Like Father, Like Son

We read the word of God from Matthew chapter 5, beginning at verse 43, through the end of the chapter. Our Lord instructs us concerning Christian love.

Matthew 5, 43. Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them who despitefully use you and persecute you, that ye may be the sons of your Father who is in heaven.

For he maketh his Son to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them who love you, what reward have ye? Do not even the tax collectors the same? And if ye greet your brethren only, what do ye more than others? Do not even the heathen so? Be ye therefore perfect, mature, complete, even as your Father who is in heaven is perfect. And perfect love casteth out fear.

People who know nothing else about the Christian life know that Christians are supposed to love each other and love their enemies, and this is true. In the Sermon on the Mount, our Lord has been giving to us the inner spiritual meaning of the law, and he has shown to us that God is not only concerned with our outward actions but also our inward attitudes. In fact, Jesus tells us in this Sermon on the Mount that our outward actions could be very correct and very proper, and our inward attitudes be very, very sinful.

And now he comes to this matter of loving. He had to get to that sooner or later because the whole Bible is filled with this subject of love. And he quotes from the Old Testament scriptures, Thou shalt love thy neighbor.

But of course, the Pharisees and scribes, in order to avoid responsibility, had added to this, And hate your enemy. You don't find that anywhere in the Old Testament scriptures. The Pharisees were like some Christians today.

They wanted to accept the word of God, and they would argue to their dying day that this was the word of God, the very law of God. But if you pinned them against the wall and said, Are you obeying this law? They'd say, Oh, yes, we are. But they were not obeying, they were evading.

For example, they took the scriptures that said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and they said the neighbor is the Jew. Therefore you should love the Jew, and this means you should hate the Gentile. They thought that because they were different, they were better.

And of course, they weren't. The Lord Jesus Christ is taking this particular truth of loving your neighbor, and he's amplifying it. He says, Not only should we love our neighbor, we should also love our enemy.

Now someone may say, Well, we want to get away from this. That's not really New Testament scripture. The Sermon on the Mount is for the Jews, or the Sermon on the Mount is for the millennium.

We have all sorts of ways of escaping these things until you start reading the epistles. Then you find that in Paul's letters and Peter's letters and John, they just pick up this very same theme and they expand it. It's in Romans that Paul says, Look, vengeance is not yours.

Vengeance belongs to God. If your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he's thirsty, give him drink.

In so doing, you're going to heap coals of fire on his head, and God will be able to do something. Peter says the same thing. He says, Now, anybody can suffer for doing wrong, but if you as a Christian suffer for doing right and you bless and don't curse, then you're like the Lord Jesus Christ.

When he was reviled, he reviled not again. He committed himself to his father. And so we can't run away from this scripture.

The Lord says to us that because we are Christians, we should love our neighbor and we should love our enemies. Now when I read that, I say to myself, Well, all right, Lord, you say it, and that means I should do it. But really, Lord, before I can do it, there are three questions you're going to have to answer for me.

If you'll answer these three questions, then I'll do it. The three questions are these. Number one, who is my enemy? Are Christians supposed to have enemies? The second question is, how should I love him? Maybe if I get too close to him, he'll kill me.

And the third question is, why should I love him? Let's try to answer these three questions, and our Lord gives us the answers here in Matthew 5, verses 43 through 48. Question number one, who is my enemy? Many people have the idea that Christians are not supposed to have enemies, but people who say that just don't read their Bibles. Our Lord had enemies when he was here on earth.

I read several times in the Gospel of John there was a division because of him. I read that they picked up stones to stone him. I read on a couple of occasions where they were going to send the officers down to arrest him.

Our Lord had enemies when he was here on earth. They argued with him publicly. They met with him in the temple and debated with him.

They lost, but they did it. When the apostles were here on earth, they had enemies. The apostles were arrested there in the first chapters of the book of Acts.

They were put in prison. James had his head cut off. Peter was put into prison, and had the Lord not delivered him miraculously, Peter would have been beheaded.

