Victor was born the spring of 44 and never saw his father anymore, a child of sacrifice, a child of war, another son who never had a father after Lennon grad, went off to school and learned to serve the state, followed the rules, drank your vodka straight. The only way it seems to drown the hate, for Russian life was very sad and such was life in Lennon grad. But I was born in 49, a cold war kid in McCarthy time. You stop him at the 38th parallel, you blast those yellow reds to hell. We cold war kids were hard to kill, under our desks in an air raid drill. If they heard we won the war, what do they keep on fighting for? Victor was sent to some red army town, served out his time, became a circus clown. The greatest happiness he ever found was making Russian children glad those children lived in Lennon grad. The children lived in my hometown and hid in the shelters underground. So the Soviets turned those ships around and tore the Cuban missiles down. And in that bright October sun, I knew my childhood days were done. As I watched my friends go off to war, what do they keep on fighting for? And so my child and I came to this place. To meet him, I do I, and face to face. He made my daughter laugh, then we embraced. I never knew what friends we had until we came to Lennon grad. Bill and Joe wrote that song back in 1989, two years after he had made what was one of the first American rock and roll tours allowed into the Soviet Union in 1987. He toured in six different concerts in two cities, three concerts in Moscow and three in Lennon grad. There was a famous Russian con named Victor who visited and attended all six of Billy Joe's concerts. And in the last one, the last evening in Lennon grad, he went up and introduced himself, told Billy Joel his life story, performed some tragic tricks for Alexa, Billy's little two-year-old daughter, and then Billy Joel embraced him. And Victor said, perhaps someday, your people in mind can be friends. It's a true story. And I think one of Billy Joel's greatest songs. It's a song about a man who lived fearing and hating the people and wondering what they keep on fighting for. And then when he went and that alien group was condensed to one person, a man with a face, a person with a soul, someone who had little children and loved his little daughter, all of a sudden the enemy didn't look so fearful, so spiteful. And perhaps the enemy could really someday become a friend. One of the great difficulties of life that you and I have is dealing with enemies. Jesus does not ignore that reality. He doesn't gloss over that challenge as he introduces us to his kingdom ethics. He comes to a point in this sermon on the Mount where he talks about how we relate to people who hate us, who would even kill us if they had the opportunity. People like Victor, or from Victor's perspective, people like Billy Joel. I believe that Jesus Christ in speaking about these different ethical challenges is moving from the easier to the more difficult, is going from the challenging things of anger and lust, attitudes of the heart, the shape the way we think about life and other people, men and women. He goes from those challenges to the difficulties of faithfulness and marriage and integrity in all of our dealings with people, the things that shape relationships in our life and make them either good or bad. And now he moves to the near impossible, retells us that we are not to stand on our rights and seek revenge, and we are not to hate our enemies, but to let the love of God live in us and overcome evil with good. He's moving progressively through all of the great challenges that every man has and he comes to chapter 5, verse 43, where he tells us something that is absolutely foreign to our human nature. You have heard that it was said, you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy, but I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you so that you may be sons of your father who is in heaven, for he makes the son to rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the just and the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You therefore must be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. Jesus faces the reality that we have enemies and he faced it with the people of Judea a long long time ago. When Jesus Christ wrote those words when he spoke those things to the people in that audience when he was preaching that afternoon on the mount, he knew who these people were thinking of when he said you must love your enemies, they were thinking of the Romans. The Romans who would conquer them and were oppressing them and it turned Israel into the state or the province of Judea, a province of the Roman Empire. The Romans were known wherever they went for three things, for heavy taxes, for harsh treatment and for haughty attitude towards everybody who they called a barbarian, anyone who wasn't like them. And they're despite an ill treatment and absolute hatred of the people they ruled was reciprocated and kind. So the hate, bread, hate, an enemy feared enemy and you know the result. Bloodshed from one end of the empire to the next. Jesus says, you know there's a different way. There's a better way to deal with enemies and it's not to pretend that they don't exist. It's in fact to address the reality that they really are your enemies. You really do have people who hate you see. One