And you see in your bulletin there, we are in that series on love launching from Philippians where Paul says his prayer is that their love may amount more and more with knowledge and discernment, and then we've launched over to 1 Corinthians 13 in order to flesh out a little bit what that means to love. And I'm going to take us one step further back to the gospels, to the teachings of Jesus, on one of his teachings concerning love, and I'll be reading from Luke chapter 6 verse 27. Matthew has this as the Sermon on the Mount, Luke has it as the Sermon on the plane or the plateau, and so here are the words of the Lord. I say to you, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you, to one who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also, and from the one who takes away your cloak, do not withhold your tunic either. Give to everyone who begs from you and from 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. If you love those who love you, what benefit is that to you, for even sinners love those who love them, but if you do good to those who are good to you, what benefit is that to you, for even sinners do the same. And if you lend to those who expect 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 hear this. 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. The word of the Lord. Our text once again is our title, love does not envy, and once again, as last week, we basically look at one word. In the text, it's simply three words. It's the word love, agape, the word u, which is the negative particle, which means not or do not, and then there's this word, ze loi, ze loi. We get our word zeal from that word. And what it really principally means is a passionate commitment, a passionate commitment, a striving after, ze loi, zeal, a striving after. And it can, depending on how it's used in Scripture, be positive or negative. There can be a ze loi or an envy or a jealousy, which is positive. The Lord is said to be jealous of Israel. In other words, He protects Israel and resists and fins off all suitors that would compete with Him for Israel's love. Israel belongs to the Lord. And the Lord as a husband would protect a wife, as the groom would protect the bride, so Christ will protect his church with a holy zeal. When the Lord in His earthly ministry drove out the money changers in the temple who were committing multiple atrocities against God's people, selling them inferior sacrificial animals and doing it at an inflated exchange rate and doing it with confiscatory value systems set up by the temple arbitrarily. In effect, ripping off God's people every which way you can imagine. Jesus who was a priest and an order of Old Testament priest had the duty of cleansing the temple. In the ancient Israel, the priest would always be involved in cleaning up the ashes and the unburped firewood and all of the blood and all of the entrails and all of the filth that desecrated the temple. In fact, the temple was built with ditches or conduits around it where all of that filth could be flushed out and washed clean and the deck and the altar area could be once again restored to pristine beauty for the next round of sacrifices. And Jesus took upon Himself that privilege of a priesthood to cleanse the temple and He drove out the filth and the pollution of the money changers. And when He did so, He quoted Scripture, He quoted an Old Testament passage which said, Zeal for thy house has consumed me. You see, Zeal is that which moves us to passionate action, commitment, a striving after, almost a blind rage that would move us in a direction of an action. It's a motive. It's something in the heart. And when it's directed toward that which is right, it is good. Jealousy that God has for His people righteous. Zeal that Jesus has for His Father's house of prayer, the temple, excellent. But that same passion, that same zeal, that same zeal when it festers in the human heart can be misdirected, finding root and growing within the fallen human being and the soul of us who are depraved by nature. It becomes an insidious, horrible thing. And that's what I think we have in view here in the passage. It contemplates a rivalry, a threat. It contemplates a hostility and an enmity. It involves quarrel and competition and strife. And when it does that, and it's directed to others, it is one of the seven deadly sins, envy. And I think in context, since the negative particle has been placed in front of it here, it's obvious what Jesus is talking about in His teachings. And the Apostle Paul has simply followed the Lord in urging His disciples to not be envious. And one of the ways we get a little help with this is to look at Paul's writings in the book of Galatians. This week we had a little staff retreat and a mark in preparation for His sermon coming up here in the next two hours. Ask the staff to get together in small groups and discuss this notion of envy. What does it mean? How is it applied? How is it good? How is it bad? And so forth. And we had a little preliminary discussion. I was fortunate enough in my group to be sitting over under a shade tree where I had two of our pastors in the group along with a couple of other people. And so they began to give me their input and I told them, just keep going. As they talked, I wrote down, because the more they talked, the more I wrote, not have sermon material. And it was our dear brother Pete who took us straight to a passage of Scripture in Galatians, where in Galatians 5, Paul has two things. He has two lists. One he calls the works of the flesh, the works of the flesh, the other list he calls the fruit of the spirit, the outcome, the product of the work of the spirit. And in that list that we call the works of the flesh in Galatians 5, 19, it's interesting that if you read that list across there, they're kind of grouped in categories. And let me sort of point that out to you as I read all of them and then point to the particular one I want us to notice. Now the works of the flesh are evident, sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissentions, divisions, envy, drunkenness and orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. Here we have from the lips of our Lord straight to the writings of the Apostle Paul, a fundamental principle of Christian ethics, of behavior. God has ethical standards, it's the law and love fulfills the law. And if we can ever get a grasp of the biblical teaching about love, we'll understand what our Father expects from us and how we are to live our lives with each other and with our neighbors. And then this grouping by the way, he puts sexual immorality, impurity and sensuality is kind of a group and you can see what he's talking about there. We're not talking about that this morning. Idolatry and sorcery, you can see how he's talking about that group there, those notions of false religion and