The apostle Paul was whipped and arrested. Not only was he arrested and mistreated by people outside the Church, but he was mistreated by people inside the Church. There were folks at the Church of Corinth and the churches of Galatia who were creating problems for Paul.

Wherever you turn in the New Testament, you're going to find that God's people had their enemies. You and I are not likely to be thrown into prison. That day might come, but it's not too likely.

It's not likely someone's going to meet us in our office and beat us up because we carry the Bible. I doubt that anybody's going to spit in your face because you bow your head in the dining room or the cafeteria at work and ask the blessing upon your food. We live in a time and in a nation where being a Christian almost might be too popular a thing.

It's very easy to be a shallow kind of a Christian today. Our Lord says that we're going to have some enemies. In fact, he talked about this back in the Beatitudes, chapter 5 of Matthew, and verse 10.

Blessed are they who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, not for having a big mouth, not for sticking their nose in somebody else's business, but for righteousness' sake, just living a righteous life, being the light of the world and the salt of the earth. For theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are ye when men shall revile you and persecute you and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely.

Be sure it's false, otherwise we're getting exactly what we deserve. For my sake, rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven, for so persecuted they the prophets who were before you. Our Lord is talking here about this matter of persecution.

Now, we are persecuted for righteousness' sake, not for sin's sake. We are persecuted for Jesus' sake, for the sake of his name. You say, well, I've not known too much persecution.

Well, you keep on walking with the Lord, you will. Paul wrote to Timothy and said, Yea, and all who will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution. But our Lord is talking here not just about formal persecution, where you give your witness and the boss says, look, there'll be no more of that or we'll fire you, where you go to school and you hand somebody a tract and say, look, I'd like to share the Lord with you and they call you up before the principal and say, you keep your propaganda out of here.

We're not talking about that. We're talking about the everyday abrasions of life. Our Lord is saying that there are people who curse us.

That means they speak evil about us. They want the wrong thing for us. They want us to endure suffering.

They are saying to us and about us, we hope you get into trouble. They wish us evil. There are those who curse us.

There are those who hate us. When we succeed, they're unhappy. When we fail, they're glad.

There are people in all of our lives who are abrasive. They're difficult. Now, he's not talking about Christian people here.

When two Christians cannot get along with each other, there are rules for taking care of that. Matthew chapter 18. If two Christians can't get along, they should talk to each other privately.

They shouldn't take it to a church meeting. Shouldn't take it to the whole town. Talk to each other privately.

Get it settled. If that doesn't settle it, take two or three brethren. Have a prayer meeting.

Put it under the blood. Get it settled. The word of God tells us how Christians can settle differences.

We're talking here about the believer who's going in one direction and the unbeliever who's going in the other direction. And when two entities are going in opposite directions, you have abrasion. You've got friction.

I'm sure there are in your lives people who hate you. They hate you because you're honest. They hate you because in the office you don't participate with some of the things other people participate in.

They hate you because you stand for the Lord Jesus Christ. I'm not talking about you being hateful. There are some Christians who don't know the difference between the offense of the cross and being an offensive Christian.

Some Christians are offensive. Some Christians breathe their bad breath in unsaved people's faces and push their faces against the wall and jam tracks in their pockets and try to push them. They're offensive.

The Lord Jesus never did this. He's talking here about the offense of being a Christian, being salt in a world that's wounded and salt stings those wounds, of being a light in a world that's dark and when the light starts to shine, it's like turning over the rock in the field, all the bugs come crawling out. And all a Christian has to do is go to a machine shop or a schoolroom or an office and just be a Christian.

And before long, the friction starts. And people start cursing you and people start hating you and start despitefully using you. That's what really hurts.

When a Christian worker in an office is just being used like a typewriter, like a chair, like a piece of machinery, because the boss doesn't want him or her to get any place, abusing them. Nobody wants to be used. All of us want to be treated like people, not like things.

And persecuting. Hostility. Now, these are our enemies.

And let's face it. These enemies come not because we declare war on them. We as Christians are ambassadors of peace.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. No, we are not declaring war. We're declaring peace.

