We turn to Leviticus chapter 19 for the reading of the word, and then Luke chapter 6. Let's stand together. Just one verse. Well, we'll read two verses from Leviticus 19, but a reminder that the duty to love one's neighbor is not a New Testament concept, as so many would say, but rooted deeply in the old covenant. From Leviticus 19 and verse 17, you shall not hate your brother in your heart. You shall surely rebuke your neighbor and not bear sin because of him. You shall not take vengeance nor bear any grudge against the children of your people. But you shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord. And then we turn to the Gospel of Luke, beginning at verse 27. And again, hear the word of the Lord. But I say to you who hear, Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you, and pray for those who spitefully use you. To him who strikes you on one cheek, offer the other also. And from him who has taken away your cloak, do not withhold your tunic either. Give to everyone who asks of you, and from him who takes away your goods, do not ask them back. And just as you want men to do to you, you also do to them likewise. But if you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. And if you lend to those from whom you hope to receive back, what credit is that to you? For even sinners lend to sinners to receive as much back. But love your enemies, do good and lend, hoping for nothing in return. And your reward will be great. You'll be sons of the Most High, for He is kind to the unthankful and evil. Therefore be merciful, just as your Father also is merciful." And this is the Word of the Lord. We turn in the preaching of the Word to Luke chapter 6, looking at verses 27 to 36 in the matter of Christian love. The well-known Anglican preacher J.C. Ryle said the following about this text. The teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ here is confined to one great subject. And that subject is Christian love and charity. And charity is the grandest characteristic of the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. Matter of love is central to Christianity. Paul would write to the church at Colossae after giving them a list of his instructions, above all these things, put on love, which is the bond of perfection. And he wrote to the Corinthians, and now abide faith, hope, and love, these three, but the greatest of these is love. The sum of the law, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. This is the whole duty of man. Jesus said, on these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. The entire ethical weight of all of the Scriptures, the revealed will of God, can be summarized in love, for love is the fulfillment of the law. Love lies at the heart of Christianity. Fundamentally, it is the heart of Christianity, this conception of love. He that does not love, John wrote, does not know God. If you don't love, you don't know God. It is impossible to say, I know God, and not be filled with love, have a heart of love. John goes on to say for this reason, for God is love. which is an electrifying and powerful statement about God. It's similar to the one that we read also in the Gospel of John that God is light and in Him there is no darkness at all. His resplendent holiness proclaimed. Here is love proclaimed. God is love. It's no surprise also that John also understood something else. That not only that God is love, Now by this we know that we, he went on to write, by this we know that we are the children of God when we love God and keep His commandments. And here's the great dynamic, the God who first loves us, we'll see later in the sermon, who pours that love into our hearts by His Holy Spirit, so fundamentally changes our formerly sinful natural disposition That we are enabled by that same powerful grace to love in a way that is analogous to the love of God. The love of God that was shown to us in Jesus Christ our Lord. The scene that Jesus commands an intense kind of love is what we're going to look at for a moment. Well, let's go to verse 27 first. The intensity of the command of love given by our Lord Jesus Christ to His disciples is the following, love your enemies. This sermon will be about loving your enemies. But let me remind you of this, that if it's about loving your enemies, it has downstream applications or implications for every single person in your life. Sometimes Christians can have the pettiest of arguments and the most bitter of dispositions to each other. So far from the biblical conception of love, it should embarrass us. Jesus here commands us to love our enemies. outside of this comfortable circle of family, outside of our closest friends, outside of the broader church fellowship, outside of the walls, to those who are even persecutors. We go to the scene in which Jesus says these words. We go back, verse 17, and Jesus is preaching at a level place with a crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea and Jerusalem who came to hear him and be healed of their diseases. He's speaking to a great crowd. We saw as we looked at the beginning of this sermon of our Lord Jesus Christ, sometimes called here in Luke, the Sermon on the Plain, but it's very closely analogous to the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew. We saw that at this point in Jesus' ministry, people are coming to Him for all kinds of reasons. I mean, He is certainly the most amazing man that anyone in that time period had ever seen, thought about, or heard. I mean, in his ministry, he will raise the dead, he will feed the 5,000, he will teach with an indescribable authority that shuts down all the authorities of his day. He will, in his ministry, face the kingdoms of this world and even Satan, the prince of the power of this age, and he will conquer them all. He will not only raise the dead like Lazarus and the son of the widow of Nain, but He Himself will rise from the grave. And there was something of this resurrection power in the supernatural dimensions of His person, the God-man, evident already from