Let's pray Father in heaven our holy God we ask now that you would give us years to hear That you would give me the words to say and that by your spirit You would preach a better sermon than the one that I'm about to preach and you would speak to each of us just What we need to hear that we might belong to you and serve you and obey you in Jesus name a man Our text this morning is Leviticus chapter 19 continuing with our series in the third book of the Bible Leviticus This morning Leviticus chapter 19 follow along as I read The whole chapter beginning at verse one Leviticus 19 and the Lord spoke to Moses saying Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them You shall be holy For I the Lord your God and holy Every one of you shall revere his mother and his father and you shall keep my Sabbaths. I am the Lord your God Do not turn to idols or make for yourselves any gods of cast metal. I am the Lord your God When you offer a sacrifice of peace offerings to the Lord you shall offer it so that you may be accepted She'll be eaten the same day you offer it around the day after and anything left over until the third day She'll be burned up with fire if it is eaten at all on the third day. It is tainted It will not be accepted and everyone who eats it shall bear his iniquity because he is profaned What is holy to the Lord and that person shall be cut off from his people When you reap the harvest of your land You shall not reap your field right up to its edge Neither shall you gather the gleamings after your harvest and you shall not strip your vineyard there Neither shall you gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard. You shall leave them for the poor and for the sojourner I am the Lord your God You shall not steal you shall not deal falsely. You shall not lie to one another You shall not swear by my name falsely and so profane the name of your God. I am the Lord You shall not oppress your neighbor or rob him. The wages of a hired worker shall not remain with you all night until the morning You shall not curse the death or put a stumbling block before the blind But you shall fear your God. I am the Lord. You shall do no injustice in court You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great But in righteousness shall you judge your neighbor you shall not go around as a slanderer among your people And you shall not stand up against the life of your neighbor. I am the Lord You shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason frankly with your neighbor less 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 You shall keep my statue. You shall not let your cattle breed with a different kind You shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed nor shall you wear a garment of cloth made of two kinds of material If a man lies sexually with a woman who is a slave assigned to another man and not yet rancened her given her freedom a Distinction shall be made. They shall not be put to death because she was not free But he shall bring his compensation to the Lord to the entrance of the tent of meeting a ram for the guilt offering in the priest Shall make atonement for him with the ram of the guilt offering before the Lord for his sin that he has committed and he shall be forgiven for the sin that he has committed When you come into the land and plant any kind of tree for food Then you shall regard its fruit as forbidden three years and shall be forbidden to you It must not be eaten and in the fourth year all its fruit shall be holy and offering of praise to the Lord But in the fifth year you may eat of its fruit to increase its yield for you. I am the Lord your God You shall not eat any flesh with the blood in it you shall not interpret omens or tell fortunes You shall not round off the hair on your temples or mar the edges of your beard You shall not make any cuts on your body for the dead or tattoo yourselves. I am the Lord Do not profane your daughter by making her a prostitute Let's the land fall into prostitution and the land become full of depravity. You shall keep my Sabbath and reverence my sanctuary I am the Lord do not turn to mediums or necromancers do not seek them out and so make yourself unclean by them I am the Lord your God you shall stand up before the gray head and honor the face of an old man and you shall fear your God I am the Lord when a stranger so germs with you and your land you shall not do him wrong You shall treat the stranger who so germs with you as the 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 shall do no wrong in judgment in measures of lengths or weights or quantity You shall have just balances just wait suggest EFA and adjust him I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt and you shall observe all my statutes and all my rules and do them I am the Lord The verse that Jesus quoted more than any other in recorded scripture is right here in Leviticus 19 You shall love your neighbor as yourself One of the most famous passages one of the most famous lines ever uttered by anyone in the history of the world And you might be surprised to find it here in Leviticus with all of the strange sometimes bizarre seeming rituals and rules, but right here in this holiness code We have one of the most famous sentences ever uttered So I've said before the second half of Leviticus from chapter 17 onwards is sometimes called the holiness code because chapters one through 16 are about approaching the holy God and then with the day of atonement ceremony God dwelling with his people the remainder of the book is about how we walk with this holy God in holiness and integrity Summary verses right there in verse two you shall be holy for I the Lord your God am holy and The way to walk with God in holiness is inextricably linked with the Levitical law of love Now one question jumps immediately to mind when we have a passage like this Just the four