But when we declare peace, they declare war. The psalmist says, I am for peace, but they are for war. Oh, their words are as smooth as butter, but war is in their heart.

And so Jesus says to us, here are your enemies. If you are going to be the kind of a Christian I've been describing, just expect this. People are going to be abrasive.

People are going to be critical. People are going to say unkind things. People are going to tell lies.

They're going to treat you the way they treated me. And if this doesn't happen, there's something wrong with our lives. I may have told you about the young Christian college student who went to work all summer in a lumberjack camp.

And I would imagine that would be one of the most difficult places to be a Christian. Because here are these he-men who are interested in things other than perhaps the things of the Lord. And after a month or so, he wrote to his friend and said, I've been here one month and I haven't had a bit of trouble because so far nobody even knows I'm a Christian.

That's not what our Lord's talking about. Our Lord is saying you are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world.

You do not believe in these sins of the world. He's been describing here the kind of people we are. We don't use anger to fight with.

We don't have lustful thoughts. We don't tell lies. He's been going right down through the law.

Now he says if you're this kind of a person, you can expect that people aren't going to like it because the sick do not like to have their sicknesses exposed. The criminals do not like to have their guilt exposed. Who are my enemies? Those who say things against us and those who hate us and those who despitefully use us and those who make it difficult for us.

It could be your landlord. It could be your brother-in-law. It might even be your wife.

But remember, they are enemies to us. We are not enemies to them. The question is not, should I be an enemy? Never.

The question is always, who is the enemy? Which leads to our second question, how should I love him? The Lord says to me, love your enemies. Now it's easy for him to say. He's God.

But then he says to me, look, I'm never going to command anything that you can't do. My commandments are my enablements. He says, love your enemies.

And you must notice, friends, that the word love here is not like. I don't know when we'll ever convince people that Christian love is not a feeling. We have a younger generation today that's trying to generate some kind of a feeling, and this is Christian love.

It doesn't last too long. Christian love in the Bible is an act of the will. The Lord did not say we have to like everybody, but he did say we have to love everybody.

What is Christian love? Christian love is treating other people the way God treats me. God is patient with me, so I should be patient with others. Be ye kind, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, even as God, for Christ's sake, hath forgiven you.

Why do we forgive? He forgave us. Why are we kind? He's kind to us. Why are we patient? He's patient to us.

Why do we go the extra mile? He's gone the extra 20 miles with us. So Christian love is not a feeling that you try to manufacture. Christian love is an act of the will.

God so loved that he gave. It doesn't say God so loved that he felt. God so loved that he gave.

Christian love is an act of the will. Now there are in our lives people that we don't like. There's something about their personality or something about their actions that we just don't like.

There's nothing wrong with this. There are people who enjoy being with certain kinds of people. Folks who like to go fishing enjoy talking about fishing, and you drop some stick in the mud in their conversation.

Who's against fishing? There's a bit of a problem there. You don't have to like everybody, but we do have to love. I think some Christians are feeling very, very guilty because there are people who have personality quirks, people who do certain things that are so hard to take.

And we think, Lord, if I were a better Christian, I wouldn't feel that way. No. Christian love does not mean I have to feel a certain way.

Christian love means I act a certain way, that even though somebody else may have a certain quirk in personality, I don't nail them against the wall for being like that. Even though a certain person may have certain habits, not sins, but just matters that I don't get along with too well, I still speak to him, pray for him, work with him. By acts of love, demonstrate what our Lord's talking about, and you're the same way.

Our Lord tells us here how we should act toward those who are our enemies. Now, remember, I'm not talking about Christian brethren. If a brother and a brother have a problem, that should be settled differently.

I'm talking here about those outside the faith who are making life difficult for us. What should we do? Well, if they curse us, we should bless. That means when they speak evil of us, we should speak good of them.

Try that sometime. You know, it's easy for us when we have someone we don't get along with to keep digging up ammunition. There are some Christians in America today who do nothing but scum off the dirt of the news, then run it off on their mimeograph machine and mail it out to people to tell all the evangelical dirt, which is too bad.

