing in Him is that we are adopted. That is a position, but here it also means we live that out. Verse 36, be merciful even as your Heavenly Father is merciful. We read this earlier, one of the great passages of scripture, Exodus 34. Let's remember the context. God saved Israel out of Egypt with 10 great plagues that made him clearly the one God of all gods. Was Israel happily praising God and thanking him the whole time? I'm gonna ask that again, it's not a rhetorical question. Was God happily praising God the entire time he was saving them from Egypt? It's still really weak. No! After he got them out of Egypt, they're at the Red Sea, and what do they do? Ungrateful! He opens the Red Sea, he saves them. He takes Moses on a mountain, and what does he do? He says, this is what I'm gonna give you. You're my royal priesthood, you're my holy nation. Here's my law so you know how to enjoy me as your God and represent him to the world. First, no other gods. Second, no graven image. What are they doing? They're building a golden calf. Ungrateful, evil, redeemed people from Egypt. And Moses says in the midst of this, show me your glory. This is who God says He is. Merciful. Slow to anger. Abounding in steadfast love. If we're really to understand who we are as God's children, we are those ungrateful idolaters. He shows us mercy upon mercy. He's slow to anger. And then he calls us to be like him. Because that's what a son is supposed to be. Like his father. When Jesus claimed God was his father, what did he say? How did he explain it? I do what I see my father doing. I say what I hear my father saying. If we're going to claim to be sons of God, children of God, we have to be like dad. It's only, it's clearly meant to be demonstrated. This is a wonderful weight to bear. It's wonderful because we, if we see how ungrateful we are, if we see how obstinate and evil we are, we rejoice in that mercy. We rejoice that he's shown such great mercy. And it's a wonderful way because now we carry and pour out that same mercy. Notice the reward is to be with God and his family. The reward is to be loved by God and love God. The reward is to be a child of the Most High and the family of God. Because He's been kind to us who are ungrateful and evil. Oh, if the love of your enemy command was weighty, be merciful even as your Heavenly Father is merciful. That's weighty. But praise be to God we received such mercy. Let's be close. Let's meditate upon our own Savior. Isaiah 53, seven declares, he, that is Jesus, the Messiah, he was oppressed and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth. Like a lamb that is led to the slaughter and like a sheep that before its shears is silent, so he opened not his mouth. His disciples have abandoned him. He's been betrayed by one of his own. He's now put before the religious leaders who are supposed to say, oh, I'm the priest, this is the great high priest, look, here he is, the true worship, and yet they turn God's people against him. He's slandered, mocked, beaten, and stood in silent strength. The Word of God Himself who became flesh. The God who spoke everything into existence from nothing with great power. The God who declares us saved and justified from sin with great power. He has all power. He could have called down legions of angels and wiped everybody out. But instead, He was silent. So that He could fulfill the will of God. He received the abuse for the sake of us. He received the abuse to show his love for us. What a wonderful weight. The God who is all merciful has given us salvation and then commissions us to be like him. The great encouragement we have, believer, to fulfill this command, God is with you. God is for you. He is the perfect God who will execute perfect justice. He is the merciful God who has saved you. You can trust him. If you look at this sermon of Jesus, the Sermon on the Plain, notice it ends with two kinds of tree and two kinds of foundation. There's a tree that bears bad fruit. I believe that's returning evil with evil. There's a foundation that's shaky. Jesus calls us to the foundation of his love so that we would bear the fruit of loving even our own enemies. What kind of fruit do we bear? What kind of foundation do we have? Let every man examine himself. Let's pray. Father, forgive us, for we are prone to grumble. We have not honored you, or shown you thanks, or given you thanks. In a way, you're truly worthy. Lord, we take matters into our own hand, and we desire our own retribution. Lord, we've sought our own revenge. We've lashed out. We've revealed the sin that still lurks with our own hearts. Lord, we pray for your grace to repent, to be washed, to be cleansed. Father, we pray that we would be like you. We thank you that you've shown us your mercy when we were undeserving. You've shown us your kindness when we were undeserving. Lord, fill us. Bless us with the fullness of your great mercy so that we might be instruments and vessels who also proclaim you by blessing those who curse us, by doing good to those who harm us, by loving even our enemy. Lord, this morning we pray for those who we feel are against us. Lord, this morning I want to come alongside our brother Chariot and his family and the church. He faces a powerful enemy in the government of China. We pray that you would break that government in a way that leads them to a fear of you, in a recognition of you. Lord, we pray that you would bless that church to know how to stand in strength and in testimony and in the goodness of your gospel. Lord, give them wisdom. Give them boldness. Lord, I pray that we as a church would be desiring to be trained up and discipled by you and your word to stand and bless those who curse us and love even our enemy. In Jesus' name we pray, amen. Let us stand and sing our song of response. Jesus, thank you.