of the problems when we come to this point is we want to spiritualize away with Jesus as saying and say, well, we don't have any enemies, only God has enemies, that is not true. There's nothing in this text that indicates that our enemies are against us because they're against God. No, Jesus says these are your enemies, not necessarily mine. And this is how you should deal with them. They were taught by the rabbis to hate them. Jesus would say as ridiculous as it seems. The better way to win your enemy is to love him and he'll tell us how. And it's not impossible what Jesus Christ is about to say when you think through it makes a lot of common sense. But let's again, as in each one of these six corrections to our understanding of the law, let's look at it the way Jesus did what they heard the rabbis say and what Jesus said. The rabbis have false teachings about how to deal with your enemies. Look at verse 43 again. You have heard that it was said, you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. Now where do they get that idea? Well, if you keep your finger in Matthew chapter 5 and turn back to Leviticus, back to the third book of the Bible in the beginning, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and if you go to Leviticus chapter 19, you will hear Moses talk about loving your neighbor as yourself. Leviticus chapter 19, beginning at verse 17, you shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason frankly with your neighbor, lest you incur sin because of him. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself, I am the Lord. Notice the people that Moses is talking about. He calls them your brother, your neighbor, the sons of your own people. He said, you shall live with them, you shall love them and be reasonable with them. You shall never hate them in your heart or bear grudge against them because they are a fellow Jew. This is what Moses said. Moses it appears that nothing about strangers, about foreigners, about Gentiles or enemies like the Romans, or did he? The mistake of the rabbis is that they ignored some verses later on in the same chapter. If you look down on Leviticus chapter 19 at verse 33, you find an amazing statement by Moses. When a stranger sojourns within your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as a native among you, and you shall love him as yourself for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God. You see the rabbis did the one thing that we love to do when we don't like a verse that's in the, we just rip it out of its context. In other words, you only read down to verse 19 and then you quit. If you read further on, verses 33 and 34 and following, you find that there are two commandments that Moses said, you shall love your neighbors as yourself and you shall love your enemy as yourself. The rabbis only focused on half of the story because that's the only half they liked. Loving your neighbor is relatively easy. Their neighbor was someone who was like them, someone whom they liked and someone who liked them. In other words, the only people they had to love was their fellow Jews or for us are fellow evangelical Christians. But as Moses pushed into their life and pushed further onto the demands of the law and he came to the fact that they actually were supposed to love people who they were angry with, people who they did not understand, people who were different than they were not like them and people who didn't like them or they didn't like, they simply stopped. In fact, they followed what is often called the law of opposites or in logic the law of contradiction. If A is true, then the opposite of that B must be true as well. If I'm supposed to love my neighbor, then the opposite is to hate my non-neighbor. If I'm to be faithful to my wife, then I should not have sex with other wives. If I'm to tell the truth, then I should not tell a lie. In most cases, it works, but sometimes it doesn't. And they said, Moses says, you shall love your neighbor as yourself, which implies the opposite. You don't have to love your enemy, in fact, you're free to hate him. We do this all the time. When we talk about the doctrine of justification, we'll say, justification is by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone has nothing to do with good work, so good works are not necessary for the Christian. You ever read Ephesians 2.8 and 9? For by grace you have been saved through faith and that not of yourself, it is the gift of God and not the result of work so that no one should boast. If you stop there, then it's all faith, all grace, no good works until you complete the sentence, verse 10. So we are His workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works which God ordained before hand, literally in eternity past that we should walk in them. So you see good works are part of the Christian life. We do it with baptism. Since God commands only people who can repent and believe to be baptized, therefore we shouldn't be baptized people who can't repent and believe, like children, oh really? Is that what Moses said? When they said, sir's what must we do to be saved? He said, repent and be baptized for the forgiveness of your sins. Now if you stop there, it's only adults. Only someone of a reason to belage who can come to the conclusion of their own conviction of sin and the sufficiency of Christ can repent and believe and be