But the Lord says when someone speaks evil of you, he curses you, you bless. Now, Peter said the same thing. He said, if somebody curses you, you bless them.

You've been called to inherit a blessing. Jesus did this. Jesus could have called down millions of angels and wiped Jerusalem off the face of the earth.

He didn't. He said, Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.

He said to us, if they curse you, you should bless them. If they do evil, you should do good. That's hard to do.

Now, it's much easier to belt somebody in Christian love and then hand them a track. But our Lord is saying here now, love is an act of the will. Love means treating people the way God treats you.

Therefore, if they with their words fight you, you use words to bless. And if they use deeds to hurt you, you use deeds to bless. David did this.

David could have killed King Saul on two occasions. He didn't do it. And then when he got the word that King Saul had been slain, what did David do? Did he put up a banner and say, praise the Lord, Saul's dead? No, he wept.

And he wrote that beautiful song that we have in the Old Testament scriptures. How are the mighty fallen? He wept over Saul. Our Lord Jesus did the same thing.

When Malchus reached out with his sword and was going to, when Peter reached out with his sword and was going to kill Malchus and cut his ear off, Jesus just reached down and healed the man's ear. Now, we can't do that. We have other ways of healing.

You see, our problem is as Christians that sometimes we get filled up with hostility. We live in such a hostile world and so much is wrong and we keep it down inside. Then some little thing happens and we tear into somebody.

Our Lord says, when they curse, you bless. When they hurt you, you do good. When they exploit you and despitefully use you, pray for them.

Pray for them. That's hard to do. But he says, do it.

Here is someone in your office or in your apartment who is abusing you and who is making a fool out of you. And you pray about it and say, dear Lord, you've got to help me with this. This is either going to be an opportunity for the Holy Spirit to bless or it's going to be an opportunity for the devil to curse.

Now, you've got to help me with this. Praying for those who hurt us. Jesus prayed for his persecutors.

So did Stephen. They're throwing stones at Stephen and he says, oh, Lord, lay not this sin to their charge. Now, when I read this, I have to look at my Lord right straight in the face and say, Lord, I can't do it.

So do you. And he knows it. That's why he keeps using this word father.

Verse 45, that you may be the sons of your father who is in heaven. Verse 48, be therefore perfect even as your father. You see, the only way I can show the father's love is if I have the father's nature.

If I have been born from above, then God has given to me a new nature. My old nature wants to fight. My old nature is filled with hostility.

The works of the flesh, says Galatians five, are all of these things, anger and hostility and murder and strife and variance. When the old nature is in control, then there's war. But God's given us a new nature and this new nature can enable us to love.

You say what can't be done, but it can. This new nature can enable us to love. It can keep us silent when we'd like to speak.

It can help us to speak when we'd like to be silent. It can help us to endure when we'd like to fight. And it can help us to carry the burden.

Romans chapter five, verse five tells us, and if you believe the Bible, you have to believe it, the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by his spirit, which is given unto us. And the fruit of the spirit is love. Now, God's not going to ask me to manufacture love.

I can't do it. But you and I have experienced those times in life when it's been difficult, when the easiest thing would have been to give way to the old nature. And had we done it, we would have felt better for a little while.

But the Lord would have been disgraced instead of glorified. And that's when the Holy Spirit moves in. That's when we have to pray and say, dear Father, by your spirit, flood my heart with love.

Lord, I want to say something and I must not say it. Lord, I feel like declaring war and I cannot do it. Now, Father, give me that love.

Help me to act toward this person the way you have been acting toward him, in patience and kindness. Now, the natural man, the unsaved person, reads this and says, you Christians are a bunch of fools. In this world, it's dog eat dog.

In this world, it's the law of the jungle. In this world, you climb the ladder of success walking on people's faces. And if you Christians allow yourself to become doormats, where are you going to get? Well, that leads us to our third question.

