I'm going to ask you to turn in your Bibles to Luke chapter 6,
verse 27, and we're going to be verses 27 to 36 this morning.
If you're using one of the Bibles found under some of the
chairs here in the auditorium in Cambridge, it's in Page 915 that
you'll turn to. If you don't have a Bible of
your own at home, you're here today and you don't have one, we
would love to give one of those Bibles to you.
That's our gift to you. We everyone to have a Bible in
their hands they own, they call their own.
It's my joy this morning to welcome a new member into
fellowship this morning. But not really new to us here at
Forward Church because she's kind of been with us her whole
life. But welcome Daniela Fiji into
membership today. And so great to see you take
that step into membership. Also want to let you know before
we get started today, we're doing Communion.
So you should have got a cup like this when you came in this
morning if you did not get one of these cups.
If you just want to put your hand up right now, I think we've
got some people in the back and they can get you hooked up with
a cup so that we come to Communion.
You're all set. I've been thinking a lot lately
about the fact that Christianity is weird, and as I've been
reflecting on this, I realized I think I grew up.
I spent my childhood in my teenage years at the weirdest
point in the Christian Church, especially if you were growing
up in a conservative evangelical church, the 80s and 90s were
really weird. We had a lot of Christian
T-shirts. If you're, if you're growing up
in the 80s and 90s in church, you were well acquainted with
Christian T-shirts that often tried to play off like well
known brands or things that were kind of cool in culture.
But we're like 3 years too late to the party.
And so I got some pictures. There's one when I, when I was a
kid in the 90s, there was a brief period of time where there
was a brand called No Fear and the shirts were really cool.
And then like three years later, somebody who was a Christian
finally figured out how to make a shirt that was kind of a riff
off that. And so they came up with this
fear not put a little verse on it and we wore it.
We got another photo up here, here.
Here's what I'm talking about with brands.
And again, if you grew up in in church in the 80s and 90s, you
saw these, you probably wore some of these, right?
That that says Jesus, sweet savior.
That's what it says in there, King of Kings and the Reese, the
Reese cup does kind of look like a crown.
So that kind of is cool. That one up in the corner,
because you can't read. I'm just going to tell you, it
says Satan. You just in really small letters
got punked. Yeah.
Oh, that's right, Air Jesus. And that's weird.
That's just weird. I don't even know what to say
about that. So we had, we had Christian
T-shirts. I had friends who couldn't play
cards but could play cards. And here's what I mean by that.
They couldn't play cards if there was like suits on them,
like diamonds, clubs, spades, hearts.
But if you removed the suits, the cards are OK.
So just had to figure out a way to not have diamonds, clubs,
spades and hearts on them. And then they could play those
same friends. They could not go with me to a
movie theater to watch a movie. But eight months later when it
came out on VHS, it was super OK to watch that in the house.
I remember having really heated conversations with my mom about
genes in church. She would die.
She would have died back. Now she wears she's in church
all the time now. She would have died back then.
To think that I would be preaching in Gene.
And that's especially true if you're a women.
You depending on the church that you're in, you may have worn
these really weird things called culottes, right?
Some of you are nodding your head.
It's like it's sort of a skirt, but it's pants.
So I'm a rebel. If you were in youth group in
the 90s, you are probably familiar with, with, with things
that ended with CD burning parties and C DS do not burn
well. And, and we were all passionate
about if we were going to get rid of the devil's music.
And then a week later Sam the record man was really happy
because then we went and bought the CD again.
So they got to sell it to us twice.
And if you're like, hey, that's not weird, that's weird.
It's weird that you don't think that's weird.
It's weird that you think that that's normal.
And that's OK. Like if you if you like the
weird, embrace the weird. That's cool.
Just don't impose it on anybody else.
But but embrace that. But here's why I say this,
because Christianity is weird enough on its own, just on the
merits. What Christianity is based on
the things we do as Christians is weird.
We just spent time singing out loud together in public.
Nobody does that. I don't know if you know that
people don't do that anywhere else.
We're going to take communion today.
We're we're going to open up this little pack with grape
juice that kind of tastes like off brand freezy juice in a
little wafer that they say is bread.
But I have questions. But we're going to take this
because we believe that God came down in the flesh.
He lived on earth, He lived a sinless life in the person
Jesus. He went to the cross, He died,
He was buried, and three days later he rose again.
