New Kingdom Love

Love in the new Kingdom of God demands that we expand our love to include our enemies.

Note: This transcript was auto generated and may have errors.

Well, this morning we’re going to continue our tour of the new Kingdom of God that Jesus invites us into. Have you ever gone to Zillow.com or one of those online realtor websites and and just looked at what houses are available in your neighborhood? You know, just to see who’s who’s selling their house and you’re like, oh, the Johnsons are selling. Let’s take a look at that place. Right. And you go through and you scroll through their pictures. It’s kind of creepy, you know, like looking at their stuff. You almost half expect to see a picture with them in there, you know? And now you can do the thing where they have the virtual tour. You know, I always end up getting stuck in a corner of one of those places. I can’t get out of it somehow. But you can walk through all the house, right? You can go to the different places. And it’s kind of it’s kind of fun. Like, I didn’t know they had three bathrooms. That place doesn’t look big enough for that, you know. Interesting. What Jesus is doing here in Luke chapter six for his newly commissioned apostles and the disciples that are around him, and for the rest of the crowd who are just there to check Jesus out. He’s giving them a virtual tour of the Kingdom of God. He’s showing them around the inside of it. This is kind of hard to picture, but I want you to try with me here to picture this.

When you follow Jesus, you are not just living your life in a different way. You are entering something new. It’s not just your life, but different. It’s you are in a in a sense, in a new place. Physically, you don’t move. Physically, you’re you’re still here in this world, but spiritually you enter into a new place. You live in this broken world full of sin physically. But you enter and live under the reign of King Jesus in his kingdom spiritually. And the result is that you live according to the reign and command of Jesus, while simultaneously living in the society around you that has its own kingdom rules. So you live under two reigns at once. It’s a little strange, but it’s true. You live under two reigns at once, and a lot of the time I might even say most of the time these two kingdoms have commands that are at odds with each other. Now not always. There is a certain amount of overlap between what our earthly kings require of us and what King Jesus tells us to do. And when that happens, we get to please both. We get to please both. Help! Help me out. Help! Help me make the call here. Okay. You get to see this. Help me make this call. God says, do not murder. And society says, do not murder. Murder. What should you do? Not murder. Good. Well done. Good job. They overlap. They agree. Neighbor parks on your lawn.

Are you allowed to slash his tires? Oh, that was a lot of hesitation, church. That was a lot of hesitation. The answer is no. Jesus in the state of Minnesota agree on that one. But here’s the thing there are plenty of places. Plenty of places where Jesus command and the civil authorities don’t overlap. And usually it’s on issues of sin. And when that happens, Jesus commands us to obey him at all costs. And so the state says abortion is a woman’s right. Scripture is clear that God knits a child together in a mother’s womb. So we make this unpopular call to live in accordance with God’s command and advocate for the unborn. Society says there is no limit to the different ways that people should engage in sex. Scripture is very clear that sex is a gift for married couples, and so we make the unpopular call to live our lives in accordance with God’s design. There are so many of these. We could be here all morning just naming these different ways, these these places where there is no overlap, where where Scripture draws clear lines for the kingdom of God that are at odds with the rest of our world. What we’re going to talk about today is one of those places where the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of the world do not overlap, but it is not at all what you would expect, because what Jesus is going to show us today is not a limiting of the world’s excess, but an expanding of the world’s limitation.

Did you follow that? It’s very different. There is a way that our society thinks of something that is far more narrow than it should be, and Jesus is going to show us how much bigger and richer this thing is than than what the world has done with it. And the thing that that we’re going to talk about is love. Does that seem surprising to you? Does that surprise you? It’s kind of surprising to listen to the to the messaging of the world’s kingdom. You’d think that they were the ones expanding love that they had cornered the market on the biggest and widest and most expansive love that there is. But actually the worldly view of love is quite narrow and it’s quite limited. It’s narrowed to feelings and sexual impulses, and it’s only as broad as who I feel like loving. That’s that’s the only people in the scope. But in the kingdom of God, where Christ reigns supreme, love achieves the size of God Himself. And I’m telling you right now, church, before we even get into this, before we look at all the the nuances of Kingdom love, let me just tell you, this is this is not what we’re really known for. The signature characteristic of Christianity is supposed to be otherworldly, Christ like love. And I’m not really sure that we’re doing that well. So this is going to be a challenge today. Are you ready to be challenged today well beyond your comfort level? Because that’s what we have in this passage.

