Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

Final sermon in mini series that flowed out of verses 17-20 about a righteousness that exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and pharisees.

Jesus gave six examples of this greater righteousness.

In them He explains that disciples of Jesus (people of His Kingdom) are people who are being transformed at the heart level and away from a robotic, outward adherence to the law.

The section we’re looking at this morning is simultaneously part B of last week’s section on a Radical response to those who wish to do evil to you.

Even in the midst of being insulted, ripped off, voluntold, and wrongfully used, a disciple cultivates a predisposition that prevents even rightful retaliation.

Last week I told the first half of the story of Operation Auca… the five missionary families that were called to the Amazon jungle of Ecuador to bring the gospel to the Huaorani Indians.

And after several attempts to shower gifts on the people to show they were coming in peace, the men decided it was time to go and meet the people.

They were ambushed and all five men were speared to death, and their bodies thrown in to the river.

A tragic event and from an observers perspective, it was a pointless tragedy.

Tension: The oil diggers and the missionaries

In the sermon “Radical Response” I paralleled the response of the oil workers to the attacks of the Auca’s and the response of the armed missionaries.

The missionaries from everyone’s else’s perspective should have responded to the attackers in kind, but they didn’t.

Why didn’t they?

In a testimony given by Rachel Saint (Nate Saint’s sister) the reason the men didn’t shoot is because they predetermined that no matter what happened that day, they would not shoot the people that God had called them to reach.

In other words, self-preservation was not their calling, but sacrifice.

I wonder where they got that idea from?

They were called to greatness.

“He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.”

-Jim Elliot

So what became of the Auca’s?

The men’s wives and families that were left behind?

First, as Nate Saint’s son (Steve) explains, his mom led her children to pray for God to save the one’s who killed her husband and his friends.

And night after night they would pray for the salvation of the Huaorani, just like dad led them to do when he was alive.

The wives and families of the others began to do the same until one of the women (Elisabeth Elliot) and Rachel Saint (Nate’s sister) decided that they would carry on the mission that God had called them to and go back and be the salt and light of Jesus to that same tribe in that same village.

What happened next can only be described as a miraculous outpouring of the life transforming grace of God.

As those two ladies brought the Scriptures to the people and showed them what it looked like to forgive and love, many of the tribe began to see their sin and came to know Jesus.

The first thing that Rachel did after leading many of these men to Christ was to train up preachers who would become the elders of the church in the Amazon.

The men who speared those missionaries to death were now studying God’s Word and teaching it to each other.

Years later one of the daughters of the missionaries was baptized in the same spot her father had been speared to death by the very men who threw the spears.

The grandchildren of the missionaries consider their grandpa’s killers, their very own grandpa.

What happened is that those families lived out what Jesus speaks of in the passage this morning.

What happened is that they followed Jesus’ teaching to “Love My Enemies.”

And before we shrug off their story as disconnected from our own, we must know that these families were not super Christians.

They were ordinary, sinful people who were following Jesus, before transformed at the heart level by the Holy Spirit, and passionate for the mission of God for the world.

That’s all.

Teaching

I think it needs to be said and I’ll say it again, Christian maturity is not measured by how much of the Bible you’ve read, or memorized, how much time you spend in prayer, how much theological knowledge you have.

I believe that the main point Jesus is making in this second section of the sermon is that:

Christian maturity is measured by how well we love those we can tolerate the least and have hurt us the most

Matt 5:

All throughout the sermon, Jesus has been deepening the meaning of several Mosaic laws and correcting the interpretations of many of those laws.

So, we’re very familiar with the way Jesus has been teaching about the people of the Kingdom and the way those people relate to God, each other, and the rest of the world around them.

He begins by quoting the Torah,

I think it’s pretty clear who “neighbor” is from this passage, but let’s broaden the context to make sure:

If I’m a Jew in the first century, I know who my neighbor is, it’s my brother’s and sisters in the Jewish race.

If I flip the page, I’m to include another group of people, the immigrant:

But it had become an increasingly popular belief especially leading up to the first century that it was not only permissible, but god-like to hate your enemies.

The Community Rule (also known as the Manual of Discipline), which dates from around 100 B.C., regulated the life of a Jewish sect at Qumran.