We believe that he died and rose again, and that's why we take
this, because this is the central reality of our faith.
This is what makes us followers of Jesus.
And prayer is weird. It's weird to just be speaking
out there and the persons can't see them.
Fasting is weird. Believing that a book written
thousands of years ago, over the course of thousands of years by
40 ish authors in three different languages across three
different continents in all sorts of different genres is
actually written by one guy to us.
And it's his inspired word, every word of it.
True. That's that's a weird thing for
most people. We could go on and on.
Christianity is weird. We can't run away from their
weirdness. If it's true, we have to embrace
it. We got to lean into it.
But of all of the things in Christianity that are weird,
what we're going to look at today I think has to be a
contender for, if not the weirdest, then at least one of
the most unbelievable different difficult teachings that Jesus
gives us. So let's let's read these words
of Jesus together, starting in Luke chapter 27.
Jesus is speaking, continuing on in this sermon on the plane that
we've been walking through. And he says, but I say to you
who listen, love your enemies, do what is good to those who
hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat
you. If anyone hits you on the cheek,
offer the other also. And if anyone takes away your
coat, don't hold back your shirt either.
You give to everyone who asks you, and and from someone who
takes your things. Don't ask for them back.
Just as you want others to do for you, do the same for them.
If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you?
Even sinners love those who love them.
If you do what's good to those who are good to you, what credit
is that to you? Even sinners do that.
And if you lend to those from whom you expect to receive, what
credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners to
be repaid in full. But love your enemies, do what
is good, and lend expecting nothing in return, and then your
reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most
High. For He is gracious to the
ungrateful and evil, but merciful, just as your Father
also is merciful. And I don't even know if we know
how weird and different that teaching is.
You, you might be here and maybe you're not even a follower of
Jesus and you're like, well, it sounds aspirational and it
sounds pretty naive, but I don't know if I would would call it
weird. I'm just telling you the reason
that we struggle to see how incredibly weird and different
this is, is because we live in a culture that's been so saturated
and so formed by the ethics and the teachings of Jesus.
Whether you're a Christian here today or not, whether you're a
practicing follower of Jesus or not, that we don't even
understand how somebody in a Roman culture, the Greco Roman
world, would this. This is a mind blowing reversal
of what the natural state and order of things is.
And let's be honest, when we stop and think about it and
apply it to ourselves, we know that's true.
Most of us struggle to love even the people we like.
Isn't that true, right? We struggle to love the people
who like us, and Jesus is calling us to love people who
loathe us. I want to tell you a story.
There's a story of a man who comes in to speak to his pastor.
He's coming to speak to his pastor because he wants to get a
divorce from his wife. And as often happens, if you do
pastoral counseling, you realize that people often want to come
in and have you affirm what they already think rather than
challenge their thinking. Says, you know, like, I just
don't love her anymore. I think we need to get a
divorce. Pastor says, well, the Bible
says husbands love your wives, so you really don't have a
choice. This is God's command to you.
He said, well, I mean, you just don't get it.
I don't even want to be around her anymore.
I don't want to live in the same house as her.
So the pastor says, well, here, why don't you try this?
Why don't you trial a trial separation?
You find a house real close by in the neighborhood and you move
in there for a few weeks. And he said, well, what?
What? What good would that do?
What? Why would I?
Why'd that change anything? The pastor says, well, because
the Bible says love your neighbor, so now you'll be her
neighbor. So the guy gets really
frustrated. He gets really exasperated.
At this point he's like, no, pastor, you don't get it.
It's not just that I don't want to be around her.
Like I despise her. I can't stand her anymore.
Pastor looks at him. He says, oh, OK, I think I
understand. So, so you're saying that like
you'd view her as your enemy. He's like, yes, pastor says,
great, here's what I want you to do.
I want you to love her. So that's what Jesus says to do,
right? See, when Jesus says, but I say
to you who listen, love your enemies, do good to those who
hate you. Here's what he's really saying.
He's saying followers of Jesus are called to love everyone,
period. No asterisks, no fine print.
The everyone of us, everyone of us in this room, everyone of you
watching online, you listen to this later, Every single one of
us in that moment wants a yellow.
But right, we've all got somebody right now who were
like, but you don't know blank. You don't know this person.
So here's what I want you to do. I want you somewhere.
Write this down. I want you to write out the
following. Jesus is telling me I'm called
to love that person. Write their name down, period.