minutes it took to read it I'm sure there were many of those commandments that you thought yep, that sounds right and then others Hey, wait a minute. Do we still do that? Why don't we do that? How do we understand this? Variety of commandments and which ones we ought to follow or are there some that we can just ignore? Well, you should not ignore any of them in one sense in one sense we must keep all of them because Even if there are some things changed by the coming of Christ There are principles Involved in all of them that still apply to us So your presumption should be this when reading the Old Testament Even when you find things that deal with an agrarian society We don't live in anymore even things that have to do with the sacrificial system that's fulfilled in Christ Everything you read in the Old Testament your first instinct should be this has something to teach me about how I am to follow God Now there's some Herminutical steps we need to take to understand how it applies But you want to think this has something to teach me about how I follow God Now it's true many of the laws in this chapter and others are not binding Upon us in the same way. How do we understand this mix of? Commandments well, you have some commands that you can see clearly are reaffirmed Simply in the New Testament commands about stealing lying adultery Then you have some that are Culturally conditioned meaning they deal with weights and measurements that we no longer use or there with the world of fields and animals and slaves and day Laborers, which is not the world that most of us inhabit But it doesn't mean that they're worthless the Westminster Confession of Faith talks about the general Equity that is each of these commandments has certain principles a general equity something to teach us They're underlying principles for our own day and most of us do that sort of instinctively There are those commandments which are tied to the sacrificial system, which we've seen throughout Leviticus find their fulfillment in Christ There are others that are bound up in the unique role that the Jews had as a nation Set apart as God's people now we are Strangers and aliens we are exiles So we are more like the Jews in Babylon and we are like the nation of Israel Though having said that we're not exactly like the Jews in Babylon because they went to Babylon and there was no It was no Democratic Republic no constitutional system there were no voting rights There was no centuries of Christian influence. So it's not exactly like Babylon There is to whom much is given much is expected and required But theologically we must see ourselves Strangers and aliens in the world rather than a constituted nation like Israel and we'll say more about that next week when we come to some of the Judicial laws and how they apply in the New Testament to the church and then there are certain things in these commandments that were Prohibited because they were tied to pagan rituals and taboos in the day and we'll note those in just a moment You can see quite clearly that the theme in this chapter is Love there are some commands scattered throughout chapter 19 that really have to do with the first table of the law That is love the Lord your God with all your heart soul strength in mind Think about and notice some of the commandments that have to do with the first table of the law verse three talks about honoring the Sabbath Verse four about Not having idols. That's the second commandment Verses five through eight have to do with the peace offerings and how you are to eat of the food This has to do with proper worship and sacrifices You have in verse 19 a strange command You shall not let your cattle breed with a different kind and means with it with a different species of animal You shall not sow your seed with two kinds of seed or wear a garment of cloth made of two kinds of Material what's this about the underlying principle is that God does not want us to mix together What he created to be distinct this is actually the underlying principle When we come to matters of sexuality and to use a modern term gender identity what God has created distinct male and female He doesn't mean for us to confuse Men are men should look like men and women are women and should look like women men and women were meant to Come together and marriage one man and one woman the principle is what God has Designed in his divine order to be distinct should remain distinct that's the principle here But here it has to do with two kinds of animals so Don't breed a sheep and a goat. It's not talking about different kinds of Cattle different kinds of sheep, but you don't breed a sheep and a goat because God wanted those two Separate you don't breed two kinds of seeds You don't wear garments now notice it doesn't say you don't weave garments together Because there are some of the priestly garments that includes different kinds of cloth and so many commentators think this Rule about not wearing a garment of cloth made of two kinds of material was really telling the lay people Don't try to put on the priestly garments because those were the sort of garments made of two different kinds of material Don't venture forth to do the work of the priest if you have not been ordained to the priesthood You see also in verse 23 and 25 you have another strange rule What is this about the fruit of the trees in three years? It's forbidden Well, it's really quite simple remember God wants the first fruits So when you plant a tree says in order to get the first fruits of the harvest it's setting this principle that God doesn't get our leftovers in life He doesn't just get a garage sale from us. Well This is junk already my kids are always thinking we could get rich with a garage sale We can make a lot of money. Well, no If we're gonna throw it in the trash Nobody wants to come and give us thousands of dollars to take it