the very beginning of His ministry. And so people came for a lot of different reasons. Some of them were just curious. Some of them just wanted to show us a sign. This is the best magician we've ever seen. We're entertained by this. He has something that no one else has. And others came with a humility of recognition that this was the Messiah, the Savior of sinners. The One who would be exalted one day to be the King of glory from His position as suffering servant. Who could look beyond what you could see with natural eyes. And by faith, like Simeon and Anna, recognized that the Son of God was here in the flesh. And that God was at work and moving in history. And that salvation for sinners had come in this person. And this crowd, the sermon that Jesus is preaching, is going to cut through that divide. The people who want him for what might be determined his outward reputation and people who understand what he really came to do and who he really was. And so we had the first sets of blessings and woes. And I want to just remind you of them. Jesus is making a division in this crowd. He's saying for some interesting reasons, he uses again, money and food and emotional state and popularity. And he says, contrary to what you naturally expect, spiritual blessedness is possessed by those who in this world are willing to suffer for me and for my kingdom. And the opposite, those who are not willing to suffer anything or give anything up for me in my kingdom, they are under woes or curses. And with this is a theme that helps us understand the command, love your enemies. There is the idea in Jesus' teaching again and again, that if you follow Him, you will stand against the world, the world will oppose you and you will be persecuted. Look at this in the text. Blessed are you, verse 22, when men hate you and when they exclude you and they revile you and your name is cast out as evil. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy for indeed your reward is great in heaven. And then the opposite is a woe, woe to you when all men speak well of you for so did their fathers to the false prophets. And it's in the context of following Jesus, counting the cost, being willing to be a disciple and being opposed by the world that the next command comes. Love your enemies. Love your enemies. It's in the context, particularly, of persecution and opposition for following Christ that the command comes to love your enemies. What is love? Let's unpack the command. Attitude or disposition of the heart. It's inseparable from an affection that is in the heart. And it produces or leads to the giving of oneself for the sake of another. Self-giving. So there's two things in love. There is the disposition of the heart. And then there is, in separately related, the act of giving. Love your enemies. And again, who are enemies here? It's a familiar word used. has roots in the Old Testament, the idea of the enemies of God's people, the foes of Israel. If you were in Israel, the most obvious might be if you're walking down the street, a Roman soldier who was an occupying, a symbol of the occupying power who had wrested political control over the land given to Abraham and his descendants. Those who are hostile, it says, rejoice, for they did in like manner their fathers did to the prophets. That raises the specter of more than just being excluded or having a hard day. It means even to be killed for the sake of following Christ. These are the enemies in view. Now, a little aside, it's important to have the context in view here. These commands are not pacifist ideals, as there are some. invariably liberal theologians, who would take these to be pacifist ideals. But these are the commanded disposition of Christians in times of persecution. What I mean by that is, if someone were to say to you, you follow Jesus Christ, you say, yes, I do, and they say, okay, then off with your head, or I will take your home, your land, I will turn the screws up in order to make you deny Jesus Christ. And Jesus said, love those people. The examples He gives in verses 29 and 30 heighten the intensity. Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who spitefully use you. To him who strikes you on the one cheek, offer the other also. To him who takes away your tunic, do not withhold your cloak, do not withhold your tunic. Give to everyone who asks of you, and to him who takes your goods, do not ask them back." Here Jesus is saying, as the intensity and variety of the persecutions of evil men on account of you following me increases and ratchets up, you are to never change your disposition towards them, not hold to the things of this world, but be willing to give everything and ultimately to not love even your own life to death, but hold fast to me. And as you do this, to show a heart of compassion, join together with giving to those who would seek to separate you from the Lord. Now this is, I want to say a little word about our day. We live in a day where everyone wants what's called now social justice. We used to call this the social gospel. Liberation theologians had all different names. It comes around again and again and again. Now we're in the age of social justice where everybody wants the following, listen carefully, safety, or a safe place, emotional well-being, and personal peace. These are the highest ideals. Listen to what Jesus said, he says, blessed are you who hunger, who weep, when you're hated, when you're poor. When these things happen for following me, then love your enemies. It's the opposite of what we're being told today. We're being told to extract a pound of flesh without forgiveness for all those who wrong us. Jesus is asking for a very hard thing, difficult thing. He's asking for a kind of love that shines brightest in the New Covenant era, which is linked to the cross. We'll see that in a moment. He's asking us to live by principles of justice and mercy and of compassion even when we're wronged. Look at verse 31, and just as you want men to do to you, do also to them likewise. He's calling us to use