We take up the threads this morning in
the Sermon on the Mount, where we left
them down a little while ago now.
So I ask you kindly to turn with
me to Matthew chapter 5, a passage that
begins with verse 43.
You have heard that it was said, love
your neighbor and hate your enemy.
But I tell you, love your enemies and
pray for those who persecute you, that you
may be the sons of your Father in
heaven.
He causes his Son to rise on the
evil and the good, and sends rain on
the righteous and the unrighteous.
If you love those who love you, what
reward will you get?
Are not even the tax collectors doing that?
And if you greet only your brothers, what
are you doing more than others?
Do not even pagans do that?
Be perfect therefore, as your Heavenly Father is
perfect.
Now we can only glimpse at this great
passage this morning, but I trust the Lord
helping us.
We can see some of the salient factors
there that apply as much this morning as
at any time in the history of mankind
and of the Christian Church.
Becoming a godly person does not mean that
you cease to have enemies.
There is a kind of notion abroad that
that is so.
That if you really are a godly person,
then everyone will like you, everyone will admire
you, and everyone will kind of pat you
on the back.
Well, that is born out of ignorance of
history and of scripture.
The one significant answer to that is that
God himself, the only good as Jesus says,
God became incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, and
the world around literally hated him to the
point of crucifying him.
You can never in this life, in this
world, experience and manifest a kind and quality
of godliness or of goodness that will transform
men and women to love you until they
themselves are transformed by the gospel.
Therefore, it is a very significant question, a
very important one, how do we deal with
our enemies?
How does the godly man or woman who
began with repentance toward God and faith in
our Lord Jesus Christ in accordance with the
summons of John the Baptist and of Jesus
that we have in the early chapters of
Matthew and of the other gospels, how is
the person who begins his spiritual pilgrimage there
in repentance and in faith, then proceeds to
experience the grace of God along at least
the most superficial level indicated by the Beatitudes,
and who begins to hear the summons of
our Lord to such ethical standards and norms
as are enunciated in this chapter 5 that
we've been looking at, how does a person
of that character react to his enemies?
Well, my text is the answer.
And if there was no other passage in
the New Testament, there are of course, but
even if there were none other, we have
the answer here.
It's very challenging, you will feel it, I
feel it.
It catches each one of us and it
touches us at a raw spot because, we
have to say, we fall short of it.
That is no reason, however, why we should
not acknowledge our sins and seek the grace
of God to do better than we have.
And I trust that on this Lord's Day,
the knowledge that our Lord Jesus who died
on the cross for us and is risen
again and ascended at the Father's right hand,
we shall come boldly to the throne of
grace to find mercy and forgiveness and grace
to help in our time of need.
This is the summons.
I say to you, love your enemies and
pray for those who persecute you.
Two main things I want to look at.
The first, very briefly, but it's necessary to
come to the main section first looking at
this.
Here we have a veritable condemnation of a
venerable tradition in Jewish life.
You have heard that it was said, says
Jesus, love your neighbor and hate your enemy.
That was the tradition.
But I tell you, love your enemies and
pray for those who persecute you.
Now, in the first place, I want to
say just something about the probable process by
which this tradition had developed over a period
of time.
Now, we can't be dogmatic here, but it
is suggested by a number of people that
it developed in a certain way.
Where would they have heard anyone, anyone teaching
that you should hate your enemies?
Now, I know we do that, but even
when we do, is there not something in
our souls, in our consciences, which tells us
it's wrong?
But where would the ancient Jews of Jesus
day, where would they have heard anyone bold
enough to say, hate your enemies?
Well, they would have heard it among the
leading teachers of Jewry of Jesus day.
It was actually taught.
Not only had they constricted the meaning of
the word neighbor to apply exclusively to the
Jews themselves, so that everybody else outside became
something quite different.
The neighbor was only by fellow Jew, but
in some circles at any rate, they were
encouraged literally to hate their enemies.
And in one community in Jesus day, that
lived very near the Dead Sea, this was
a common saying of theirs, and I quote,
love your brother, hate the outsider.
Unquote.
It is really against this kind of background
alone that we can understand the question which
prompted Jesus' parable of the Good Samaritan.
You remember the question.
A teacher of the law asked him, what
did he ask him?
Who is my neighbor?
You see, it had become confused, because they
so often thought of their neighbors exclusively in
terms of a fellow Jew.
And this man was really puzzled.
The question may seem nonsensical to us, but
because of this tradition, it was a very
real one.