Love in the new Kingdom of God demands that we expand our love to include our enemies. If you want to know how well you’re doing, living out the kind of love that Jesus demands of you, you need to assess how well are you loving enemies? Jesus is going to diagnose the sickness of our hearts and expose our weakness this morning. Are you ready for some of that heart surgery? Because that’s what this passage is going to do. It’s going to it’s going to dig right into us. So please open your Bibles if you have them to Luke chapter six. We’ll start in verse 27. I will have it on the screen as well. This is the passage that follows the opening blessings and woes that we looked at last week. In this section, Jesus describes what loving people will look like in his kingdom. His description has three parts where he shifts the perspective on love slightly. Now, I’ve boiled this down to three statements that you can take away with you this morning. Each of these summary statements offers a broader view of love than anything that we find in the world. So here’s here’s the first love enemies with the same love that you want from them. Love enemies with the same love that you want from them. Jesus says, but I say to you who hear, love your enemies and do good to those who hate you.

Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who abuse you to the one who strikes you on the cheek. Offer the other also, and from one who takes away your cloak, do not withhold your tunic either. Give to everyone who begs from you and from the one who takes away your goods. Do not demand them back and as you wish that others would do to you, do so to them. It would have been very easy for Jesus to have said, friends, I want you to love everybody. Love, love everybody. That would be actually very popular in our in our day. Wouldn’t it? People would grab on to that love. We need to love. We need to love everybody. And everybody would enjoy that statement coming from Jesus. When when you broaden and generalize things, it tends to sound really good as long as you don’t look at it too closely. It’s like when you describe someone nice, right? Somebody nice in your in your life and you say, man, that guy is so nice. He’s the nicest guy in the world. You ever you ever said that about somebody? He’s just he’s just the nicest guy in the world. Well, first of all, how would you even measure that? That’s my first question. But secondly, saying something like that just washes over every way that that guy isn’t nice. There’s probably lots of ways that guy isn’t nice, but you just wash over it with a statement like the nicest guy in the world.

If we heard Jesus say to us this morning that you need to love everybody, my guess would be that most of us here would give that about two seconds of thought, consider ourselves very nice people and go on about our day. Without thinking about who everybody includes. Who does everybody include? Jesus, though he isn’t a bland, inspirational poster. He’s not a flowery meme your aunt posted, and he’s not a vague speaker who allows his audience to define his terms and so that they can go on about their life feeling good about themselves. See, what Jesus does is he. He goes right to the very heart, to the place where true love is going to be most restricted and seemingly impossible. He goes to enemies. Think about all the people that you don’t like. Go ahead and think about them right now. Think about all the people that you don’t like. Think about the people who have. Who have hurt you. Personally. Think about all the people who, when they speak, you start to get upset. Think about the people who who don’t seem to care how they make you feel when they speak to you disrespectfully. Think of the people who are hoping you will walk away mad. They’re hoping to get at you, and they would like you to get upset at what they’re saying so that you’ll get up, walk away mad. And Jesus, as Jesus mentions here, think of the people who take your things without being grateful for those things and without returning them.

See if you if you want to know whether your love for others is the kind that is commanded commanded in Jesus kingdom, you can’t look at your friends because everybody loves their friends. You wouldn’t. They wouldn’t be friends if you didn’t love them. That’s what friends are. There are people you like and people you love. The kind of love that’s found in the kingdom of God is broader than worldly love. And you know, to know if you have it, you really only need to look at your enemies and ask yourself, how well are you loving them? And if if you want to know whether the quality of that love that you have for your enemies is what Jesus demands of you, you actually can’t just look at how you feel. You have to look at what you do. Do you notice how much action is involved in the description of love in this passage? Go back and look at it. There’s so much action involved in this description of love that that first statement is Jesus main point. He says, love your enemies. And then what follows after that first main point are examples of what loving enemies means. And it’s all actions. It’s all things that you do. He says. Do good to those who hate you. Okay, so let’s think about acceptable worldly responses to people who hate you. Okay. What would the world say would be an acceptable response when when you meet up with somebody who hates you? I think there are two choices and I’m going to call them normal guy and nice guy responses.