Why should we love our enemy? Who is our enemy? Well, anybody who curses us and hates us and despitefully uses us. How do we love him? Well, when he curses us, we bless and when he does evil, we do good and when he despitefully uses us, we pray. Now, why do we do this? He gives us three reasons.

Number one, we do it for Jesus' sake. That's first reason. We do it for Jesus' sake.

He said, don't measure yourselves by other people. If you love those who love you, what good, what reward is that? He said, even the sinners do that. Even the mafia love each other.

And he says, if you only greet your brethren, what good is that? The publicans and sinners can do that. You see, we do this. We, in order to solve this problem, we make a little circle of people who like us and we like them and then we just all get along together and the world goes to hell.

Many churches are nothing but mutual admiration societies, evangelical ghettos, evangelical bomb shelters into which people hide, never to have to confront the outside world. And our Lord says, look, for Jesus' sake, be the salt of the earth. For Jesus' sake, bear this persecution.

This you do for my name's sake. Now, that lifts all of this to a very high level. It's not just some people fighting each other.

This lifts it to a very high level. You say, I've got people in my neighborhood who make life miserable for me. Are you facing it for Jesus' sake? Now, I'm not saying if people are breaking the law, we should encourage them to break the law.

I'm not saying if people are sinning, we should encourage them to sin. Of course not. What I'm saying is there are personal abrasions, personal difficulties and differences.

Do we take it for Jesus' sake? Do we say, well, Lord, you took worse than this for me. I haven't yet been crucified. I sit here and I nurse my wounds and I'd like to get out there and drop some landmines in that neighborhood, but I can't do it.

We do it for Jesus' sake. We don't measure ourselves by each other. We measure ourselves by the Lord.

And then secondly, we do it for our enemy's sake. Remember the story that came out of World War II about the Christian boy who was the only Christian in his barracks, and the first night he was there, the guys are all ready to hit the sack. And this boy knelt down by his bunk and prayed.

And some uncouth, ungentlemanly, unchristian, ungodly fellow picked up his dirty, muddy boots and just, boom, boom, hit the fellow with his boots. And the Christian just kept kneeling there and praying. Lights out, they all went to bed.

Next morning, when that uncouth fellow woke up, there were his boots by his bunk, all cleaned and polished. Nobody had ever done that. He surely expected that the next day that fellow would do something to him.

He did. He loved him. It opened the way to build a bridge to witness and to win him to Christ.

You see, we do this for Jesus' sake, and we do it for the sake of the enemy. Mr. Abraham Lincoln said, I get rid of my enemies by making them my friends. Why did the Lord say, look, your father in heaven makes his son to rise on the evil and the good.

He sends his rain upon the just and the unjust. What's he saying here? He's saying this. The way I respond to my enemy creates the climate.

If I show love and Christian kindness, then the rain is going to fall upon his heart and the sunshine and the seeds of love and truth. The word that I plant in his heart can take root and grow. It may take months.

It may take years. I had a pastor. I have a pastor friend who for, oh, a number of years, I suppose, 10 or 15 years, there was a man, an unsaved man, used to come and sit in his church and after every service come up and say some nasty thing to my friend.

Something like, I hope someday you'll learn how to preach. That was sure a poor sermon. My friend just loved him, prayed for him.

One day that man came in, threw his arms around my preacher friend, began to weep, and he said, you know, I have been so mean to you. My friend said, well, I love you and the Lord loves you, and he had the joy of helping that man in his Christian life. That's what he's talking about.

We do it for the enemy's sake. You and I may be the only person who ever touches them. The trouble with us is we're like James and John.

We don't want the sunshine and the rain to come down. We want the fire to come down from heaven. The third reason why we should love our enemy is for our own sake.

It helps us to grow up. You see, when you love your enemy and you pray for him, you know what happens? He doesn't control your life. I'm speaking to some people right now whose lives are being controlled by the people you don't like.

There's someone who's creating problems for you, someone in your job or your neighborhood or your apartment or your family. And you know what? As long as you hate that person and fight that person, that person is controlling your life. You don't have any freedom.