How could any Jew with the Old Testament
in his hand, how could he come to
hold such a view as this?
Well, let's say negatively in the first place,
he did not get it in the Bible.
He did not get it in the Old
Testament.
That's important.
The Old Testament does not, positively not, teach
us to hate our enemies.
But more positively, it has been suggested that
a number of factors were involved in the
process whereby some segments at any rate of
the Jewish community and leadership and those in
teaching, in the authority of teacher, with authority
to teach, came to believe this kind of
thing.
First of all, it has been suggested that
this emerged because of an unjustified conclusion arising
out of their evident election by God.
Now, this is a danger that is still
present in the Christian church.
If you know that God has chosen you
to be a Christian, and I trust you
do, but if you know that God has
chosen you, then it is possible for that
soul to react, for you so to react
to that that you say, well, I must
be better than others, and he must have
chosen me because he saw something in me
that he didn't see in other people.
Now, this is a false and unjustified reaction,
of course, but this is what happened way
back here in New Testament times and before.
Many people felt because God had chosen them,
so evidently chosen them, well, he must have
seen something special in them that he didn't
see in anyone else.
Now, God, of course, rejects that.
When God chose Abraham and his seed in
him, Abram was a worshipper of idols, and
if tradition is right, his father was a
maker of idols and a seller of idols.
That's uncertain, but if it is right, it
makes the picture darker still.
Whatever about Isaac, Jacob was a supplanter from
his mother's womb, and Esau was profane.
And over and over again, one of the
prophets or one of the Old Testament writers
says, God did not choose you because you
became numerically strong or superior in any way.
It was out of his grace, not because
of what you were at the time, but
because of my love, my grace, my mercy
for you.
That was the sole reason of my choice.
Now, we cannot look with a condemning eye
upon the ancient Jews without recognizing the possibility
of the same thing taking place in our
own hearts.
That could have been one factor.
Then here is another.
It is suggested that an unreasonable and unworthy
reaction had emerged to the fact that the
Jews had suffered so much at the hands
of Gentiles.
Now, this was true, of course.
They had been savagely treated by the hands
of the Egyptians.
They had been savagely treated by the Syrians.
Yes, and by Antiochus Epiphanes of Syria.
Indeed, they had been squeezed through the meshes
to powder and humiliated.
And this, in turn, had in measure gendered
a hatred of those who were non-Jewish,
so that they called them dogs.
Well, that may be so, but there is
one other thing that I want to mention
or generate because it comes up right in
this context.
And that was they had an untenable attitude
to Scripture.
You know, my friends, you and I can
go wrong anywhere if we do not wisely,
carefully, and consistently read and expound and understand
the Scriptures.
Reading the Scriptures is not adequate.
We must understand the Scriptures, and we must
take all the Scriptures, and we must be
loyal to them.
You see, they had come, so many of
them, to play ducks and drakes with the
Scriptures of the Old Testament.
For example, in this context, we have a
quotation.
You have heard it said, you shall love
your neighbor.
Now, that is a quote from Leviticus chapter
19, but you notice it's a quote and
it misses something out.
What does it miss out?
If this were a Sunday school class, I
would like you to put your hands up.
I won't ask you to do that.
But you see, they've left out two crucial
words from Leviticus 19, and you can't do
that with the Word of God.
Jesus said, you must love your neighbor, not
period, but qualified as yourselves.
And the neighbor is not just your fellow
Jew, it includes the alien, it includes anyone
that comes among you.
But you see, they missed those words out.
You and I can do exactly the same
thing, and it can lead to all kinds
of trouble.
But not only that, they had elevated something
that had no basis in Scripture, to assume
an authority which they gave to the Scriptures.
They added to that command of Scripture, that
we were to love your neighbor, they added
this to it, and hate your enemy.
You be careful of those who add to
Scripture.
Intentionally or unintentionally, it makes no difference.
The havoc wreaked is tragic in both cases.
Hate your enemies.
Now, this was contrary, you see, to the
whole ethos of the Old Testament.
I realize, of course, that this is not
commonly appreciated.
People generally speak of the Old Testament and
of the God of the Old Testament as
a God who is nothing but hate.
Don't let me go off at that tangent,
or I don't want to spend time representing
that point of view this morning, but it's
not true.
It was contrary to the teaching, for example,
of that very chapter from which I've quoted,
Leviticus 19.
It included the following instructions.
Listen to this.
I'm quoting from Leviticus, the Old Testament, at
the beginning of the Old Testament.
Listen to this.