Because that's what this is a call to.
It's a call to the person to for you to love the person who is
the person who you think is absolutely unworthy of your
love. The group of people, do you
think there's no way I can't love them?
That's what Jesus calling us to do.
You get how hard this is? Get how different this is.
See, following Jesus, we've been saying this.
Following Jesus means different. Living differently.
That means following Jesus means loving differently.
That's not the totality of what it looks like to follow Jesus.
But you can't follow Jesus without doing this.
You're like, but you don't know. You know how terrible they are.
You know how deeply they've wounded me and hurt me.
You're right. I haven't walked in your shoes.
These are not my words to you. This is Jesus call to everyone
who would choose to follow him. And our struggle is this.
It's because we have a wrong concept of what Jesus is calling
us to. No, you can't have warm fuzzies
to somebody who has been terrible towards you, who's been
awful towards you, who loathes you, who acts as an enemy
towards you. I get that.
But that's not the love that Jesus is calling you to here
today. Love here is I don't want you to
be thinking warm fuzzies. I want you to be thinking
actions. The love we're talking about is
not fundamentally about how we feel, but how we're going to
function with people. Listen, we have such a feeling
emotion centric idea of what it is to love and and and emotions
are part of it. But I I love.
I love what my mother-in-law what what what Judy used to say
to my wife sometimes, which is very hard to believe because
Amanda is about the most lovable person.
In fact, her name means worthy of love.
But but her mom's would say to her at times, listen, I love
you. I don't like you very much right
now, right? If you've been a parent, you
know that you felt that you've lived that.
We're not talking about sentimentality.
What I want, what I need you to understand as we walk through
this, is Jesus going to be talking about sacrificial
action, not sentimentality. What Jesus is saying really is
this, be loving towards your enemies, act out of love towards
your enemies. So what does he mean by that?
Well, now he unpacks it for us, verse 28.
He starts by saying, what does it mean to love your enemies,
Bless those who curse you? That's what it means, loving
you. That's what it means to do good
towards those who hate you. You bless those who curse you.
And I would put it this way, respond to words of hate with
words of healing. That's part of what it looks
like to love your enemies. And I'm going to tell you, maybe
out of all of these we're going to walk through and every one of
us is going to struggle with different parts of this.
This is a hard one for me, really hard 1 for me.
I've been blessed with the ability to have a pretty quick
wit and pretty sharp tongue, which is not a blessing.
When you get into a spot where somebody hurts you, it's not a
blessing for them. At least when someone comes at
me verbally, everything in me wants to completely annihilate
and dismantle that person down to the very core.
Like, I want to RIP their heart out with my words.
I just want to slice them to pieces.
And, and this was not good when I first got married.
It was, it's not good because if you've been married, you know,
you, you're, you now you put yourself into what is, I would
call this God's sanctification chamber, right?
Two sinners living in close proximity to each other all the
time is going to do one of two things.
You're either going to grow like crazy in Christ or you're going
to kill each other. And by God's grace and a wife
who again, is unbelievably patient and kind towards me, I
grew to move away from responding with harsh words all
the time. But I still struggle at times to
just not respond in the moment with vitriol when I feel hurt by
something. I had to recognize a couple
things. Just a marriage, but life in
general, 1. I don't always hear things
correctly. I don't know about you, but
there's a lot of things that happen in a day and in life that
can cause me to have some filters where the thing that
somebody is intending to say is not the thing that I heard.
There's a lot of past trauma that can happen in your life,
past wounds that can get opened up, man, when you got burned
skin, just a little tap sets you off with pain, right?
And all of us have some burns in our life.
And there are ways that we all respond in unhealthy fashion
because of the past pains that we have when we come in contact
with people who say things in our current moment, but they
don't know that they're hurting us that way.
So I had to recognize sometimes the the issue was a me issue.
I felt cursed, but they weren't meaning to curse me.
Second thing I realized is, yeah, sometimes people really
are cruel with their words. They intend to harm me.
But even when they intend to harm me, it's usually not really
about me, see? Usually people are responding
out of their own pain. Hurt people hurt people, and
we've all got hurt. And sometimes we act out of that
hurt. And so I learned to ask the
question, am I, am I truly hearing what this person is
saying? And what hurt or pain in that
person's life has caused them to act in this way that they would
want to inflict pain on me? Now this is an explanation.