satan worship and all of the sorts of things that are involved there. Then he has this longer group, he has drunkenness orgies and things like that. I think we can see what he's speaking of there. But listen to this little group here, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy. Ironically, the word that's translated in me is not our word this morning, it's not zeloy, it's the word that is translated enmity. There it is, enmity. Love does not harbor enmity and strife and conflict and hostility and rivalry and quarrels and dissensions and competitions. That's what's being pointed out. Love is in our hearts that which overcomes and works against these kinds of things. We don't have to go very far in the scripture to find that the Old Testament story and the story of humanity is the story replete with example after example of this very thing being in the heart of humanity. Cane enable, there was enmity, there was jealousy, there was strife, there was division, a major religious division, two complete different views of how to worship God. There was dissension, denominationalism and strife between cane and able. And because that emotive force festered within the soul, it overcame whatever love and affection that was there and resulted in murder, cane, murdered able, giving us the first pair of brothers. And the first pair of men who failed to love their brothers and as they differed in so many ways and came to enmity, they failed to love their enemy and came to death. We find the same thing happening in Abraham and Lot. Abraham with his nephew came to a point where the massive grasslands of the fertile plains of central Canaan still did not satisfy the needs of their herds and they began to quarrel and their servants began to quarrel and have strife and envy among themselves. And it was necessary that they separate and move in different directions and divide up the pasture lands. And at that point Abraham chose to be a peacemaker and he satisfied the quarrel at least temporarily by allowing Lot to make his choice. And Abraham moved away, a better resolution of that hostility and that passionate commitment to possess Jacob and Esau, two brothers born of the same father, born of the same mother, born at the same time twins. And yet, as their lives went along, they developed an enmity, a hostility, a conflict, a competition, a jealousy, a rivalry that lasted all the days of their lives. Today, if we're perceptive enough, we can still see the fruit of that enmity, not hostility and that hatred in the Middle East. Joseph, his brothers, Envious, hostile, sold him into slavery, considering themselves pretty good that that was an act of mercy because really what they wanted to do was to kill him. Isn't it interesting how intense and corruptible this thing can become, this passionate drive within our soul, if it's fed by sin and depravity, if it is indeed one of those works of the flesh as Paul says it is, it drives us to unbelievable things in another case, an atrocious act of enslavement. We see this being counterbalanced and worked in another story in the Old Testament. King Saul, David, Saul grew jealous, Envious toward David. In turn, David, who had served Saul so well, had given Saul basically a new lease on life in his kingdom as David had slain the Philistine giant Goliath, and put back the thread of the Philistines for another few years that enabled Saul's kingdom to prosper. But as those wars went along as the young warrior David began to progress, he would hear the songs of the young maidens singing Saul has killed his thousands, but David has 10,000 and Envy, jealousy, enmity began to well up within the heart of Saul and Saul began to chase David and threw a javelin at David and sought him in the hills and chased him to the ends of the kingdom, trying to find him and kill him, put a bounty on his head, trying his best to kill him. What overcame that enmity, love, Saul's son Jonathan, love David, and David love to Jonathan. And so Jonathan, even though he was a loyal confidant to his father and stayed by his father side all the way through, went into battle and died right alongside his father Jonathan, was loyal to his father to the very end. Yet his love for David caused him to spare David's life and enable David to survive those years of hostility and envy in the life of Saul and to inherit the kingdom that God had anointed him for. And brought him to. As I close, I want to turn back to the teachings of Christ for just a moment and just highlight a couple of things there in that passage. Here Jesus is giving us, I think, one of the most difficult things he ever said. And in the midst of it, I did notice the golden rule, you noticed a lot of other things in the passage I read, but the thing that is striking to me is he says, love your enemies. The only thing that will overcome that enmity, that strife, that passionate jealousy that leads to all sorts of ill is love, love applied, love focused, love manifested. And Jesus knew that. And he urged his disciples to adopt an ethic alien to any in the ancient world. And that was not merely to love your friends, not merely to love the brotherhood, not merely to love the neighborhood, but to love the enemy, the hostile one. And it's interesting down in the passage, he says, you will be sons of the most high. Our sonship is manifested in that we're like our father, our father in heaven, we're like him. He loved his enemies, Christ loved his enemies, Christ loved his enemies so much he died for his enemies. You and I, at one time were numbered among his enemies, and he loved us in that condition and overcame that by his great love for us in his sacrificial death. You will be called the sons of the most high. Then I just could help but remember that one of the fiatitudes, blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the sons of God. Here's a designation for a true child of God. It is someone that overcomes that enmity and that hostility and that jealousy and the strife and the divisions and all of that and becomes like Abraham, like Jonathan, a peacemaker. Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called sons of God. Father, we ask you to help us, O Lord, to find within our souls the capacity to love our enemies, to eradicate the enmity and the hostility, the dissension, the strife, with those with whom we differ and that we are naturally have developed an animus. Lord, we know we cannot find it within our hearts to do that unless you place it there. So Lord, we're asking you to start a work of grace in our hearts that gives us the grace to not envy and to love like you have taught us to love. Or this is not easy. We do not get very far down this road in our growth and in our maturity. But Lord, we must forgive us of our sinful ways, restore to us the ability to love our enemies in Christ's name we plead it on them.