In that same chapter, and they knew the
chapter because they quote from it.
Listen to this.
When you reap the harvest of your land,
do not reap to the very edges of
your field, or gather the gleanings of your
harvest.
Don't do that, says the Lord to his
people.
Do not go over your vineyard a second
time, or pick up the grapes that have
fallen.
What are you to do then?
Here it is.
Leave them for the poor and the alien.
My word.
You leave them for the poor and the
alien.
Leviticus 19, 9 and 10.
And listen to verses 33 and 34.
When an alien lives with you in your
land, a non-Jew, a Gentile, someone from
outside, a pagan, or an alien.
When an alien lives with you in your
land, do not mistreat him.
The alien living with you must be treated
as one of your native born.
Love him as yourself, for you were once
aliens in Egypt.
So much about the possible process whereby some
of the Jewish leaders and teachers have come
to believe something like this.
Love your neighbors, hate your enemies.
But you hear the pronouncement by which that
tradition was utterly condemned by our Lord Jesus
Christ.
I tell you, over against that, I'm telling
you, love your enemies and pray for those
who persecute you.
Two things I want to say only.
I want you to notice that our Lord
assumes authority over all the Jewish teachers of
his day who had made, who were involved
in the creating of such an impression, a
false impression.
And he sets himself out as the Son
of God, anointed to teach, to bring the
Father's word, and to correct all and sundry.
That doesn't make you popular, of course.
It's one of the reasons that led him
to the cross, if we follow it through
the New Testament.
God spoke in his Son and he came
in some measure to correct false impressions, as
we have gleaned already from this great sermon
on the mount, chapter 5.
The other thing is the necessity that he
affirms as one having authority.
He went beyond the mere condemnation of hate.
He insisted upon the necessity for subjects of
his kingdom positively to love their enemies and
to pray for their persecutors.
The condemnation of a venerable tradition.
Now that brings us to the exposition of
an imperative requirement.
Oh, let us prayerfully face this.
May God give us grace.
But I tell you, love your enemies and
pray for those who persecute you.
Be perfect, therefore.
It starts by saying love your enemies, pray
for those who persecute you, and Jesus brings
the passage to a conclusion with another positive
statement.
Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is
perfect.
And everything else is sandwiched in between those
two positive statements.
Love, pray on the one hand, then be
perfect even as your Father in heaven is
perfect.
Now the first thing we need to do
here is to try to be reminded of
the meaning of the command itself.
The verb to love, agapeo, from which we
have the now familiar word agape, that is
the word that is used here.
Other words for love more evidently involve the
feelings and the emotions.
There are three of them.
They all involve the feelings and the emotions
of people, much more so than this verb
agapeo, with its noun agape.
The others refer to the feelings, whether it
imply feelings of God towards man, or man
towards God, of a parent towards children, or
children towards parent, or a husband towards wife,
wife towards husband.
Indeed, one of them has reference to the
kind of feeling that a person may have
for his nation, legitimate feeling, a love of
nation.
But one of the outstanding features of agape
is that it is not primarily at any
rate a matter of feeling, but a matter
of will.
You see, the New Testament commands us to
love with agape love, because it is a
matter of will.
You can, if you're a child of God,
if you will.
Now it all hangs upon that.
The New Testament does not command us to
like people.
So you can't command that kind of thing
at will.
You can't command an affection if it is
not there.
It has to be developed, if it's coming
at all, or usually it has to be
rather spontaneous.
But the New Testament commands us to love
with a love of agape, because it is
a matter of will primarily.
And if we will, we can, by the
grace of God.
That is, of course, if we're Christian.
If you're born again of the Spirit of
God, and if you have the Word of
God to direct you, and the Spirit of
God to enable you, and the example of
Christ to look at, and the providence of
God to direct your way, then, brothers and
sisters, we say to our shame, there is
no reason why we do not love our
enemies.
And so Jesus commands us to express this
kind of love.
He doesn't say, you know, I would like
you to do it.
He commands us to do it.
Now that is startling, and it is breathtaking,
in its lofty and uncompromising demand.
Nevertheless, I want to say this this morning.
I suppose I could skip it, but I
want to say it.
You know, the Old Testament had prepared the
way for this.
I deliberately bring this out because of the
view of the Old Testament, which is common
as an unworthy book.
But you read the Old Testament carefully, and
read it all through, and study it, and
I believe you will find that the Old
Testament has prepared the way for this.
Even in the passages I've already quoted from
Leviticus 19, it has done so.