It's not an excuse. That's what I just want to be
clear on that It's not an excuse for you to harm somebody else,
to hurt somebody else, to be hateful towards somebody else
because you've experienced a lot of harm and pain and hurt in
your life. But when we receive that from
somebody, it is super helpful to change my posture towards that
person to be able to respond back in ways that are not going
to try and RIP that other person apart for the pain they've
caused me. It it helps to create a heart
that is more able to bless when you're cursed.
So let me give you a couple real life examples.
Maybe you've been here before, maybe you've experienced this,
you've been in a meeting maybe where a Co worker just kind of
calls you out and lays into you and criticizes you in front of a
team of people. I don't know about you, but my
response in that moment is either to fire back.
I want to fire back or even more so I'm going to plot my revenge
and get them later. I'm going to find my time where
I'm going to be able to take them.
I'm on the watch now. Every time you screw up, man,
I'm on it. But instead, if we're going to
bless those who curse us, here's what it looks like when you get
an opportunity to catch them doing something right, you
praise them, you encourage them. That's that's totally flipped
from what we want to do, right? Maybe because you realize, hey,
hurt people hurt people. When your emotion levels come
down a little bit, you kind of pull them aside.
You check in to see how they are doing and if there's something
going on in their life. It's a pretty different way of
responding than I think our usual way of responding there.
How about this on, on social media, man, it's easy to be a
keyboard warrior, especially when you get a nasty comment
back at you. Somebody behind the anonymity of
a keyboard tweet something at you, says something at you, runs
you down, man, I we would never talk to people in real life the
way that some of us talk online. There's just no way you wouldn't
do it. But when that happens, if you're
on the receiving end of just some nastiness, instead of
getting into some type of flame war online, what if you engage
with gentleness? What if maybe instead of even
going public, you sent a quick message privately to see what's
going on in somebody's life? See, being loving towards your
enemies looks like responding to words of hate with words of
healing and with words that bring healing to a relationship
instead of further dividing it. Second thing he says is this.
Pray for those who mistreat you. And here's how I would put this.
I think Jesus is saying this. When someone hurts you, put
their name on a prayer list, not a hit list.
See, we think that we have gone above and beyond with people
simply when we don't retaliate in kind to the things they send
our way. Jesus says no, It's more than
that. When someone comes at you, I
actually want you to do good towards them.
I want you to pray for your enemies.
And when Jesus says pray for them, it's not Lord smite them.
OK, that's not this is not what he's saying.
He's asking that you would pray for their healing.
I want you to go back to your what about person the the person
that came into your mind when I said you have to love everyone
and everything inside of you wanted to scream, but not that
person, right? That's the first person you need
to put on your prayer list. I'll just challenge you to pray
for that person for the next 30 days.
Commit to praying that God would bring healing into their life,
that God would help them in whatever they're struggling
with. The God would save them if
they're not a follower of Jesus, that Jesus would be real to them
and they would come to a point where they would believe in him
and be transformed by him and see how that begins to change
your heart towards that person. And if you think there's no way
nobody could ever do this, well, that's exactly what Jesus did.
While Jesus was being nailed to the cross, he cries out about
the soldiers who are crucifying him.
Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.
While Stephen is being stoned to death and martyred for preaching
the name of Jesus, he calls out for forgiveness for those who
are stoning him. Now, you can absolutely pray
against the injustice that is committed to you.
The Psalms give us some templates and some frameworks
for praying against injustice, against evil.
But for our hearts, we got to pray even for those who are
doing evil against us. So loving your enemies looks
like speaking words of healing towards those who hate you.
It means praying for those who you would just like to be able
to smack. It also means that when you're
insulted, you don't return the favor.
Verse 29 says if anyone hits you on the cheek for the other also.
So I want to give a very important heads up before I
delve into this a little bit. This is not a call to endure
abuse. We're going to talk about why
that is. This is clearly not Jesus saying
if you're abused, suffer abuse. OK?
If you are abused, let me say if you're being abused right now,
two things. Get out, get help.
Reach out to us. Let people in your life know who
can support you and encourage you in that.
If you're an abuser, let me say this to you, repent, come clean.
You get yourself out of that situation.
Don't make the person who's being abused you get a
repentance would look like you saying, I don't know what to do.