According to Dr. Marvin Wilson, "The people of Qumran had withdrawn to the wilderness to await the end of the age.

They were the `sons of light,' equipping themselves through intense discipline, rituals of purity, and scriptural study to overcome their enemy, the `sons of darkness.'

"1 The Community Rule begins by saying that members of the community should be taught to seek God and obey Moses and the Prophets so that "they may love all the sons of light, each according to his lot in God's design, and hate all the sons of darkness, each according to his guilt in God's vengeance."

I want you to imagine for a moment that we are living in a moderately friendly country to belief in one God, but the regime only allowed belief and practice in that God if you adhered to the demands of the regime.

To make matters worse, our pastors and seminary professors were very involved in politics and seemed to care more about keeping the relationship with those politicians in good standing than caring for the people.

And not only were most of the religious leaders compromised, but the wealthy of the community knew that if they wanted to keep their wealth they were going to have to work for the regime and offer kickbacks just so they could keep their wealth and stranding in the society.

During the weekly gatherings those pastors would get up and lead worship, teaching that they must keep their relationships tight with the government or we would all lose our freedom to worship.

Those pastors would speak distantly of the day when the Messiah would come to crush the regime and make all that was wrong, right.

In that setting Jesus said, “I know that it’s popular to believe that we should love each other and hate our enemies, but the deepest sense of God’s law is not that.

It is to love your enemies.

It is to love those who hate you, those who persecute you, those that have turned their backs on the Jewish community for status and wealth.

Love your enemies.

Love them and pray for them

What does Jesus mean, love them?

We talked about love earlier this year, so I won’t spend too much time with the meaning of the word.

But let’s just remember that even though we use the term to reflect emotion, that‘s not what Jesus means.

The love used here is the word agape.

Agape very simply carries with it two main ideas:

Love is a heart attitude that leads to prayer

When Jesus says to love your enemy, he means that the heart attitude or the way we think about (in this case) the enemy is to be decidedly good.

It’s impossible to have warm fuzzy feelings about someone who is filled with hate.

So just as we saw last week, Jesus is serious about His disciples taking the time and the space to think about their offenders in a way that does not imagine harm coming upon them, but good.

We have a handful of examples in Scripture where we see this very thing taking place:

The first is our King as He hung on the cross, exhausted, tortured, forsaken he prayed for his enemies and said,

The first martyr, Stephen, prayed this prayer as undoubtedly many of the same crowd that cried for the death of Jesus, stoned Stephen

When someone inflicts pain on you, on your family what is your heart attitude?

For most of us, it is not this.

I’m afraid the prevailing heart attitude is the opposite of the Proverb:

Proverb 24:17

Love is not only a heart attitude that leads to prayer, but agape love is also

Love is a heart attitude that leads to action

Biblical, agape is not passive.

Jesus is not teaching the disciples that the way of the Kingdom people being led by the Spirit as we journey through life is being run over and walked on.

No, agape is active.

And every one of the NT writers that wrote about this struggle to be salt and light in dark places understood agape.

Agape begins by sacrificing time in our schedules and in our lives to think through our relationships, find the ones where we’re being tested and pursue those relationships with active agape.

When Luke is reflecting on the teaching of Jesus, he doesn’t split the two ideas from each other, but understands them as one in the same:

When Paul was writing to the church in Rome he said:

The wise king told his son:

You have to imagine yourself in the position of these disciples.

Can you imagine how disappointing this would be if we were under the kind of oppression that they were under?

And then for the one person who could rescue us from that tyranny shows up and says this?

Jesus doesn’t really owe anyone an explanation, but He paints a beautiful picture to ground his disciples.

He gives them a motivation for loving their enemies:

Why should we love our enemy?

Matt 5:

Some have assumed that Jesus is giving an entrance exam in saying (so that), but we have already learned that Jesus is teaching the crowd what people living under the reign of Christ is like, not a legal requirement for entering the Kingdom.

So what does Jesus mean, than?

What Jesus said would be very similar to the way we talk about likeness.

My mom does this all the time; she’ll be watching my kids play around and look over at my wife and say, “He is his father’s son.”

What does she mean?