But let me just quote one or two
other passages to you again.
Listen to this, Exodus 23, verses 4 and
5.
If you come across your enemy's ox or
donkey wandering off, now we're really back in
Old Testament times, aren't we?
Your enemy's ox or donkey wandering off, what
do you do?
Well, here's the command.
Be sure to take it back to him.
If you see the donkey of someone who
hates you, fallen down under its load, do
not leave it there.
Be sure you help it, you help him
that is the owner with it, even though
the owner is your enemy.
Now listen to Proverbs chapter 25, verses 21
and 22.
If your enemy is hungry, give him food
to eat.
If he is thirsty, give him water to
drink.
In doing this, you will heap burning coals
on his head, and the Lord will reward
you.
You see, it's that Old Testament.
Didn't we hear that read from Romans chapter
12 this morning?
Yes, you did.
You heard it read from Romans chapter 12.
But it was a quote from Proverbs chapter
25.
Paul got it from Proverbs, from the Old
Testament.
What I'm saying is this, you see.
The Old Testament had actually prepared the way,
the right attitude of godly men and women
towards their very enemies.
Helping one's enemy in trouble is at least
a significant step towards the lofty goal of
loving him.
It doesn't bring you there all the way.
Such then is the abiding requirement of God.
Nothing less will satisfy him.
And for good reason, because you see, God
is love.
God is love.
Not only love.
He is holy, he is just, but God
is love.
Nothing must be allowed to eclipse the reality
and the wonder of that truth.
I read something strange in bed the other
day, not heavy, not even written by a
theologian.
But somebody was talking about love, not in
this context at all, one of these little
things that comes by post in a small
envelope.
But he said something about love which really
took me, took my mind, captured my imagination
quite a bit.
He spoke of the elasticity of love.
And I quote, you know, he says, love
has more stretch than any rubber band.
It extends out far beyond any conceivable length,
and it draws its object all the way
back to the lover.
Love goes out far and brings the lover
back.
It is so elasticated, it'll go out and
come back again.
It'll go down and bring the lover up
from the depths to the heights.
That's love.
You know, it's true.
But now you notice that Jesus linked something
with love here.
There's much more that could and should be
said about the command to love our enemies,
but let's look at this alongside of it.
Love your enemies and pray for those who
persecute you.
You hear, even in political and social circles
very often, you hear the words of Jesus
quoted, love your enemies, even though people don't
do it, nevertheless they refer to the words
of Jesus as sagacious and wise and good.
But I rarely hear this from political circles,
not often in the church even, that Jesus
linked love of enemies with praying for our
persecutors.
He did.
You may wonder why.
Well, it's because of the very nature of
love, of course.
What is agate love?
It is this.
It is to seek the highest and the
loftiest for the lowest and the least and
the unworthiest.
But you see, if I'm seeking the very
highest and best for anyone, I've got to
go to the source of the highest and
best to procure it, and that is God.
I can't bring the highest and best into
any life without God granting it and giving
it and enabling me to do so.
So you see, you've got to go to
God if you're seeking the highest and best,
and that's why this loving of your enemies
isn't something you can go out and do
gritting your teeth.
No, no, no.
You can only do it as you fellowship
with God in prayer and seek from God
for your bitterest enemy what is pleasing to
him, the highest and the best.
Now, this is reasonable, difficult, very difficult, challenging,
terribly challenging.
If it makes you as uncomfortable as it's
made me, then it is challenging and you'll
acknowledge that.
But you know, it's reasonable.
Jesus goes on to show that it's very
reasonable.
That is, it is reasonable to require this
of men and women that have come into
the kingdom by way of repentance and faith.
I'm repeating, but deliberately.
And having come into the kingdom by way
of repentance and faith, now deepen their level
of experience in accordance with the Beatitudes.
Poverty of spirit and so forth, hungering and
thirsting after righteousness, purity of heart and so
forth, have gone deeper and deeper in their
experience of the Beatitudes, and then have become
salt of society and light of the world,
more and more so, and then take his
ethical norms and apply them to themselves.
That man, that woman is growing in the
knowledge of God.
And for the man and the woman that
is growing in the real knowledge of the
living God, this is reasonable.
If your religion is only cosmetic, it's not,
doesn't make sense.
But if you have been crucified with Christ,
and a new creature has been born in
you, and you're a new man and a
new woman, this makes sense.
I'm not saying it's simple.
It'll never be simple.
You can only love your enemies by denying
yourselves.
I can only love my enemy at the
expense of the self in me.