again the words here of Matthew Henry, another commentator. Be honest and just in all your dealings. Freely give to those who are in need. Be generous and forgiving all those who have injured you. We do not demand our rights. We do not seek revenge. For vengeance, says the Lord, is mine. I will repay. But we love our enemies to our own hurt. Jesus intensifies the command, you keep reading, because he gives the principles in verses 27 to 31, but then he asks some questions. He says, anticipating that there'd be some recoil. If you simply love people who love you, what credit is that to you? And what Jesus is saying here is the quality of love that I am looking for in my disciples is this, that it is bestowed on the unlovely, the unlovable, and the undeserving freely. Jesus says sinners, those who are outside my kingdom, they are happy to love those who love them. Jesus said, if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that? He says, sinners do the same. It's easy to do a favor for a neighbor who's always doing you favors. Jesus said, it means nothing in my kingdom. It means it's no credit to you. It's interesting language. He says, unbelievers easily offer affection to those from whom they've received affection. Everything is a quid pro quo for the unbeliever, an exchange of goods, a reciprocation, you keep reading. And if you lend to those from whom you hope to receive back, what credit is that to you? For even sinners lend to sinners to receive as much back. There's nothing about this, when everything is an equal exchange, when you give, you expect to return in kind, that matches the quality of Christian love that says, love your enemies. If you think that this, Jesus says, is meeting the bar of my command, you have not yet understood my commandments. He's saying, Christian, if you were to love people from whom you expect no advantage at all, and even if they, on account of your love for Christ, would mistreat and harm you, Jesus says, if you just do it for reward, what credit is that to you? He says it three times. He's saying, if this is how you are living, if you refuse to love your enemies, this reveals a profound spiritual heart deficit. Something is missing within. There's an emptiness. There's a failure to comprehend the nature and glory of my kingdom. And if you are already beginning To grab hold of something here in this text is that there is something profoundly different about Christ and His Kingdom. There is something unusual, unnatural, I mean concerning natural fallen man. Unusual, unnatural, profoundly different, surprisingly powerful about Christian love. It's very different from the spirit of the age in the world that I just mentioned, where the ideology which is sweeping churches, and I saw some of it this week, even as I talked to people at our General Assembly, and it's all over right now. Yet every hurt needs justice, safety. Forgiveness cannot lead to restoration. Pain is the unforgivable sin. Contrast that with this great hymn, Christ who pain didst undergo for my poor sake. Jesus is saying something very, very intense without a willingness, and I would even say an eagerness, to extend this kind of mercy. You do not understand yet the nature of his mission and what it means to be in his kingdom. I know a lot of you here have told me stories of being hurt very deeply by even friends and family. And that hurt, pain, sadness are all very real. But even in our moments of greatest hurt, if we're a Christian, it doesn't mean that we simply go on, for example, being abused without seeking any remedy. I'm not saying that. But if you're a Christian and you look on hardships and wrongs, there should be something in your heart, even in your tears, that you have a remaining pity for those who are so far from God, that while you know Jesus Christ and His saving love, they know nothing. and that the fundamental longing of your heart, even in the tears, is that they would turn from sin and know Christ and the power of His resurrection, and that this in you enables you and drives you to do something which is not natural, which is to even love your enemies while they persecute you. The strongest language here of the text is love your enemies. If you keep reading to the end of verse 35 and 36, well, we'll get to the end of verse 35, but Jesus repeats the command here, verse 35, but love your enemies, do good, and lend. And here's a little phrase you need to have just sink into your heart, hoping for nothing in return. Nothing. I would be content to offer my heart freely and willingly if in this life I would receive not one token of reciprocal love or kindness or favor in return. I'll just give. I would just love my enemies. Sometimes people say things like, you know, I deserve this, or why don't people notice me, or wait for compliments, or they're pitying themselves. Jesus' ethic is so different. Hoping for nothing in return. You'd be happy if you got nothing. Now this doesn't seem possible, does it? Something here, if you're listening carefully and you have any sense of what it is to live in a fallen world, the burden of the commands are so great that they are not common to natural man to obey them. It is also not common to natural man to have the power to obey them. Where would this come from in me, you might be asking? You should be asking that. Where could this possibly come from in me? As a matter of fact, when I hear these commands, if I were to think about them long, apart from the next point in the sermon in a moment, I have a sense of an internal collapse and inability. That there's something being called forth from me in these commands that I do not naturally possess, apart from the grace of God. I think about also the matter of love and how I haven't yet defined it in this sermon, and that without a definition, there's no way to keep the command. Years ago, some of you can remember this, 1997, September 6th, there was a funeral that was watched by the whole world. Some of you perhaps remember who it was, Princess Diana. Tony Blair, Prime