We sometimes have a garage sale mentality with God God if I've already got time left over Already got money left over you had it first fruits is the principle in the Old Testament And so literally you plant a tree God says I don't want you picking off these these little bits of fruit I want you to save it until the fourth year when we know that it's fully mature fully ripe And you're gonna give that first fruit harvest under the Lord and so in year five go ahead in eat of the trees It's protecting this principle of worship that God gets what is first and what is best Verse 26 we've seen the command before about not eating blood. We explained that two weeks ago No sorcery Verse 26 and verse 31 Why because God has given to his people his word He's spoken to us Here by the prophets by Moses by divine revelation now in these last days by his son and by the word that the Holy Spirit has given to us And so you don't go to fortune tellers. You don't go to sorcerers. You don't go to people who supposedly consult with the dead Because that suggests you don't trust God to tell you what you need to know You need a tarot card. You need a weegee board. You need somebody who can communicate with the deck Somebody who can go to the great beyond no God gives you what you need to know The reason that these are forbidden is its chance amount to rejecting God and a sufficiency of his word And then you see verse 27 and 28 Just round off the hair in your temples mar the edges of your head Jump making it cuts on your body for the dead or tattoo yourselves. Okay. We just gotta Say something about this here This is connected to pagan rituals and appearance if you look over a couple of chapters Leviticus 21 verse 5 They shall not make bald patches on their heads Nor shave off the edges of their beards nor make any cuts on their body They shall be holy to the Lord and not profane the name of the Lord their God the grouping of those things together With your hair and with cuts and with markings is because all of these were associated with pagan rituals You see this even more clearly in Deuteronomy 141. Let me read it to you You are sons of the Lord your God you shall not cut Your selves or make any baldness on your forehead for the dead that's Deuteronomy 141 So these kinds of rituals don't know why you would want a ritual baldness on your head But it was something that was all the rage in the culture Cutting yourself tattoos all of these things were linked to pagan appearance and pagan ritual So we cannot make an absolute command against tattoos You may want to make prudential reasons why you wouldn't have tattoos we have Those sort of prudential no tattoo reasons in our household But you cannot say that as an absolute command of scripture Because it's tied here explicitly to pagan appearance. It would be to use an analogy Everyone would understand today That if you if you mark something with a swastika No one would object to the church saying absolutely you cannot do that Don't mark your body with that don't mark a flag with that because we all know That means something and has connotations with something wicked But perhaps 500 years from now Those right angle lines that come together don't mean anything and that history has been long Washed away. We don't know so perhaps the symbol doesn't mean what it used to mean That's the sort of thing this cutting this hair tattoos The the bald patches were obvious in their cultural moment that this is associated with paganism Therefore you clearly should not do it those associations are not the same And so the underlying principle is there but the application looks different Now those are commands scattered throughout chapter 19 that had to do with the first table with worshipping God not giving into idolatry We want to spend our time however on the second table Love your neighbor As yourself Jesus refers to this as the second great commandment more important evens and offerings and sacrifices Paul in Romans 39 says all the commandments are summed up in that because love is the fulfillment of the law Galatians 5 14 since the whole law is fulfilled in one word you shall love your neighbor as yourself James calls this the royal law According to scripture in James 2 in fact if we had more time we could see every almost every verse in this passage from Leviticus 19 Certainly in this middle section about love your neighbor almost every one of these verses is alluded to in the book of James James is among other things an extended commentary on Leviticus 19 and what it looks like to love your neighbor Now notice before we get into the specifics That love is very concrete and love does not just exist in some box. We label religious or spiritual Love is not just a matter of vague abstraction The love has to do with specifics day to day. How do you treat people Holiness is how people are set apart by God to live their lives in ways distinct from the world And love in Leviticus 19 There's another word for this holiness. You could think of love Is holiness lived out for the good of others Love is holiness lived out for the good of others Now this passage this middle section in particular from verse 9 The verse 18 It's not flowery It doesn't soar to the heavens You don't hear it read very often at weddings There aren't a lot of songs for it But it shows us what this love Looks like This passage applies love to five different areas of life. You see there beginning at verse 9 You have these Paragraphs five of them each of which end I am the Lord your God See those five paragraphs you see the heading in the ESV love your neighbor to yourself and then there's five sections each ends with I am The Lord your God I want us to think of this as five love languages. Huh somewhere should write a book that was sell a lot of copies We could build a track at Warner Park if I had written that book Five love languages not