But it is reasonable.
And Jesus goes on to explain why it
is reasonable, negatively and positively.
Actually, the order with him is positive and
then negative.
May I be allowed to change the order
this morning?
Negatively, simply to love those who love us,
and to greet those who greet us, really
doesn't prove anything.
Now that's the negative.
Listen to what he says.
Verses 46 and 47.
If you love those who love you, what
reward have you?
Are not even the tax collectors doing that?
And if you greet only your brother, what
are you doing more than others?
Do not even pagans do that?
You see what Jesus is saying?
What's the alternative to this?
Well, of course, to love my own kind,
and the people that are kind and generous
and gracious to me.
But if you only love the people that
show love towards you, you know that doesn't
prove a thing.
And Jesus illustrates it like this.
You know, he says, the most hated person
in our Jewish society does that.
Who is he?
Well, generally, the tax collector, who was in
the employ of Rome, the pagan overlord, to
extract taxes from the Jews.
But you know, he says, even the tax
collectors love their kind.
There's a community of feeling among them.
They love their own people.
But what does that prove?
Simply nothing.
And if you only greet your brothers, some
people don't even greet their brothers.
But if you come to the point where
you greet your brothers, what are you doing
more than others?
Everybody does that kind of thing.
Even pagans do that.
People who know nothing about the grace of
God.
There's a family feeling.
They often love one another and are loyal
to one another and respond in kind.
You know, that proves nothing, brothers and sisters,
proves nothing.
That's the negative.
But Jesus doesn't confine it to that.
Positively, he puts it like this, but I
tell you, love your enemies and pray for
those who persecute you that you may be
the sons of your father in heaven.
He causes his son to rise on the
evil and the good and sends rain on
the righteous and the unrighteous.
You do not become a child of God
by loving your enemies.
That's not the point.
We do not become children of God by
anything that we can do, any more than
we become children of our parents or became
children of our parents by anything we could
do.
We were born, they chose to have us.
You do not become a child of God
by anything you can do.
You must ask and he of his grace
can only bring you into the household of
faith.
But you prove that you are a child
of God in very truth when you act
in a distinctively God-like manner.
You prove that you are a child when
you learn to behave like your father in
heaven.
You prove your pedigree.
You prove your identity.
You manifest to the world and to angels
that you are really a child of God
when you've learned to do as your father
does.
Now in other places in the Bible, the
stress is upon holiness.
In Leviticus even, be holy for I am
holy.
This is another side of that coin.
Both are important.
Today we're stressing this.
God is a God of love.
For God so loved the world, says John
3.16, or to come back here to
Jesus, God causes his sun to shine.
Unfortunately we don't talk like that in this
day and age, but we should as believers.
We say the sun arose today.
No indeed it didn't.
God my father caused it to shine.
It's raining today.
We say no it isn't.
God our father sends rain.
You see the causative action of the Lord
of the universe in all that happens.
But the point here is this of course,
that he causes sun to shine and rain
to fall on just and unworthy.
In common grace God is all embracing.
His love is all embracing.
He leaves no one out.
And the unworthy, the unworthiest, are the objects
of his common grace.
Now this is very important.
I have to close, but this is very
important.
See this is a habit of God's.
And if you're a child of God, you
and I must learn to practice this.
God loved us when we were enemies.
Many passages of the New Testament tell us
that.
When we were God's enemies, we were reconciled
to God through the death of his son,
Romans 5 10.
Once you were alienated from God and you
were enemies in your minds because of your
behavior, Colossians 1 21 and in other places.
You see we were enemies of God.
We didn't want him.
We hated his holiness.
We hated the kind of God he is.
We wanted our own way and we loved
our sins and we didn't want the God
who wanted to have control over our lives.
We wanted a God we could handle, if
any God at all.
Do what we want him to do, of
course.
He must be capable of doing something that
we want him to do, but not handle
us, not master us.
That's why we hated him.
But God loved us when we were enemies.
God incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth died for
his enemy.
That is evidenced in a myriad places, but
especially on the cross when our Lord Jesus,
probably thinking not only of those that had
nailed him to the tree literally and physically,
but of those who had planned the whole
program that had led to this particular experience
of his on the cross.
Those who had prosecuted and persecuted him.
Father, he says, forgive them, forgive them, for
they know not what they do.
He loved his enemies.
And listen, if the Holy Spirit comes into
your heart, the first of the fruit of
the Spirit is love, agape.
Now all of this says, you see, that
agape love is something that is essentially characteristic
of God's nature and of God's action.