I can't stop myself right now. I've got some stuff that's so
broken in me this out. Then you get out and we'll help
you and you come and ask us for help so we can begin to help
figure out how to get you some healing so that you won't live
that way. Jesus here is making a point
about how we respond when we're insulted, not how we respond to
being abused. He's not calling on people to
stay in an abusive situation. See, in Jesus day, hitting a
person on the cheek, slapping them was the ultimate sign of an
insult. And in fact, Matthew adds a
detail that Luke doesn't include in this text.
Matthew when he's recounting Jesus teachings on this says
when someone hits you on the right cheek.
And so if I was to hit somebody on the right cheek as a as a
right hand dominated person, I would need to backhand slap,
cross the cheek go like that sound guys.
I'm sorry. The right hand backhand slap was
an insult that was given from somebody who was a superior in
social station, connotating that the person that they were
insulting was an inferior. OK, you get this.
So if you're an inferior, I'm going to slap you.
Like even today we kind of get this, this, this feels just so
dismissive. Jesus says if he hits you on one
cheek, turn the other cheek to you.
So if we add in Matthew's teaching, if he hits you on the
right cheek, turn the left cheek to him.
Now here's what happens with the left-handed smack.
That was viewed as a insult that you would give to somebody who
is on equal footing, an equal plane with you socially.
And So what Jesus is really saying is when you bear with the
insults of someone without responding to them, you've taken
away their power. How do you take away their
power? How does how does that work?
Works like this. When you refuse to respond to a
bully, to the insult of a bully, to the insult of somebody who is
hoping to knock you down and crush you and make you feel
small, When when you don't respond, when you don't respond
in kind, you are declaring to them this your approval or
disapproval holds no power over me.
It's my dignity, my worth. It's not determined by your
opinion. I'm strong enough to take this
because I actually don't care you.
You can't make me feel away. You can't make me respond away
because I am convinced that my dignity and my worth and my
value is found in the one who made me in his image, the one
who died on the cross to save me.
So your insults hold no power over me.
That's what you declare when you withstand an insult, when you,
when you have to respond in kind.
Here's what you're saying. I'm so devastated by what you're
saying. I've given you all the power
over me. And then he says this.
If anyone takes your coat, don't hold back your shirt either.
Give to everyone who asks you. And from someone who takes your
things, don't ask for them back. What he's saying is be generous
even when it's costly. Loving our enemies.
I just if you haven't got it yet, it's costly.
Loving your enemies means giving up the vengeance that you
deserve. More than that, because of what
Jesus is calling us to here, it means absorbing that cost of
vengeance and going further and responding with mercy and grace
towards them. Not just not returning evil, but
returning evil with good. That's costly.
And so if you're going to love your enemies me, you have to be
generous even when it's costed. More than that.
We think of hate as the opposite of love, but many people would
argue, and I think this is true, that apathy is actually the
opposite of love. Love and hate, They, they,
they're both deep emotional feelings.
They both come out of a deep sense of I care.
Apathy is a complete lack of concern or care or feeling
towards somebody. Feeling apathy is the opposite
of love, and feeling apathy towards those who are in need is
in some sense a greater absence of love.
When we feel no concern about those who are hurting, those who
are broken, those who are in need, in some ways, that's more
concerning about the lack of love in our soul.
See, if we're going to love everyone, period, it means
acting in love towards those not only that we want to hate, but
that we totally want to ignore and not see that we want to not
notice or care about. And I know, like it's real.
Compassion fatigue is a real deal, especially in a world
where we bombarded with everything awful in the world
all the time from everywhere. Our hearts just get tired.
It gets we get weary of loving or caring or being concerned.
I get it. But aren't you glad the God
never got to a point of stopping caring?
God never gets to a point where he's just like, I'm done.
I mean, I just don't have it in me anymore to care about you.
Be honest. There's a lot going on in the
world and you're kind of annoying.
So I'm just going to forget about you.
So how do we do it? Here's here's what I would say.
Some of us, we we need to tune out the noise because we are
compassion fatigued and focus on the person in front of us in the
flesh. When when, when that person on
the street is in front of you. See them as a person created in
the image of God whom Jesus loved.
Care about them enough to say hello and give them some
dignity. Focus on the people.
We can't fix everything all the time, but you can deal with the
person who's in front of you in that moment, who needs care and
who needs love and who needs to be seen.
Finally, just in case we're still struggling to understand
what Jesus is calling us to when he calls us to love our enemies.