Minister, Great Britain reads 1 Corinthians 13 to the world. Greatest of these is love. 2.5 billion people are said to have tuned in. Just think about that. The great high chapter on love in the scriptures read to a third, maybe at that time, closer to a half of the world's population. It's a quite remarkable moment, actually. We talk about it. We read about it. We sing about it. We turn on the radio. Every third song is about some sort of love, usually not a good kind. But you ask yourself, what is it? Where is it from? How could I obey a command like this? How do I love like this? Notice in verse 35, the language of no credit turns to reward. says, your reward will be great if you do this. And then some powerful language, and you will be sons of the Most High, for He is kind and merciful, kind to the unthankful and evil. Therefore be merciful as your Father in heaven is merciful. If you do this, Jesus says, be no credit to you if you just love the lovely to your advantage. But if you do this, He says there'll be a reward. What is the language of reward? Well, if you look up in the text, it's the same sermon. Jesus said, rejoice in that day, verse 23, and great will be your reward in heaven. He's saying that there is a link between the capacity, ability, and exercise of this kind of love and your ultimate destination in glory. You know, if you look at social media, it's kind of a cesspool of bitterness and arguing. immaturity, massive proportions, particularly it seems that young men are prone to a kind of hard-edged, unloving immaturity. Perhaps young women have their own sins on social media as well, but I think especially of the bitter tone that pervades most of it. The opposite should be true of the Christian. Not a bitter tone, not a ungodly tone, not a bitter dealing with enemies and those who oppose. From social media to your personal relationships, to life in the church, to your workplace, wherever it is, there should be something else. And then Jesus says, when there is, it's a sign of something different within. you've been translated to a different family. You've been moved from the natural fallen realm into a supernaturally glorious, the family, the family of God. You have been moved from the place where God looks upon your heart and sees an empty hatred and a selfishness to where God looks upon the hearts of his people and sees those who are willing to love as they have been loved by him. The theology of the final state is central here in Jesus' theology of love. The second thing is the theology of being adopted by God. Sons of the Most High. Look at the next phrase. The Most High is God. To be sons means to belong to His family. To have the family resemblance, the family of God, the Kingdom of Heaven is marked by those, clearly, who love their enemies. The climactic principle Jesus gets to is that you'll be sons of the Most High. He is kind to the unthankful and evil. Therefore, be merciful as your Father also is merciful. And now He's tracing If you go to the command, love your enemies, and as he runs through this, pressing the hearts, he ends at the source of the river, which is his Father in heaven, whom he knows and who is the source of love, who is kind to the unthankful and evil and is merciful. He's tracing the river to its source. If you dig deeper here into our Savior's teaching, He sees something glorious. He's saying that this kind of love is rooted in the love of God. The Amazon River. People have been searching for its source, I learned this week, because I was trying to think of an illustration of the idea of source. And people have argued over the source of the Amazon, even in the last few years again, trying to figure out which river running into the hills is the longest, most original source of the Amazon. It's interesting when you do that with a river is that it breaks into all these smaller and smaller tributaries and it becomes harder and harder to tell what the source is. It is the opposite with love. The source of all true love is the Triune God Himself. And that love flows from God onto and upon and into and from His people by the power of His Holy Spirit. God is the one who loves. For God so loved the world. The great John 3.16 passage which rightly stands at the center of our consciousness when we think about God. For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life against the backdrop of sin, rebellion, hatred, of hostility, of violence, of mistreatment. That brings condemnation to humanity against that backdrop. There is God, the Father, the Father of the Son, Jesus Christ, who loved the world and so sent His Son to die. And Jesus is talking about His Father. He says, this is My Father who is merciful. The eternal purpose of the Father is to send the Son. The Son is the declaration. He is the revelation of the love of God for sinners. Matter of fact, Paul says, as he writes to Titus, he says that when Jesus appeared, he says the kindness and love of God appeared in the flesh. If God is love, Jesus is the love of God personified in a walking, breathing, living, mediator, savior, God-man. And in this his love, John would write, not that we loved God, but that God loved us and gave his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. And then John says, Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another. And the Apostle Paul says in Romans chapter 5, those famous words about the love of God, the seeking love of God, and who He gives His love to. For when we were still without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly. For scarcely for a righteous man will one die. Perhaps for a good man someone would even dare to die. But God demonstrates His own love toward us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. We were reconciled to God by the initiating, seeking love of God while we were enemies. You see, the thing that Jesus is pointing to when he says, love your enemies, is a kind and quality of love. that is found first and ultimately in the triune God, displayed at the cross and the Father