the the marital love languages, but five Levitical love languages that you must Embrace as a sign of holiness towards your neighbor here. They are we must love with our possessions By our words Interactions by our judgments in with our attitudes those are the five Levitical love languages. So look at the first paragraph verses 8 through 10. We must love others with our possessions Can understand what this agrarian Command is about in a society where people are farmers Assistance farmers and they go and they get their grain or they have grapes in their vineyard Can imagine that as you're doing the harvest some of the sheaves fall to the sides some of the grapes fall on the ground And this command says I don't want you to go and pick up every last grape I want you to get every last bit of the harvest in fact. I don't want you to go all the way out to the edges You're going to leave some it's going to be a little bit messy To be hard for your OCD But you're going to leave this because some people the poor Sojourner you're going to allow them to come in and take some of what you've left The best example most famous is Boaz is kindness to Ruth and letting her glean in the fields If experienced as famine her and her mother-in-law have nothing but Boaz it's kindness is sure You can come behind my reapers and go ahead and and he actually tells the reapers let her get as much as she can This law of gleaning was in addition to the tides that they brought in An addition to the food that they shared with the priests Those gifts probably added up to More than 20% of what they took in each year This is on top of what they gave to support the priesthood the tabernacle the sacrificial system This was specifically for the poor And it's not hard to understand the underlying principle As God's people we should deliberately plan our financial lives So that we have extra left over To give to those in need Yes, we live in a very wealthy country The needs look different the way of providing for the needs of people may look different But the principle is the same that we would we would not grasp tightly onto every last penny we earn Or are given but we would let some of it slip through our fingers Gleaning Was a conscious decision not to hold on to everything that belonged to you It allowed the poor to benefit From your generosity from God's people and their generosity That they didn't all the way to the end maximize their standard of living But they allowed some to fall through their hands for the poor What might this look like for us? Perhaps giving to the church's mercy fund we have a history of People giving very generously to that which provides quietly but consistently to people in need Perhaps an anonymous gift to someone you know who is in need Yes, it's okay to give to people even if you don't get a tax break for it Think about a local charity you may want to give to invest in Scholarships or entrepreneurs Maybe it's as simple as being a big tipper Restaurants showing hospitality to people The principle you can see they literally had margins they had literal margins at the edge of their field They didn't go all the way out to the edge. They didn't get every last penny accounted for and so in our financial life You need to have some margins You don't harvest everything You don't go back and pick up every last grape It's an attitude of exuberance instead of exactitude Let's get everything of course. It's good to be careful. It's good to count all of that appropriate What I mean by exactitude is I even need to make sure every last penny dollar sent accounted for in my Rather than an attitude of exuberance that says yes, I want to be responsible for some of this Happily to slip through my fingers And look for ways that I might help others and provide for the poor the sojourner love others with our possessions number two love others with our words Now verse 11 begins you shall not steal But actually the stealing seems to be related to Bearing false witness you shall not deal falsely because the rest of verse 11 and 12 have to do with our speech And in particular There are two contexts here where honesty is paramount and it was in the ancient world and it is today business and in the courts Do not steal but the context suggests stealing is taking place by lying Dealing falsely with each other as in a business setting When we love we tell the truth in all of our transactions Look back at the end of the chapter of verse 35 you shall do no wrong enjudgment The measures of lengths or weight or quantity just balance is just way to just defa just him This was one of the most common ways that you could cheat people Because you're weighing out what you get paid for your grain or for your produce and you would have a Scale you've all seen before and it's weighted on one side and you stick some rocks in there to make it Way heavier or lighter so that what you're giving them is not telling the truth I think I've mentioned this you before my very first job Was working at a grocery store Third shift bottle return whoo Ten at night To seven in the morning And this was before the day of Especially you know in Michigan you get ten cents ten cents It's a big deal to turn in your cans and your bottles ten cents This is a big deal. This is before Automated things you just brought in a bag and then For people like me We're back there all night just Separating coke from Pepsi from seven eleven. I got to know all the different makes of beer bottles and came host smelling wonderful But it turns out the people who come in with a bag so then you print off their receipt because you get ten cents For every bottle or can that you bring in In the state of Michigan turns out that the people who come in at say two in the morning with a can of bag You know a bag of cans and aren't always telling the truth be a black bag and they say 300 cans in here do over 30 dollars