Okay, so there’s normal guy and there’s nice guy. Normal guy. The normal guy response is that you can hate them back. That’s perfectly normal. That is perfectly acceptable in our culture. Someone hates you. You can hate them back. That is, that’s acceptable. In fact, it’s what most people today both practice and recommend that you do. So someone slams you publicly. Well, you got to slam them back. You can’t let them get away with that. Right. What’s your response going to be? Everybody’s waiting around to see what are you going to say back. How are you going to get back at them? Someone holds a position you don’t like, well, you better tear into them. Otherwise they won’t know how bad their position is. So you’ve got to tear into them because they deserve it, right? That’s justice. That’s that’s what we call justice. The normal response to hate is to cut people off to to alienate them, to return fire, for fire, to gossip about people behind their back, to shun entire groups of people and to hate people that hate you. That’s normal. That’s a normal response. Nice guy response though nice guy response is different. Nice guy just doesn’t do any of those things. Okay. Nice guy shows restraint. He doesn’t return fire for fire.

If someone does something terrible to you and you don’t do anything back, and you take it in stride and you don’t demand justice, and you’re some, like, some kind of superhero in our culture right now that you would that you would be able to do that. And a lot of people in the church today, they find themselves in one of those two camps. They either have accepted the that you can trash people who trash you. Or they think that the Christian response is simply not to hate that person back. But church, if we want to know what love looks like under the reign of King Jesus in the Kingdom of God. We don’t get to choose what that looks like. We have to listen to Jesus, describe what it looks like, and he says, it looks like doing good to those who hate you. Do good to those who hate you. Not actively hating back, or even passively not hating back, but actively doing good. Do you see that turn the other cheek part? That’s a very famous phrase from the Bible, isn’t it, to turn the other cheek. But it’s often misunderstood. See, this is not an issue of ongoing abuse. If you’re being hit in your home or abused by someone, this is not an instruction to keep on taking that abuse. See, a slap in the face in that culture was an insult. When you when you turn the other cheek, you’re saying, I am going to actively remain in this relationship even though you have insulted me? Even though you have struck an insult against me.

Even though you’ve stepped on my reputation, I choose to remain in this relationship in a loving way toward you. It’s an active acknowledgment that you’ve been insulted, and you show your willingness to continue to love that person despite their insult toward you. It’s the same with the one who takes from you or begs from you. When you turn the other cheek, when you give the tunic, when you give to those who beg, knowing you won’t get it back. What you’re saying is, I choose to love you on account of something other than your behavior toward me. That our relationship is not going to be defined by how you treat me. That my love for you is not contingent on how you how you behave toward me. That it’s actually contingent on something completely else. Jesus is saying that our love should be hate proof. Christian love is hate proof. It should overcome the hatred of other people and their hurtful actions and attitudes toward us. And it should do this not by passively absorbing that hate, but by actively showing love to the people who hate us. And if you’re wondering what the appropriate action would be to overcome the hatred that’s shown to you. Well, Jesus says, all we have to do is we have to think about the love that we wish they would have shown to us.

And and what that would look like. That’s all you got to do. If you want to know what that love you need to give back is, just think about what you think love toward you would look like and do that back. So there you go. Every one of us is carrying around in our minds right now the blueprints for for loving people like Jesus loved people. You’ll never again have to ask yourself what you need to know to show love to an enemy. Just picture what it is that you wish they’d do to you and do that back to them. Do you wish they would speak lovingly to you? Do you wish their words were more loving and they’d say these hurtful things to you? Do you wish that they were more loving toward you? Well, there you go. Choose your words carefully and build that other person both to their face and behind their back. Build them up. Use wonderful, loving words toward them. Do you wish that they would stop trying to take all the credit for the work that you do in the office, and just be a good teammate? Well, there you go. Stop worrying so much about credit and promotions and raises and just be a great teammate with that person. Right. Here’s a hard one. Do you wish they’d searched deep in their hearts? And see how much they have wronged you. And come to you in repentance. Is that what you would wish they would do? Well, there you go.