He says this just as others, just as you want others to do
for you, do the same for them. So I would say this, Jesus
saying, show the love to others that you wish others would show
to you. That grace that you wish other
people would extend to you and you're not at your best.
That forgiveness that you wish somebody would offer to you when
you have messed up royally. That kindness, a little bit of
kindness that you wish you would get in a world that often seems
really cruel and cold. The patience in a world that is
so quick to give up and discard people, you do that.
You do that with the people who are in front of you.
You do that with the people God brings into your life.
The things that you wish that somebody would give to you, you
give to them. You say, Derek, that's hard.
This is all so hard. What if I just, how about this?
I'll love the people who love me and, and, and, and I'll ignore
the jerks. I'll, I'll at least I'll get
better. And instead of respond to them,
I'll ignore them. No, this is what Jesus says.
If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you?
Even sinners love those who love them.
If you do what is good to those who are good to you, what credit
is that to you? Even sinners do that.
If you lend to those from whom you expect to receive, what
credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to be repaid
in full. Listen, what he's saying is love
that's easy isn't love that's different.
That's not the type of love that Jesus is calling his people to.
It's not enough. It's not enough.
Kingdom love, Christian love, Jesus love is supernatural love.
It's above and beyond love. It's choosing to act in love
towards your spouse when your spouse deserves anything but
love. It's choosing to love the
coworkers that are awful, that annoy you, that you can't stand,
the ones that undermine you. It's loving the person in the
church, not just the ones who are kind to you, but the ones
who are kind of a pain. OK.
It's loving everyone, period. It's it's loving like the sun
instead of like a candle. Here's what I mean by that.
A candle burns as long as the conditions for burning are
right, as long as it's got oxygen, as long as it's got
fuel, as long as a wind doesn't come along and blow it up, then
a candle will burn. But the sun burns and shines no
matter what, because the sun burns and shines because of
what's in it, right? Not because of what's around it.
So many of us love like candles. We love because of what's around
us. Jesus is calling us to love
because of what's in us. He says love your enemies, do
good, do what is good, and land expecting nothing.
Because of this, we love like the sun, because we've been
loved by the sun, he says. Then your reward will be great,
and you will be children of the Most High, for he is gracious to
the ungrateful and evil. Be merciful, just as your Father
also is merciful. The way The reason we love
everyone, period, is because Jesus loved us, period.
That's the gospel. That's the truth.
Becoming a Christian starts with understanding this reality that
God loved us just like Jesus is calling us to love others.
To To love this way, you have to understand how merciful God has
been to you. It has to sink into your heart.
To love this way. You have to understand how
greatly God has loved you. Romans 58 says this, but God
proves his own love for us in this and while we were still
sinners. Christ died for us when we were
his enemies. Jesus died for us when we did
nothing to deserve it. Jesus died when you wanted
nothing to do with God. God came running towards you in
the person of Jesus. Jesus doesn't love us because of
what we do for Him. He loved us in spite of what we
have done to Him. You might be here today and you
have no love for God. I want you to know this.
God loves you because His love isn't contingent upon your love
for Him. The things He came running
towards you when you wanted nothing to do with.
Because that's what He did for me.
And the only way to love differently is to receive a
different kind of love. You see what he said then your
reward will be great. When you do this, you will be
children of the Most High. He is not talking here about
loving your enemies so that you can earn the love of the Father.
This is pre cross. Now that we're post cross, now
that we understand what Jesus has done, we understand what
he's saying is. I loved you this way and if you
have received my love, you've become children of the Most
High. So that's the type of love you
can now take out in the world. You know why you can do this
type of love even though it's costly?
Because you have a never ending source of love and grace that's
coming from the Father. If you had to do this on your
own, you can't do it. You run out of resources.
But when we come back to the reality that this is the way we
are loved, not just in the past but every day by Jesus, now all
of a sudden I have the ability to respond in kind because I'm
never going to run out of the love that I'm receiving.
I've always got more love to give.
Only those who have understood what it is necessary to be
called sons and daughters of God.
Only those who cry out that they are enemies of God, deserving
his judgment and wrath, and then who accept the love of God by
receiving the fact that Jesus died on the cross for them while
they were sinners and enemies, and is rose again in power,
victorious to give us the Holy Spirit power to be able to go
out and do this. Now we've got the resources
necessary to be able to love this way.