Then you they leave and you'd open up later. I found rocks. I found bricks. I found you know Lego. I mean just anything to just weigh this down. I thought you just walked out Sometimes the people it was Disorganized place back there sometimes the people I worked with because it was not well accounted for I would walk out at the end of the day and write themselves off with one of these bottle receipts and walk off with Some money a very easy obvious example, but Perhaps in our business transactions. There's less obvious ones Think about advertising you know advertising is a is an honorable Profession and there's nothing wrong with trying to make products a appeal so long as we tell the truth One of the reason for the financial meltdown 15 years ago People bundling things together and everyone sort of passing along from the homeowner to the many people in the financial services Not telling the truth about what these things were Or perhaps promising more than you know your product can deliver I ran across this story from Many years ago in the Earlier part of the 20th century Douglas aircraft was competing with Boeing to sell eastern airlines which doesn't exist anymore to sell eastern airlines It's first big jets and the president of eastern airlines was talking to Douglas aircraft and reportedly told Donald Douglas His jets were as good as bowings in every way Except for noise suppression. They were they were louder than bowings jets And he gave Douglas one last chance. Can you out promise? Boeing can you promise that your jets Will be quieter than bowings and after consulting with the engineers Douglas reported back that he couldn't make the promise and the president of eastern replied I know you can't I wanted to see if you were honest And he gave him an order for 135 million dollars worth of jets and he told them go home and figure out how to make them quieter May not always be a happy ending you may lose the sale sometimes, but we tell The truth It's not that profits and business are wrong We simply must keep our priorities and business they give it this way principle people products Profits you put profits before your principle before people That's when you get into trouble But if you first have principles and you love people You want to stand by your products or services or goods and then a profit. That's the right order So honesty and business honesty in the courtroom Especially in a day without surveillance cameras or DNA testing or wiretapping everything depended on witnesses That's why bearing false witness with such a serious crime Think of a hab and jezabel who got worthless men to accuse neboth and he died because of their false Witness This matters in an official courtroom. It matters in the courtroom of public opinion as well How it's true. We all can make honest mistakes Where we may interpret someone's ideas or opinions or we may just have honest disagreements There's a difference between disagreements and dishonestly We must be careful in the court of public opinion that we don't pass along slander Or hear say that we can't confirm or we're eager to pass along reports that would only tear others down Love whether for our neighbors or for our enemies Demands that we are careful with our words. We love with our words Third love language love others by our actions. You see this in verses 13 and 14 As we've seen many times before here. We have the quintessential biblical definition of oppression oppression Is not equal if you have Some kind of economic inequality that may or may not be the result of oppression This is the quintessential example of oppression when you promise to your day laborer to give them a wage And then the sun sets and you don't give them what you promise you defraud your workers Because a day laborer is by definition someone who's living day-to-day hand-to-mouth They don't have recourse. They're not powerful people The ones who's hired them out they have the power and the status and the position And so it's a very easy thing to say well. I don't think your work was done up to snuff or you know what Turns out I don't have anything I don't have any shekels to give you today. Why don't you come back next week? It was an easy way For landowners and employers to stiff their employees and their day laborers of their wages And God in the Old Testament the New Testament consistently speaks out against this act of oppression The broader principle is that we must not take advantage of the week You see in verse 14 to very simple obvious examples Don't curse the death Don't put a stumbling block before the blind Those are really aphorisms. They're maxims to illustrate how we should not take advantage of the week. Don't curse the deaf The deaf can't hear you and so go ahead and curse them right you won't get in any trouble Put a stumbling block before the blind they can't see they won't know who did it You get advantage you get to laugh The idea is simple do not take advantage of those Even if they have no recourse to hold you accountable What is the deaf man going to do when you curse him he can't hear what will the blind person do when you put the stumbling block They don't know who did it We must not run roughshod over people because we can get away with it Because we know they don't have money to get a good lawyer or they won't know how to use the legal system Or they don't have the same level of education Or we understand we have a position of power or know how or networking or contacts We must not manipulate children We must deal kindly with people under our authority We must not take advantage of people who look up to you and they are eager to trust you and to please you You see in verse 20 don't take advantage of others sexually That's this rule about the man who lies sexually with a woman who's a slave You can understand the man may be thinking well This is an easy way for me to