baptized, but if you read on through the rest of the sentence, repent and be baptized for the forgiveness of your sins and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit for this promise is for you and for your children. Well, low and behold, He did say something about baptizing people who can't repent and believe. And we could go on through the New Testament and on through our Christian faith and find one thing after another thing after another thing where we conveniently take the part we like and leave the part we don't. That is exactly what these rabbis were doing. Moses said, love your neighbors and love your enemies. They only took one half of it. Not only that, they lifted that out of context and they left off a very significant phrase, love your neighbor as yourself. See, that elevates the man even higher. I'm to love my neighbor and my enemy both as I love myself. No doubt they use the imprecatory Psalms to justify their selves. The Lord tests the righteous but His soul hates the wicked and the one who loves violence. Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord? Do I not know those who rise up against you? I hate them with the complete hatred. I count them my enemies. That's actually what David wrote. Psalm 11 and Psalm 139, so they undoubtedly said, Moses said, it's a godly thing to hate your enemies. Tainted with the utmost loathing and to count them is your enemies. You know what? Jesus will have none of that. This one who authored the Psalms and sang them to His Father. This one who was speaking on the mountain and giving the book of Leviticus to Moses. The one who's the great law giver and the Redeemer of mankind said, no, we will have none of that playing with the Bible in my kingdom. So what does Jesus teach about our enemies? But I say to you, verse 44, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven, for He makes His Son to rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. If you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same. And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the pagans or the Gentiles do the same? You therefore must be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect. Jesus makes us, first of all, reconsider three things. What is a neighbor? What is an enemy? What is the Son of God? The child of God. That issue of who is my neighbor was a huge one for the Jews. Turn to Luke 11. You know this famous story and even more so, this famous parable that Jesus tells about the good Samaritan and answer to the question, who is my neighbor and whom do I have to love? Luke chapter 11, verse 25, and behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test saying, teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? And he said to him, what is written in the law? How do you read it? And he answered straight out of the book of Deuteronomy and Leviticus. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind. That's Deuteronomy chapter 6. And then he turns to Leviticus chapter 19, the verse we just looked at. You shall love your neighbor's yourself. Jesus said to him, you've answered correctly. Do this and you will live, but desiring to justify himself, he said to Jesus, but who is my neighbor? Jesus replied, a man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and he fell among robbers and stripped him and beat him and departed, leaving him half dead. Now by chance, a priest was going down the road, and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise, a Levite when he came to the place and saw him pass by on the other side but a Samaritan as he journeyed, came to where he was and he saw him and he had compassion. He went to him and bound up his wounds and pouring on oil and wine, and then he set him on his own animal and brought him to the end and took care of him. And the next day, he took out two denarii and gave it to the innkeeper saying, take care of him and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back. Which of these three do you think proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers? And he said, the one who showed him mercy, Jesus said to him, you go and do likewise. Who is your neighbor? Now you notice in that story, it's a Jew that's mugged on the road the Jericho and it's two Jews that go by a priest and Levite and do nothing but lo and behold who were the Jews great spiritual enemies, the Samaritans. And the enemy comes by and takes pity on him and helps him. Jesus' parable says your neighbor is whoever is near you especially those who are in need. You cannot choose folks who your neighbors are because according to the parable and the teaching of both Moses and Jesus Christ, your neighbor is the one whom God sets in your lap, in your life. These neighbors may be people who are like you, they may be people who like you and people you like, or they may not be. But the fact of the matter is your neighbor is not determined by you but by the circumstances of your life. Your neighbor would include a church member, a next door neighbor in your neighborhood. The people of Matthews, a Muslim in your circle of life, a member of a race that historically is at odds with you, but that person works opposite you in the cubicle at the office. Perhaps it's the person who has a different party affiliation and is somehow brought into your circle of life. Maybe it's the man dying of AIDS across the