Have you ever been around someone that made you so mad you could hurt them?The title of this message: Love Your Enemies
1st in series: Red Letters We Wish Were Gray - series based on the words of Jesus that we wish weren't so strict. We wish they were gray so there would be some way of tempering these commands so that could be easier to do or give us the ability to pick and choose which to follow. But they aren't gray; they are red.
But, before we get to far in the message today, let's take a moment to look at:
5 Reasons You Should Always Love Your Enemies:
1. It saves you time on all the mean text messages you would have wasted on them
2. If they randomly die from an unknown cause, you won’t be considered a suspect
3. Since you’re married to them, you might as well make the best of it
4. You can go back out in public again since you were afraid of running into them before
5. You can probably sell your evil plot idea to dispose of them to the creators of CSI
It may be fun to joke about all of our “enemies” real or fictional, but Jesus said something very different and really very hard: We are to love our enemies.
Let’s look at this passage of scripture
Luke 6:27-36
27 "But I tell you who hear me: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, 28 bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. 29 If someone strikes you on one cheek, turn to him the other also. If someone takes your cloak, do not stop him from taking your tunic. 30 Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. 31 Do to others as you would have them do to you. 32 "If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even 'sinners' love those who love them. 33 And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even 'sinners' do that. 34 And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even 'sinners' lend to 'sinners,' expecting to be repaid in full. 35 But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. 36 Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.
Jesus is speaking to his own people, the Jews. At this time Israel was being occupied by the Romans who oppressed and taxed them possibly up to a 90% rate. The Romans mercilessly harassed the Jews and would kill anyone who opposed them.
Let’s put this in today’s context. Imagine, for a moment, that there was absolutely no possibility of providing for our own energy resources and OPEC, out of simple greed and ability to subjugate the U.S., started charging over $1000 for each barrel of oil, rather than the current $74 or so. Can you imagine what that would do not only to our economy, but also to our very means of living? Now, imagine that some man, one that you’ve been following a bit because he seems to be a real prophet comes up and says, “No, don’t go to war, don’t impose sanctions – Love OPEC.” What would you think of him? Would you still want to be one of his followers?
Well, that what Jesus is saying. Jesus tells us that we need to love our enemies. He doesn’t say that if we have enemies we are to love them; he just assumes that we all do.
The truth is, if we are really going to “love” our enemies, we are going to have to change who we are, because we will not be able to change who they are. The first way that you can be changed and begin to love your enemy is by praying for them.
Luke 6:28
28 bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.
Have you ever prayed for someone you did not like or prayed for an enemy?
What happened?
Did that change the relationship at all?
Believe in Jesus’ wisdom.
Donald Miller in his book, Blue Like Jazz, writes about the idea of “belief,”
“The trouble with deep belief is that it costs something. And there is something inside me, some selfish beast of a subtle thing that doesn’t like the truth at all because it carries responsibility, and if I actually believe these things I have to do something about them. It is so, so cumbersome to believe anything. And it isn’t cool. I mean it’s cool in a Reality Bites, Welcome to Sarajevo, Amnesty International sense, but that is only as good as dreadlocks... Even our beliefs have become trend statements. We don’t even believe things because we believe them anymore. We only believe things because
they are cool things to believe.”
I like what Donald is saying here. I like it because he could be describing me and my thoughts on “loving my enemy.” I may say that I believe love changes things because it is a cool, trendy thing to say. I may also say that I believe that really loving people is what is going to change the world. But if I truly believed this, I think I would live differently. If I truly believed this, then I would begin to change.
So let’s look at three realities that, if we truly believe them, will move us to actually loving our enemy.
Reality # 1: Hate hurts the hater.
Physiology – may suppress the body’s ability to produce acetylcholine which tempers the severe effects of adrenaline. This in turn overexerts the nervous system, weakens the heart and stiffens arteries
Mentally - consumes our thoughts and focus
How has deep hatred affected our current world? Our culture? Our community? Our church?
Reality # 2: Love is the only thing that doesn’t make things worse.
How have we seen in history the actions of love changing a situation?
George Harris (US Marshalls @ Pentagon 1967)
“Love is the only thing that can turn an enemy into a friend.”- Martin Luther King, Jr.
Billy Graham in Leningrad 1982
"Jesus Christ is not dead on the Cross. He is a living Christ. He can come to your person. He can come to your family. He can come to your great country."
Jesus says, “Don’t just refrain from doing evil, actively do good to the very ones who you tend to think of as the bad guys in your life.” He’s not saying, “tolerate the evil”; He is telling us that God wants us to be an actual force for real love in a real world that is really messed up.
Reality # 3: We change in the process of choosing love.
In Matthew’s rendition of the gospel, Jesus says that when he is talking about loving our enemies, that we are to “be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect.”
This is one of our doctrines of faith in the United Methodist Church. We believe that Christians move on to perfection and that it can be achieved in this lifetime. What? I am sure that many of you are thinking, “No, that’s not right.” Hear me out because the first time I heard this I was stumped too. I could not get the idea that we could actually be perfect or how God truly expected this to happen. But the Greek word that we translate as “perfect” is better translated as “complete, mature.” The thought that he is trying to communicate isn’t to “not sin,” but to be like God: to be “whole and complete.” This is about being a person whose life is marked by love and light, just like God is love and light. This isn’t about niceness, but is about truly loving someone regardless of whether they are going to love us in return.
The life of a Christ-follower isn’t about “not sinning;” it is about being “whole and complete.”
Who is it that you consider to be your enemy? Is it you boss, neighbor, teacher, former friend, spouse,…?
Jesus doesn’t give us the choice as to how we treat them; he simply says – Love them.
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