fulfill my sexual desires. I don't have to care for her. I don't have to marry her I can go to bed with her. She's just a slave God's words says The do so is to pollute the land Do not profane your daughter by making her a prostitute verse 29 now you think who on earth would profane your daughter by making her a prostitute no parent would do that unconscionable And yet it was common in the ancient world It was a common profession especially with shrines and temples And though we wouldn't think to do that exact thing isn't there a temptation even in our own day whether as parents or perhaps as employers You leverage someone's beauty for your own gain you leverage their sexuality for your own profit. That's what's happening here And we must give special honor to those who are older than us look back at verse 3 Reasserting the fifth Commandment Honor here. It uses the word revere your father and your mother It's an asymmetrical relationship parents and children and there's a reason What's the command god gives to parents fathers in particular don't exasperate Your children Moms and dads you're not told to obey your children That happens too often You're not even given the command to honor or revere your children though we honor them in one sense Now our particular danger is parents as we exasperate them They push our buttons we push them back We know how to make them frustrated angry The command for you children however Is to revere So hold your you can see how this goes both ways The parents feel like well, you're not revere you're not honoring me That's what we do things that exasperate them and in children Well, I'm exasperated and you turn around and you don't revere you don't honor the command here children And this goes with however old our parents are yes You move out on your own it looks different but for all of life we honor and revere Our parents whether they're good parents bad parents because of the role that they have in our lives and in verse 32 What a wonderful word about gray hair You shall stand up before the gray head Why would I get rid of this gray hair? It's an honor Honor the face of an old man. So I guess I'm old You shall fear the Lord your God. Isn't it the case one of the ways That our world Our Western American culture is most In the opposite direction from the Bible is in this matter We've had since What at least the sixties probably and ever increasing emphasis on youth Culture that's that's the dominant. That's what we want. That's that's the marketing place that everyone's that sort of reorganize things around the preferences In the cultural expectations of the young And this is Strange in the history of the world and it would seem very strange if you were to go to many places in Asia many places in Africa This would have been a very ordinary command but it strikes us here as quite counter-cultural stand up before the gray head honor the face Of an old man of an old woman someone who is your senior someone who is your elder someone the the The impetus the assumption is this person whatever imperfections we all have this person Rather than our world saying this person probably This person probably has old outdated ideas Probably just shuffled them off to the end of their days The Bible says know your assumption ought to be this person has lived longer than you And they have something to teach you they have wisdom that you don't know about They have things that you can learn from them and you want to stand up and you want to honor them before the Lord It's one of the great things about this church is that we have Generations and it's very unique. I think that we have We have all these young people who made profession of faith We have babies being baptized. We have young newlyweds and we have lots of people Senior adults who are coming in that's a healthy thing for a church. Let's show a different kind of culture a biblical culture to honor The age of the older among us Here's the fourth love language verse 15 and 16 love others in our judgments These courts Would have been immeasured in their community You would know these people they would know you And notice what it says because here's the biblical definition of justice We live in a day everyone talks about justice talks about social justice We have a hundred different definitions of what that means Here we have justice you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great Justice is making a right fair judgment You don't defer to the poor So if a poor man comes before you don't say well this person's never had any breaks in life I know how much they they could use this nor do you defer to the great Suppose two men in the church had a property dispute and a poor man from the church was doing work at a rich man's house And the poor man says I was told that I would get $10,000 for the job and then the rich man claims Well, I said I would get $10,000 only if the work was done by a certain date He didn't meet that deadline as so I'm paying him $5,000 and then the poor man says well my children were sick I couldn't help it and they bring this case before the elders of the church not a real case going on that I'm aware of it bring that case before the church The elders are tasked with making a right judgment They cannot think to themselves well This great man this rich man is a big giver at the church and we went to Chapel Hill together and we've been friends for a long time And so I'm gonna be on his side nor can you think Well, I've never liked rich people and this poor man sure could use a break in life And he needs that extra $5,000 the task of those in authority is to at the best of their ability to make a right Judgment justice means rendering the just Vertict which is why in common iconography lady justice You think on the top of court buildings has scales Because she's weighing matters a sword to execute justice and is