Search deep in your heart. Think about all of the ways that you’ve contributed to this situation. And by the way, you definitely have contributed to it. And go to that person and repent and explain what you’ve done, with no expectation that that repentance will be returned to you, and see what God will do with that. So that sounds pretty good for our enemies. And it sounds pretty hard for us, wouldn’t you say? Church. What’s in it for us? Well, it happens to be not actually that bad a question to ask that. And so Jesus tells you to love enemies for your benefit. If you love those who love you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, what benefit is that to you? For 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. But love your enemies and do good and lend expecting nothing in return. And your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High. For he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil. I want you this morning to get rid of the mistaken but very popular notion that somehow the only sort of love that is true, and the only sort of love that is pure, is the love that has no benefit, that comes back to you as the one who is doing the loving.

Jesus love had an agenda. Jesus loving agenda was to bring all of his people into his kingdom so that that he could be exalted and they could enjoy him forever. God reaps the benefits of his own love, and those benefits are in line with our greatest happiness. They are not at odds. This is a. This is a wonderful truth that everyone benefits when everyone loves. Now here’s the truth people can do things that look like loving acts, but are only done for self-serving reasons. But really, that’s not love at all. That’s that’s called manipulation. But truly loving someone with your words and actions has benefits, and there’s nothing wrong with wanting those benefits. When my wife receives love and kindness from me, generally speaking, my life gets much better. Now, every married couple in the room has discovered this, and if you haven’t, you really should. You really should. It works really well. And there’s nothing wrong with showing love and reaping the benefits of peace and happiness in your home. But here’s the thing church. There’s nothing especially Christian about it either. This exchange of benefits is firmly within the world’s view of love. Showing love to people who love you back to create happiness for yourself that is smart and it’s smart for everyone. And it’s fine. It’s fine to do that. It’s fine to love in that way.

Jesus even tells his disciples to love one another in John 13, and that that love that we show each other will be one of the marks, that we are his disciples. But here’s the truth there’s another level of distinction to Christian love. When you love an enemy, you reap benefits. But from God himself. You reap it from God Himself. The benefit to you loving enemies comes from the Lord directly. Do you see that there where it says, your reward will be great? Your reward will be great, and you’ll be sons of the Most High. When we. When we love someone who doesn’t love us back, the Lord sees this as a display of the quality of love that he has for us. This is gospel shaped love. We’re going to talk more on this here in just a minute. And there are benefits to this love that that come from the hand of the Lord, but they are eternal benefits. We talked about this last week, didn’t we? Remember how we talked about the eternal perspective of the Kingdom of God that is necessary for understanding what Jesus is saying here? Well, here is an example of that. The benefits of loving an enemy are God given. They’re not social, which is why loving enemies isn’t part of our society. In fact, it’s the reason that our culture puts a value on holding grudges and actually gets upset at Christians when they forgive too quickly for their taste.

They can. They can only forgive when there’s justice or repayment right now that they can tangibly see and hold and feel to even the score. They have to have their benefit from this world. But Christian’s love for enemies isn’t driven by what we can tangibly hold and feel right now. It’s driven by what God thinks. It’s looking only for the for God’s approval. It’s seeking the reward that comes from making Jesus name shine and putting his grace on display in this world. I want you to imagine something with me for a moment. This might be a little bit hard to imagine, but I want you to imagine it with me this morning. Can you imagine seeing the wrongs done to you as opportunities to display otherworldly grace? Can you imagine the Lord bringing into your life a trial, a really difficult trial where where great wrong is done to you so that you have the opportunity to respond with a sort of gracious, God empowered, supernatural love that tangibly demonstrates to lost people what Jesus has done for you. Can you imagine that when you show this love? Your status as a son or a daughter of the Most High God is confirmed in your heart, and then you then receive the benefit of the joy and peace of knowing that you can trust God with any evil that this world can dish out at you. And can you imagine that this example of the gospel that came from you will echo not just throughout this world, but into eternity, perhaps even bringing your enemy to know the love of Christ and finding salvation in him.