giving His Son, who pours forth from the Father and the Son and the gift of the Spirit, Romans 5.5, the Spirit of God has poured the love of God into our hearts. And so this great river, this great fountainhead, the headwaters of all love for God is love from the Father through the Son and His mediatorial work at the cross and the empty tomb, by the power of the Holy Spirit, capturing overcoming, breaking our hearts while we were yet enemies. And then that principle of new life flowing from us so that the person who would seek to divide us from the Christ we have known and loved by persecution and hatred, we can say, I have been loved with an everlasting love. and my highest ideal, what I now would live for by the grace of God, is that I would die so that you could know the love that I have come to know in Christ. Because when I was like you, He found me, and He loved me. So I give you what He gave me, and I hold nothing back. I have come to know the supernatural spring of divine love. The imprint of the family is on me. And I understand I can love my enemies. So I have been loved. Central critical mark of a true Christian. Really it's a supernatural ability to give love in conditions and circumstances and to people that no natural sinful man or woman could love on their own. Jesus said, love your enemies. A few things. This should sift your hearts. Calvin says this about the text when Christ expressly declares that no man will be a child of God unless he loves those who hate him. That's what Jesus is saying here. It's impossible to be a child of God with this not to be true to some degree. Who would dare to say that we are not bound to observe this doctrine? The Parable of the Unforgiving Servant, Jesus teaches the same thing. It's impossible to know this love and not give it to others. Because we know that the love of God is a divine, supernatural act of the Spirit, in which our eyes have been opened to the loveliness of Christ. We understand that it's impossible to know that love and not to love. And so I would plead with you, if you are unwilling to love, that you would turn to the God who declares his love to enemies and find in him forgiveness and rest through the blood of Christ's cross and learn for the first time ever what it is to be loved and to truly love. This is for our witness in the world. The world is full of bitterness, revenge, holding faults, petty arguments. I think it was J.C. Rouse said, filled with morbid sensibilities about my honor. How different we ought to be. I said earlier in the sermon, if you're to love your enemies here at Covenant, God forbid that we don't love one another. We've been reconciled to God and to one another by the blood of the same cross. If the highest order love is commanded, how about your brothers and sisters, children at home? It's unbelievable sometimes. I can remember, I'll just stick to my own childhood. And I have enough memories to know that the way I was willing to treat my siblings was terrible. Children, you should never fight with each other. You should never be bitter with each other. You should never be unkind or cruel. Even when you're mistreated. Because the love of Christ compels us to love one another. So love your brothers and sisters. Children, love your parents. Parents, love your children. In every relationship, this is part of what we do because of Christ's love for us. If you're here this morning afraid that because of all your sins and failings that you haven't done enough, which is often the position of the sensitive heart. Here be reminded that in the command to love your enemies, which presupposes the love of God, there is the whole grace and glory of the gospel of Jesus Christ, who promises to those who still in their fallen and weak condition, yet I'm talking to those who are saved by grace, but still have a remnant of sin within you. You are both comforted here, even in the commands of Christ, which are rooted in the gospel, And be reminded that what God calls you to do, He'll give you the grace to do. So ask for His help. Meditate more on the love of God. He is kind to the unthankful and evil. Be merciful for your Father is merciful. There's not a day in your life where that shouldn't shape the entirety. You're thinking about Him and you're acting towards others. And you're comforted in the gospel. What God is like is astonishing. This is his heart proclaimed by his son. And then an encouragement finally. But love your enemies, do good and lend, hoping for nothing in return. And your reward will be great. Sometimes someone wrongs you and you're like, is it really? Is it really? Can I really love? I'm gonna lose. You might in this life, you might make a mistake of being too generous against someone who would perhaps hurt you again. In other words, you overestimate somebody and you get hurt again. It doesn't matter. It's not a mistake of love. It's because you're unable to see everything that the future will bring. But remember this, even when you do this, your Father who sees in secret, who knows your heart, who knows your desire to say, Lord, as you've loved me, give me grace to love others. One day, he will reward you openly. Let's pray together. Lord our God, we pray for grace that your word would so captivate our hearts and bring us back again to you that we would return from here and go out into the world with the kind of assurance of Your love in our hearts, a knowledge of its dimensions and glory, thoughts of You, our Father, who is merciful and kind, that we'd be willing to love even our enemies, to do good to those who persecute us, and to be willing to give up all the comforts of this life, standing fast for Christ, and to speak of His cross, glory, and kingdom. Deliver us, we pray, from our bitternesses, and produce in us, we ask, to greater and greater degree a conformity to Christ, in whose name we pray. Amen. Look up and receive the blessing of the Lord. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God the Father, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.