blindfolded because justice is supposed to be Blind on the supreme court building in our own country are the words equal justice Under the law That's the goal the goal is not to meet a predetermined result The goal must never be to show partiality to one group Based on their gender based on their race based on their ethnicity based on their social standing But it is to give equal Treatment we see in the final paragraph of the chapter this includes the sojourner among you This would be like our resident alien those who are among us even though they may not have access It may not have your history and they may be from a different place They deserve the same equal treatment And then finally and the last paragraph loving others In our attitude. It says you shall not hate your brother and your heart. Well, this is hard The other ones we almost thought maybe we could do but now it gets to the heart We're pretty decent at showing up for an hour and a half and being Civil and polite Some of us hold on to anger over past offenses Or we're smiling in public and then we rip somebody to pieces and privates Or we go home and say the sort of things we would never say out loud and we're smiling on the outside Southerners do Inside we're seizing No, say well, what am I supposed to do? I can't just tell myself not To hate can I? Well these verses tell us what we should do You shall go reason frankly With your neighbor less you incur sin because of him strange phrase what what does it mean in curse sin? Does it mean you're going to be guilty of sin if you don't correct him? I don't think that's the case. I think what it means is unless you get this worked out You're going to have such bitterness such anger that it's going to lead to sin and further festering hatred in your own heart A prophet says it's a glory to overlook in a sense So praise God most of this stuff in life and say okay nail it to the cross. I don't I don't need to go you don't need to bring up Everything anybody does that annoys you or we will never go home today You don't have to be the Holy Spirit in somebody else's life But when there are those things that you cannot just overlook and they're they're Adding of a festering wound and a spirit of bitterness and what you see there in verse 18 a desire to take vengeance or to bear a grudge You must go and speak to the person That's what it looks like very concretely. How do you get rid of this this this hate that you have this this Burning growing frustration and anger you must at some point when you're calm Speak to them That's what love does you may not win them over But you go as a neighbor And perhaps it's as a family member to speak love as you would want to be loved Love your neighbor as yourself. We all know the verse and it's hard to do It means you have an open heart toward others It means you are eager to forgive because wouldn't you want to be forgiven? How many times am I driving down the road and I see some Terrible driver and think what an awful driver. I wish he would fall over and I could say something And then I think how many times I've been that driver and I hope that is I Didn't see somebody in my lane. They will have mercy and think well. He's having a bad day Is that why you want to be treated? Jesus said the judgment you you want to receive should be the judgment you give to others Do you want people to be exacting with all your faults? Do you want them to bring up with a long list of all of their grievances? Do you never want anyone to give you the benefit of the doubt? None of us want to be loved like that Do you want people to make the worst assumptions but the worst constructions upon all of your motives? No one wants to be loved like that We are responsible to treat our neighbors as we would want to be treated And the way to move that hatred out of your heart Is to speak in love and to open yourself up Yes, love always love is vulnerable love opens yourself up to being To being frustrated being hurt again, but that's what love does Not when there's immediate physical danger, but The sort of love that says I'm not going to hold everything that you've done against me before you I'm going to make the first step to say I'm sorry Two final thoughts if you want to love Get to know the law Isn't it true? We put law Love you want to be a law Christian law Christian or love Christian? Well, I want to be the love Christian. Well, Jesus said if you love me, you do what you obey my commandments Paul said the the law is fulfilled in love and the fulfillment of love is the law If you want to know how to love not just some ethereal Oh, feeling the warm fuzzies today It's not love it's nice when you get those Concrete actions toward one another you need the law to direct you Final thought if you want Love get to know the law and if you want love get to know the only one who kept the law perfectly Only one man ever loves his neighbor fully as himself Only one man was always generous always honest always helpful always fair Only one man Can forgive us of all of our pettiness all of our selfishness all of our disobedience because only one man has ever loved And only one man has ever satisfied the father's impartial standard of justice and that man Is the Lord Jesus Christ the only one who has the power to forgive you The power to change you the power to enable you the power by his spirit To give you a new heart that you might love your neighbor as yourself only Jesus spoke all of the five love languages With perfect fluency and only Jesus can help us to speak them to Let's pray Father in heaven we give thanks for your word Challenging but practical Give us your spirit that we may understand that we may apply and even more so that we may walk in these things To love our neighbors as ourself and to know your love for us For giving us all our sins and giving us the spirit to walk in your ways in Jesus we pray amen