street whose lifestyle is very antagonistic to your church and your beliefs, but he's right across the street. He is your neighbor because God forced him into your life, into your comfort zone even though you don't like him. Secondly, who was an enemy? We should not spiritualize the way the reality of enemies. Jesus assumes that enemies are real, that enemies are unavoidable, and that enemies are generally dangerous. They're hateful and dangerous to us. We cannot say I have no real enemies. Oh yes you do. You have people in your personal circle of friends who hate your guts. You do. As lovable as I am, I do. That was a joke. I deserve to be hated. You don't, but you have, listen, Muslims, many of them will hate you because you're a Christian. They hate Jews and they persecuted Christians for thousands of years, hundreds of years. Jews, according to Paul and Romans, are your enemy because of the gospel. Communists will hate you because you're a capitalist. Atheists, secular humanists, despise you because you have a theistic worldview and you speak from a biblical perspective and you believe in absolute right and wrong according to what Jesus said. You got a lot of people who hate you. Now please, if you don't like the illustrations, I'm not disson on Muslims and atheists and Jews and secularists, I'm just saying you pick the reality, but the reality is you have people in your life who hate you. And if given the opportunity to do you wrong, they will. Jesus says that. Look in chapter 5 again at verse 10. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake. Look at verse 11. Blessed are you and others who value and persecute you and other all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Jesus acknowledges that there are people who for righteousness sake or because of the gospel sake will give us a difficult time. And He says, you know, you have to deal with them. Now do we deal with them? The way David does in the imprecatory Psalms? Do we say I hate them with the utmost hatred? Oh God, destroy them. Lay their glory in the dust, ground their bones to powder. These are things that David says. Well, the answer is yes. And no, we need to understand where David was coming from and where he, what perspective he wrote from in these imprecatory Psalms. He was speaking of the reality of evil and evil men. And he was speaking as Israel's federal head, their king. And as a federal head, David was the incarnation if I can use that word of the people of God Israel. So when they struck at David, they struck at Israel, then they struck at God because they were God's people. David hates these people, not because of what they do to him personally, because in the very places sometimes where he prays for their destruction, his evil men, he also prays that God would bring them to saving faith. David hates them because of what they're doing to God's people. And ultimately that they're striking against Christ, David is a type of Christ. And Jesus Christ is our federal head. There are people in the world who hate Jesus Christ. They hate his church and they hate his religion. And they will slaughter us to the last child to eliminate the followers of Jesus Christ. And as a group, we ask for God to overcome their evil, deliver us from evil, we pray. And that deliverance may come in their destruction. Listen to Dan Doryani. This is how we must understand these Psalms and prophecies that approve of God's judgment of wicked people. Believers hate violence and wickedness. Some people give themselves over to such sins so that they are properly called by the Bible the violent or the wicked or even the evil ones. The Bible never commands us to hate individual enemies, but there is a place for righteous wrath towards God's settled enemies. On judgment day, we will rejoice. The book of Revelation says, at their downfall, for their end is inseparable from the victory of God and all of his saints. Thus when we view the wicked as a class, from an eternal perspective, our love for them ceases. However, in daily life, we have no right to adopt the eternal perspective toward an individual. We cannot classify all people. The very man standing before us that may look like an enemy and who may be wicked, we know not whether he will repent and believe in Christ or not. Islam is evil. Communism is evil. Secular humanism is evil. And people who believe those things and practice those things believe in evil and do evil, but the Muslims stand before you, the communist or the atheist, you have no right to treat as an evil person. You don't know when Christ will break through and make them a son of God. That's the third thing that Jesus defines. What is a neighbor? What is an enemy? Who is a son of God? He mentions this. Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you so that you may be sons of your father who is in heaven. What does it mean to be a child of God? It doesn't mean to be born a Jew. It doesn't mean to be baptized into the church. No, according to Jesus Christ, the child of God is one who has a saving faith of Jesus Christ and loves other people as Christ loves them. Jesus defines the son here. He's the child of the one he imitates, the one who causes the son to rise on the evil and the good and to send rain on the just and the unjust. And that is where Jesus Christ is pushing us in this point. Son of God may run into a neighbor and an enemy who are the same person. Your neighbor for God's sake may be your enemy. It may be a Muslim who lives next door to you. An antagonistic believer who is your sister-in-law, a boss who's the light to work for, but he is a horror when it comes to spiritual things. Your neighbor and your enemy could be your unconverted spouse, both at the same time. Your child who's rebelled and walked away from parents and church and Christ. He could be your immoral brother who lives in a subculture that's hostile to Jesus Christ and now he's hostile to you. Jesus Christ says, you know, it's better for you not to try to categorize who's a neighbor, who's an enemy, and who's the son of God. You should love them all as you love yourself because God does. Your father does and you are to be like your father in heaven. So he gives us five things to do. You say, pastor, this is pie in the sky stuff. No, friends, listen to Jesus Christ, it's not. The five things he tells us to do, we are capable of doing, listen to me, capable of doing to our enemies without dropping our guard, being stupidly naive and baptizing evil as something that's good. We can do these things and still keep a person at distance until we know they're safe enough to embrace in the presence of our children. Step number one, to love your enemies with compassion. You shall love your enemies. You say, well, how? Well, Jesus says, as God does, well, how does God do that? Would you turn to Romans chapter five? God will tell you exactly how he loved you before you were a Christian when you were still his enemy and you hated Christ. Had nothing to do with his church and made fun of his children, the Christians. How did God treat you? Romans chapter five, beginning at verse six, for while we were still weak at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly, for one will scarcely die for a righteous person, though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die, but God shows his love towards us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God, for if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his son, much more now that we are reconciled shall we be saved by his life. More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, the whom we have now received reconciliation. Look at verse 10, while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his son. The first step to loving your enemies is to realize that they will never be anything but a wicked, spiteful, hateful person until they come to know Jesus Christ. They will always be the enemy of God and listen to me. The enemy of God and the end is the enemy of all mankind made in his image. That's what's wrong with the world. It's just a bunch of unconverted people bumping into each other and they love no one and no one loves them except God and that's the one they hate the most. Our love begins when we stop being angry in our neighbor and we say the reason they do these things is that they're unconverted. Since they hate God, Roman says they're the enemies of God. I didn't say that. Jesus said that. He gave those thoughts to Paul and Paul wrote down they are enemies of God and if they're enemies of God, how could they possibly be a good neighbor to you? How could they possibly be a loving husband, a caring father, a beautiful and honoring son, a woman of virtue? They can't be. They don't want to face that reality and quite frankly, you can't make them face that reality. Only the Holy Spirit can do that but you can begin to approach them in your mind, in your demeanor, in your speech with compassion and say, you know, I was once an enemy of God. I'm an enemy who became a neighbor to Christians and the child of God through the mercy of Jesus Christ. That leads to step two. He says, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. Paul has several prayers in the New Testament that we should pray for people who are unconverted. If you feel compassion for these people, then the first thing you'll begin to do is to pray for them. Not the God would judge them. That day is coming. Listen, you don't have to ask for God to judge the wicked. That day is on the way, either in some remedial judgment at life or some final judgment that would be such a horrible day that the Bible indicates in revelation that you and I won't even want to look at that judgment. We tend to think, well, I'm going to stand there and say, good for those know you won't. You'll be weeping your eyes out. When you see people condemned to hell for the very thing you were and you did in realizing that you had elect mercies of saving grace and for some reason they did not. Now is the time to pray for them. Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, through the medium of prayer, we go to our enemy, stand by a side and plead to God for him. And there's a man who wrote that when he was in a Nazi prison camp about to be executed. We we go to our enemy, stand by his side and plead to God for him. John Stott is right. He says in his commentary, you know, it's impossible to pray for somebody and hate them for very long because the more you pray for them, the more the Holy Spirit wraps your heart around them and the more you see them from their perspective, not from your own, and the more your compassion and your pity grows for their lost and Christless state. So we we approach them with a heart of compassion. We pray for them. We bless them. Jesus doesn't say that here, but in the parallel passage of Luke 6, he says, I say to you who hear me, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you. How do we bless? Well, to bless someone is to speak kindly to them. It's also to ask God to be good to them. One of the things that always makes hatred go on back and forth and escalate is when in some caricature in our mind, we have nothing but foul things to say to our enemies and bad things to say about them. They can do nothing right. They never had a decent day in their life. They never loved their children. They don't love God. How do we know those things? We don't know those things.