If Jesus could act in love towards you when all you
deserved was punishment, you can act in love towards those who
deserve your hate. If Jesus could forgive you when
you didn't deserve it. You can forgive those who have
wronged you even though they don't deserve it.
If Jesus prayed for those who were nailing him to the cross,
you can pray for the people who have murdered your reputation.
And when you do that, when I do that, we give the world just a
little glimpse of the unbelievable, weird, totally
different type of love that God offers than anything else in
this world. And it proves, it proves that we
have understood the type of love God has given to us and received
it. And then you can have great
confidence in knowing that you are a son or daughter of God
Most High. We're going to take communion
this morning and just say this as we begin to take it again.
If you came in late and you don't have communion, just put
your hand up. We'll get some people at the
back and they can get you one of these, but communions for those
who have made the decision to follow Jesus.
So if you're not yet a follower of Jesus, you just kind of
listening and exploring this whole thing.
This is not for you. This is for those of us who have
said, I believe all of this stuff about what Jesus has done
for me today. We're going to take this
together because we're going to remind ourselves of this
incredible love that's been shown to us that is the source
and the power through the work of the Holy Spirit for us to be
able to love even our enemies. See, communion is a reminder of
what Jesus has done, and it's a reminder for those of those who
he did it for. If we weren't enemies, if we
weren't sinners, if we weren't those worthy of God's hate, who
hated God. Jesus didn't have to go to the
cross, but he suffered and he died.
And he did it out of love for us.
Those who were his enemies, who were his betrayers, who he
didn't just come to a point of being OK with.
He didn't just come to a point of letting it go, He came to a
point of receiving us into His family as sons and daughters.
That's how greatly He loved us. The bread reminds us of His
body, offered for those of us who did not deserve it.
The cup reminds us of His blood poured out for those of us who
at that point had never asked for it.
Jesus loved you when you were unlovable and he still loves us
today in those moments where we sometimes lapse back into being
unlovable. And he still loves us today even
though every one of us in this room have some stuff we need to
work out about people that we're not loving well.
So I want to give us a little bit of time here just to prepare
and reflect together. I'm going to ask you just close
your eyes, bow your head. I say this all the time.
There's nothing special about this except that, you know, in a
culture of distraction, this just helps us to remove the
distractions, to hear from God a little better.
I want you to ask yourself this. Is there someone today that I
need to love who I haven't been loving?
Is there someone I'd call my enemy?
Someone I need to forgive, someone right now that I need to
pray for them and stop resenting them and stop plotting my
retaliation against them, but just to pray for them?
Maybe there's someone that you've withheld mercy from.
The God is calling you to love because He's never withheld his
mercy from you. Father, thank you for loving us,
unlovable us. Thank you for loving us to such
an extent that while we cursed you, you blessed us.
That when we insulted you, you turned towards us.
We wanted nothing to do with you.
You did everything to be with us.
God help us to understand the depth of the love that we have
received from you and how undeserved that love is.
Because until we get that, until our hearts are convinced of that
reality, we just don't have it in us to do what you're asking
us to do today. So help us break our hearts.
Show us our sins so we could see your love, so that we could love
those who sin against us. Father, as we prepare to take
this wafer, we thank you for your body, broken for us
unlovely, unlovable sinners, broken so that you could crown
us with Christ's glory, put his robe on us, and call us sons and
daughters of the King. How unbelievable.
Thank you church, let's take and eat God's body broken for us
together. Father, we thank you for the cup
represents the blood of Christ poured out for the forgiveness
of sins. A new covenant, a new way that
we get to relate to you. Not by our efforts and actions,
Father, but it was because, well, we wanted nothing to do
with you. You ran towards us.
You initiated God for some of us.
We're waiting for somebody else to initiate.
God help us to be like You. We know there is brokenness in a
relationship. Let us be the ones to initiate
as far as it depends on us, as much as that we're able to do,
and we can't do it on our own. It takes 2.
We know that, Father, so we pray that you would soften hearts for
those who we would maybe even call this afternoon or reach out
to. But if you're prompting us to
make the first step, remind us again, afresh and anew, that you
have taken all the steps towards us.
Forgiveness is possible because you've forgiven us through the
blood of of your Son on the cross.
Let's take and drink together. We're just going to take some
time here at the end, a little bit longer than usual.
I want us to respond in heartfelt praise and worship to
all that Christ has done for us on the cross.