But when you start loving that person and forgiving that person and treating that person the way a Christian should, you have freedom. You're set free. You can go to bed at night and not dream about these things.

There's no poison of malice stirring in your system and making you hard to live with. It helps us to grow. He says, look, you're going to become like your father.

Verse 45, that you may be not the children, but the sons. In the Bible, there's a difference between children and sons. Children means born ones.

Sons means mature ones. That you might be the mature sons. Little children are always fighting.

Little children like to squabble. But oh, when you grow, when you mature, it's a different story. And Jesus said, if you really want to grow in your Christian life and become more like your father, love your enemies.

Do you ever stop to think that God may be using that difficult person for your good? In my ministry, it's happened on more than one occasion that difficult people have created problems. It's always been for my good. Once the problem's been solved, I can look back and say, well, it's been for my good.

It's taught me patience. It's helped me to grow. It's helped me to get my roots down a little deeper.

Sometimes I've failed. Sometimes I confess to my shame I have failed and I've lost the blessing. Our Lord goes on to say there's going to be a reward in heaven for those who endure persecution.

Don't just endure it, invest it. Don't just put up with it, but put something into it. Now, all of this sounds crazy to an unsaved person and maybe to some Christians.

Someone right now may be saying, well, Pastor, I've tried that and it didn't work. All I know is that Jesus says it, and when he says it, we're supposed to do it. He tells me who my enemy is.

He tells me how I should love him. He tells me why I should love him. It's for my own spiritual growth that I might be perfect, mature, complete, like my Father in heaven.

Now, we can't help having enemies, but we can help being enemies. The difference is the attitude of our heart. So if we walk in love, as the Lord tells us to, then this love is going to kind of spill over as we touch the lives of other people.

As I was meditating on this passage, I thought to myself, you know, Lord, you're not asking us to do anything you didn't do yourself. I turned over to Romans chapter 5. In Romans chapter 5, we read these words. For when we were yet without strength in due time, Christ died for the ungodly.

For scarcely for a righteous man will one die, yet perhaps for a good man some would even dare to die. But God proved his love toward us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. For if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son.

You see, Jesus said greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. He laid down his life for his enemies, you and me. You and I would not be saved today if Jesus had not practiced this, love your enemies.

We cursed him. He spoke words of blessing. We hated him.

He came back with love. We despitefully used him and blasphemed him. He came back and prayed for us, and he died for us.

So the next time I say, Lord, I can't do it, he's going to say to me, wait just a minute. Where would you be today if I hadn't loved you when you were my enemy? Love your enemies. Some Christians have a hard enough time loving the brethren, let alone loving their enemies.

May God help each of us to realize how much he has loved us, and not to go through life holding grudges, feeding malice, adding fuel to fire, sharpening our swords. May the Lord help us to go through life building instead of tearing down. When they draw a circle that leaves us out, we draw a bigger circle and take them in.

When they build walls, we build bridges, because love never fails. Everything else is going to fail in this world, but the one thing that will succeed is the love of God poured out through our hearts by the power of the Holy Spirit. Heavenly Father, we've just thought together about something so difficult.

We get sensitive and touchy. We get defensive and critical. Father, it's hard for us—we confess it's hard for us—to put up with even the little annoyances of life, let alone crucifixion.

Forgive us. Help us, Lord, to learn to love the brethren. May we find sustenance and strength and encouragement in the fellowship of the brethren.

Help us to love our enemies. By your Holy Spirit, fill us with love, patience, the fruit that we need. O God, it's easy for us to talk back and fight back and hurt, but I pray you'll give us the grace that we need to act like the Lord Jesus, to grow.

Even now, as we come to the Lord's table, cleanse our hearts. I pray for those here who maybe have never been saved at all, never trusted Christ. O Father, may they trust Him today.

Any listening to our voice today, I pray, O God, you might speak to their hearts and may they respond by trusting Christ. This is our prayer, through Jesus Christ our Lord, amen.