In fact, Jesus seems to indicate that even in their wickedness, God has a great affection for them. In common grace, he's good to them. Why would he give us permission to be bad to them? You know, this is how the Cold War ended. Two mature men, Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan met an Iceland and said, you know, unless we come to understand each other, this world is going to end in a nuclear holocaust. And so, they began to talk. The first meetings were pretty tense, were told. And at one time, they both just stood up and went like this and stared at each other to their interpreter, said, well, maybe it's time for coffee. But as they began to talk, in their own writings, later on, Mikhail Gorbachev began to say, you know, I saw that Ronald Reagan was an honest man. And Ronald Reagan said, I saw that Mr. Gorbachev was really deep down a man who wanted peace. In the book, Reagan and Gorbachev, how the Cold War ended, Jack Matlock says, face-to-face meetings between the Soviet and American leaders and their policymakers were essential to move the US and the Soviet dialogue in a constructive direction. Under these conditions, the overwhelming suspicion characteristic of that Cold War was gradually replaced by trust, not a blind trust, but a trust supported by and reinforced by the proof that these two men would keep the promises that they made to one another. You know why the Cold War ended? Because Mr. Gorbachev and Mr. Reagan decided they weren't going to curse each other anymore. They weren't going to vilify people they disagreed with. They were going to love people. And they were going to speak kind words and say, is there a way we can work this out where your people are blessed and so are mine. Bless and curse not. Fourthly, do good to those who hate you. But 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. Matthew puts it this way, your father makes the sun to rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the just and the unjust. For if you love only those who love you in return, what's the big deal? Why not be good to those who don't love you? Every time we do something kind, every time we do something reasonable, every time we're polite, every time we listen, every time we say, well, you know, thank you for that. I didn't understand that. Every time we say, can I buy you a cup of coffee? Every time we send a note saying, thank you, we build a bridge. And you know what in the end, folks? It's something strange about the human nature. Black and dark and Christless as it is. It longs for love. It yearns for peace. It always dreams in one form, another of a world where hatred is no more and everybody gets alone and everyone does good. Finally, he says, greet your enemies. And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the pagans do the same thing. Greet means to acknowledge that someone exists as a person and to treat them with respect. If you want insult somebody, you know as well as I do. The best way to do it is to be walking down the hallway down the street. You see them and you just turn your head. Because it's horrifyingly embarrassing for them and say, well, good luck. And you walk on by. It's an utter act of contempt. It's to say to them, you don't even amount enough to me to say good morning. And he said, we greet one another. Greeting, by the way, is a huge thing in the Christian community of the New Testament Church. So that is how we love our enemies. None of those things unreasonable. To see them with the compassionate eyes of God who wants them to be saved and not spend eternity in hell. To pray for that to happen that the Holy Spirit will convict them of sin and convert them to Christ. To bless them rather than curse them. To do something good to them if the opportunity arises. And to acknowledge them with respect is a fellow traveler as the image of God walking through this world and through this life to an eternal destiny toward a day of reckoning and judgment. Respect. And those my friends are not difficult things to do. Jesus seems to make it difficult when he ends this beautiful, reasonable section with a very difficult sentence. You therefore must be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. But I want you to know that that little word in Greek, the word tele-os, does not primarily mean perfect. It means mature or complete. It's a word used for a fully developed male or female in the Greek language, a mature person. Jesus is saying, don't be infantile and nurse grudges and hatred in spite. Those are children. That's a childlike way of not being able to overcome your own fears and emotions and step out into adult world and extend the hand of reconciliation. That