Church that is gospel shaped love. That’s gospel love. That’s the new Kingdom. Love of Jesus. That he’s showing us here. And we know exactly what this enemy love looks like, because it’s the love that Jesus showed to us. See love. We’re called to love like the father loved us. And 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. God’s grace, by definition, is love shown to people who are ungrateful and evil. That’s what grace is. Grace is undeserved. It’s love that you don’t deserve. And even even more than that. God’s grace is love given to you at a time when you were not asking for it. So what I’m about to say might break up the logjam in your heart of of of a long hurt with somebody in your life. Okay. So so listen carefully here. Very normal, world. Worldly, widely accepted wisdom would say this, and I’m going to even take a moment. I’m going to put a Christian spin on this. Okay. What I’m about to say is I’m going to put a little Christian spin on it. So it’s going to sound like probably something you’ve heard before or something you’ve thought to yourself before. If someone has hurt you and will not repent or ask forgiveness, you should wait until they see the error of their ways before you forgive them in your heart.

Church. I don’t know about you. When I hear advice like that, it sort of feels right. It sort of sounds right when someone wrongs me. I think the worst of them until they turn it around. My forgiveness is waiting on them. I’ll tell myself it’s waiting on them. I’ve got. I’ve got loads of pardon in stock and and I will gladly give it away to the person who comes and asks for it, as long as they come and ask for it. There’s a there’s a gracious transaction just waiting to take place. All we need now is for this sinner to recognize just how awful he is and come find me and make things right on his end. And then all of my pardon can be released. And then we say, even in our own mind. Isn’t that how God does it? Isn’t that how God does it? We reason. He’s got a flood of forgiveness, is waiting for the sinner who comes to him. And repentance. Isn’t that how it works? It sounds right. Sounds even biblical in a way, doesn’t it? But it’s missing a critical piece of the gospel. There is a critical piece of the gospel that that line of thinking is missing. So here’s the truth. In our relationship with our Heavenly Father. His grace came first. His grace. Came first. His love for you began before your repentance.

In fact, it was his gracious power at work in you that brought you to your knees and caused your repentance. He didn’t wait until you finally figured out how wretched you are to begin his work of saving you and graciously forgiving you. He is kind. To whom? To the ungrateful. He is kind to the evil. His love came when we were still in a state of rebellion against him. This is true for those who come to be transformed by the grace of God, and for those who don’t. Everyone receives the mercy of God in some measure. The Matthew parallel to this teaching. So if you go to the sermon on the Mount, the Matthew parallels of this teaching is helpful here. It’s illustrative here because in that setting, Jesus taught about how the father makes the sun to shine and the rain to fall on the just and the unjust, the evil and the good. God is long suffering with everyone when they’re in rebellion against him. Everyone. This is what theologians call common grace. It’s the benefits of God’s mercy that come to all people. But there are some evil and unjust people in this world who will then experience the special saving grace of God in Christ and those who are saved by God’s grace. Look, they’re not special people. We are not special people. We are not set apart these these are not good people who deserve God’s love somehow. These are not the better people in the world who got to have this from God.

These are normal, evil, rebellious people that every one of us were at one point until the Lord intervened with his mercy. His mercy came first. His love came first. His his gracious heart transforming love came first. And our repentance was the response to that irresistible love. Friends, I would love to tell you this morning that the response you get when loving your enemies will always be their repentance. I would love to tell you that, but it won’t be. It won’t be. But here’s the truth we’re not called to love only those who deserve it. We’re not called to only love those people who repent. We are called to show mercy and compassion and love to those who don’t. Your love to them comes first. Because the father’s love to you came first. Right? And they may never respond in repentance. This this friend, this person you’ve been thinking about, probably for the whole sermon. They may never respond in repentance. They may never come to you and be fully reconciled to you. Just like many who receive common grace, are never reconciled with the Lord through Christ. But the Lord has called you as his beloved son and daughter. Those of you who have entered into his Kingdom to emulate his mercy and demonstrate his grace, no matter what you get back. Because the reward we’re looking for, the only one that matters, comes from the hand of the Lord. Let’s pray.