And this command, though difficult, is realistic and
is precious and reasonable, because what it asks
us to do is just to prove our
identity.
It's to prove that we are the children
of God, that we have something of his
Spirit in us, that we have been made
partakers of the divine nature, that God is
our Father, that Christ is our Savior, that
the Holy Spirit is our sanctifier, and the
Word of God is our guide.
And if that is so, it's not unreasonable
to ask you to show it and to
ask me to show it.
If it's not, of course, that's another cup
of tea.
But it's reasonable to ask us to show
our identity.
You go to another country and you ask
for your passport.
As you go over the border, well, here
it is.
It's showing your passport and our passport.
Is this that we love with the love
of God?
Just as God's agape embraced the evil and
the good, the righteous and the unrighteous, in
the gifts of common grace, so will you
and I prove our affinity with him by
that same work of love?
I conclude with this.
I'm only referring to verse 48.
It's a crucial verse.
Be perfect is the translation, even as your
Father in heaven is perfect.
I believe that whatever else it means, and
it probably means more than I am going
to indicate now.
It means, first of all, what is signified
by an underlying Aramaic term.
And the underlying Aramaic term for be perfect
has the nuance of be complete or be
completed, which is exactly what Jesus says here
about God.
God's love is all-inclusive.
It embraces the just and the unjust.
There is nothing in this context to indicate
that God's people are to become absolutely perfect
with the perfection of God.
Indeed, in chapter 6, Jesus even tells his
disciples that when they pray, they will need
to pray for the forgiveness of sins.
And that is to go on, apparently, in
according to Luke's rendering, whenever we pray, we
shall need to pray not only for daily
bread, but for daily forgiveness.
It's an ongoing thing.
So Jesus does not envisage any of his
people becoming absolutely perfect with the perfection of
God in this life, beyond this life, but
not in this life.
We are summoned to this all-inclusiveness within
our love.
How far do your arms stretch around the
world?
How much elastic is there in your love?
That was a very significant day, the most
significant day in her life, she says, in
one place, when Karitambum, you remember, this was
mentioned in the Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology
here this year, but you may find it
in one of her books.
Karitambum faced a man at the end of
a service, where she had been speaking of
the wonderful grace of God.
This man came forward to her with his
hand outstretched, and he said, Sister, and he
wanted to shake her by the hand.
And she looked at him, and lo and
behold, it was none other than the very
individual who had caused her the greatest pain
and anguish in the concentration camp.
It was the very one who could probably
be described as the beast of the concentration
camp.
And it was the very man who was
largely, if not altogether, responsible for the death
of her sister.
Now it seemed like an eternity.
Karitambum went through this, what on earth am
I to do?
Here he is, and she remembered everything.
In a flash, it all came back.
What on earth am I to do with
this man?
And here he is, pretending to be a
believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, and calling
me Sister, and there's his hand.
But you see, she was a child of
God.
She was real.
And the grace of God within her began
to prompt her, and the Holy Spirit got
charged.
And she found that she had to put
out her hand, and she said, as she
clasped his hand in hers, Brother, brother, it's
hard.
You've got to pocket your pride.
Self has to be crucified, but this is
the way of the Lord.
And you know, it is as rewarding ultimately
to the person who pays the price as
it is to the person who is blessed
thereby, who is loved and prayed for.
Because into your heart there will come a
love, a peace, a joy, a grace that
is nothing short of the foretaste of glory
divine.
God grant us the humility and the willingness
to heed his word of yesteryear, of long
ago, but also of today.
Love your enemies, pray for those who persecute
you, and you will prove thereby that you
are indeed the children of God, who causes
his sun to shine upon the good and
the evil, and his rain to descend upon
the just and the unjust.
He will show that you have the same
attitude towards the unworthy as your Heavenly Father.
You'll prove your pedigree.
You'll have assurance, rather cheap assurance.
You see, Christian assurance costs you yourself.
Let us pray.
Our Heavenly Father, thank you for this day,
a day of grace, a day of mercy,
a day when the divine provisions are found
in the wilderness of our human life, and
there is manner to be gathered in the
strength of which we make pilgrimage forward and
capture for you the territories that remain in
our earthly pilgrimage.
Oh Lord, bless your people this morning.
We confess to you that it finds us
out and it points so many things out
in experiences which are unworthy and inconsistent with
your word and with your character.
Please, Lord, bring us back into line.
Help us, help us to lay ourselves afresh
on the altar.
Help us to give ourselves.