is what Jesus Christ does. He steps into a world of enemies and says, Father, let's look at them maturely. Forgive them, their children. They don't know what they're doing. And then he sticks out a scarred, nailed pierced hand and says, come now. I would love to be friends with you. And that is what Jesus Christ is asking us to do. Martin Lloyd Jones makes the wonderful comment at the end of this section that the thing that should be on our minds if you read this carefully is how are we different than other people? How are we different than the tax collectors who sucked up the Roman? Did all their dirty work and abused everybody else? And how are we going to be different from the Romans who kept us under their booted heel? How are we going to be sons of God, members of the kingdom of God, and not the children of men in darkness and hate? That's what he's asking us. Can we do this by ourselves? No. No, you can't. As long as you're thinking in and living by and discoursing in the kingdom of Bendis as never possible, but once you through faith in Jesus Christ enter into the kingdom of God and His spirit fills you, this becomes possible. We're taking a brief story to end and then I'll pray. When I grew up in Columbus, Ohio and the Catholic parish I grew up in, the wealthier people lived on the north end of the parish, the poorer people lived on the south end of the parish. I lived on the second to the last street on the south end of the parish. The joke in our community was all of our dads on the south end worked for the dads on the north end and that was usually true. And the children of these people, they carried that on and they let us know it. There were three boys that I grew up with in elementary school, went through eight years of school with them. They never missed an opportunity to tell me how economically and socially and intellectually superior to me they were. And one of them named Jeffrey Allen said to me one day, you know, you're nothing but a slum boy and that's all you'll ever be good for nothing like your mom and dad. And I want to tell you from that day on, I hated that boy with a white hot hatred. In my senior year in college, I happened to be walking one evening about five o'clock down to the library and out of the building came Jeffrey Allen. He had flunked out of his prestigious little school he went to. His father had left his mother, his life was falling apart. And as he came down the street next to me, I said, I will not greet this fella. And as I went by, he said Mike and I just kept on walking and I felt great score one. Well, you know what? The next day, I saw him at the same place. I passed him by and this time he said Mike, remember me? I'm Jeffrey and I just kept on walking. Only the second time it didn't feel so good. I felt a little bit cheesy but not too much. The third day as I came down the street, Jeffrey sat down his books and I said, fair enough and I sat down mine. And he stood in my way and I went like this and I said Jeffrey, I've been waiting all these years to pay you back. And he said, wait, I was wrong. I was a child and I was wrong. And all I wanted to do was ask you to forgive me and here's my hand. I stood there for an eternity staring at his hand until he said, can you forgive me? And when I reached out and took his hand, this is the truth. I don't believe either one of us were converted at the time. But I'm telling you when I took his hand, my hatred for Jeffrey left. In fact, I went and bought him a pizza and we had dinner together because he was broke. It can happen, folks. It can happen if you're willing to say, here's my hand. Can we try to be friends? And you never know what the grace of God is going to do in the other person's life. Your enemy could become your neighbor and maybe even your brother and sister in Christ. Amen. Let's pray. Father, we want to thank you for the fact that you are not a proud person. You do not hold a grudge. You don't always have to be right, although you always are. You are able to forgive. You don't nurse petty insults and little things. Your great concern is that we become your children and the friends of Jesus Christ. That's the mission of your eternal life to seek and to say that which is lost and full of hate and the dignity with you and everyone else and everything else in life that it touches. We want to thank you that we once were your enemies. Now, not only have we become your friends through the Holy Spirit, but through his indwelling, you've made us the children of your heavenly family, little brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ. And there are others in our lives, perhaps even in this room this morning, who are distant from you, who feel a hatred towards us because they don't realize this. They really are spiteful towards you. Now, I ask you to open up their hearts and let them see that they never knew what friends they had until they came to Calvary and were embraced by Jesus Christ. Make us people who forgive. People who want to get along, people who will let things go by and forget the past and look to the future where Christ is making all things new. Give us this grace to be a reconciler. More than that, reconcile us to yourself and to one another as we plead for these things under the mercy of your cross and in the powerful promise of your gospel. And as we ask for them in Jesus' name, Amen.