Now, if you'd open your Bibles
to the sixth chapter of the book of Luke, Luke chapter 6. Now, last night I dreamed that
I was preaching from the book of Lamentations. And right as
I was getting to the first point, and it seemed like, you know,
my thoughts in the dream were that I really got something special
out of the book of Lamentations, you know. And right as I got
to the first point, my alarm clock went off. So, you know,
who knows, I might have had a special vision from the Lord last night
and the alarm clock ruined it. But we're gonna have to instead
go with this message from Luke chapter six that I studied for. I have, by the way, slept or
dreamed through certain sermons. And probably the lamentations
wouldn't have been any better than the others I've dreamed
up. I haven't gotten any great messages in my sleep, so we'll
stick to the one I got when I was awake. Luke chapter 6, verse
27. But I tell you who hear me, love
your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who
curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. If someone strikes
you on one cheek, turn to him the other also. If someone takes
your cloak, do not stop him from taking your tunic. Give to everyone
who asks you. And if anyone takes what belongs
to you, do not demand it back. Do to others as you would have
them do to you. If you love those who love you,
what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love
them. And if you do good to those who are good to you, What credit
is that to you? Even sinners do that. And if
you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit
is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners
expecting to be repaid in full. But love your enemies, do good
to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back.
Then your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most
High, because He is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father
is merciful." Matthew chapter 5. is a parallel
passage to this. Now we can't be certain whether
Matthew's account and Luke's account came from the same, shall
we say, sermon by the Lord Jesus. I'm sure the Lord was like many
traveling ministers, and he preached the same sermon, so to speak,
in different places, and there would be slight differences in
the way he presented it, In Matthew it says when he came to a mountain,
you know, really we're not thinking a mountain, you know, like the
Rockies or even the Appalachians, just a rise. But he preached
from there. And then here in Luke it says
he came to a level place. Now it could be that on the side
of the mountain there was a little bit of a level spot and it was
easier for him to stand on a level spot. I don't know. But there
are a little bit of differences in the content or at least the
way the content is expressed. But there's no question that
the same message is being delivered in both of these passages. I
was attracted to this passage. I was reading something this
past week. Can you remember what it was I was reading? But it referred
to this statement that God is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. In the old covenant, conduct
was regulated by a law. I've got written here, chiseled
in stone, but it really wasn't chiseled. God wrote it with his own finger.
In the new covenant, conduct is regulated by an imitation
of the God of our salvation. important that we note these
differences between the Old and New Covenant. The Old Covenant
given to Israel on Mount Sinai, and the New Covenant which was
brought to fulfillment and fruition by the Lord Jesus Christ, they
are not different versions of the same covenant. They are two
different covenants and there are some dramatic differences
between them. The one had a set of commandments, ten of them,
And they were imposed upon a people who didn't want to obey them. They wanted to steal. They were
prone to killing. Adultery, disobedience to parents,
all of that, that was their direction. But God imposed a law upon them
and that law was external to them in the new covenant. There is such a thing as law,
but it has an entirely different flavor to it. It's not laws written
in stone that call on us to do things contrary to what we truly
want. Rather, we are called on to imitate
our Father. We might say that love is the
basic law of the New Covenant, and that's true. And yet, that's
true only because the scriptures say God is love. To love, that's
to imitate the Father. I find it strange that harsh
and loud judgmentalism, especially from preachers, that set forward,
boy, I tell you, the power of God was on him. He was really
pounding those sinners today. He's kind to the ungrateful and
wicked. Yes, there will be a day when
God will deal in justice with the ungodly, the ungrateful,
and the wicked. But what compassion He shows
them now. And that same compassion and kindness and mercy that our
Father shows even to the unbelieving in this world is the way we're
supposed to act. In the Old Covenant, it is written,
blessed is the man that continues in all points written in the
law to do them. And the only way to get the blessings
offered under the law was to perform the law, and not simply
to perform them, but to perform them perfectly and continuously. Needless to say, no one qualified
for the blessings of the old covenant. But the law of the new covenant
is for people who already have all the blessings. What did the scripture say? Blessed
be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed
us with all spiritual blessings in the heavenly places in Christ
Jesus, according as we have obeyed, according as we have believed,
according as he has chosen us in him before the foundation
of the world. We are blessed. We already have
everything. We may not possess all that God
has in store for his people, that is, possess it by way of
experience, but it shall we say it's up there in a treasure chest
and got our name on it. It's our inheritance. It's an
inheritance and the testator, as the book of Hebrews calls
them, has already died. The will has already been probated. It's ours. And so the law given to us under
the new covenant is not a law that we try to do in order to
obtain blessings. In fact, this law cannot be obeyed
by anybody. but those who already have the
blessings. Here's another distinction between
Old Covenant law and New Covenant law. In Old Covenant law, certain
actions are demanded or prohibited, but in the New Covenant, moral
principles are outlined, and these principles can be applied
to any situation. And the philosophy professor
I had in college believed that the Ten Commandments, you know,
he'd say it's the rule and guide for Christian living. In fact,
he'd use the word objective. It's the objective rule and guide
for Christian living. Then he went on to explain them.
And he would get to something like, you know, the law that
says, thou shalt not commit adultery. He said, now that includes, and
he went on and included a lot of other things that don't fall
under the category of adultery. Now, I didn't think of it then.
You know, when you're 20 years old, you look at your professors
and you think you're looking at someone who's about halfway
to heaven, you know, and you just accept what they say. But
later on, I thought, well, now, if the Ten Commandments is the
objective rule and guide for living, then you can't add to
them, you can't take away from them, you don't say this means,
because it means exactly what it says. And thou shalt not commit
adultery means just that. However, in the law of the new
covenant, we're not so much given specific commandments to follow. as we might call them moral or
spiritual principles, which are to guide our lives in every circumstance. The distinction continues in
that old covenant law required conformity to a set of written
commands, while new covenant law requires an imitation of
a loving and merciful father. We can say that New Covenant
Law surpasses Old Covenant Law in this, as we conform to New
Covenant Law, we learn the goodness, grace, and mercy of the God of
our salvation, and we become more confident of our inclusion
in his family. Now, don't misunderstand what
I'm saying here. I'm not saying that obedience
to the New Covenant Law causes us to be sons. Observance of the things that
we read here do not make us to be sons of God. But what happens is as we imitate
our father, we begin to learn our father's attitude toward
us. Here's the only illustration I could come up with, but I think
it does pretty good. All through my childhood, my
dad went to work virtually every day, except Sundays. And he'd go to work. I didn't
know what he was doing. I mean, a couple of times I was taken
to work to look around, but I really didn't know what it was to put
in a day of work. All I knew was I played, mowed
the grass, took out the trash, that kind of thing. But every
day, three square meals a day, and a nice bed to sleep in, nice
home to live in. That's what I knew. But then
I grew up and I started having to do what my father did. I started
having to go to work every day and put in the whole day trying
to make enough money to take care of my family. And you know
what? After I did that a while, I realized how much my father
loved me. I realized what it meant when
he left every day and came back. In other words, when I did what
my father did, It taught me what my father thought of me. And
when we begin to do for others, for others who are ungrateful,
wicked, mean, persecuting, unjust toward us, when we do that for
them, we begin to learn what the Father did for us. Because
you see, all of those adjectives ungrateful, wicked, persecuting,
hateful, all of those once applied to us, and all of them still
apply to us to some degree. We are sons of God because of
God's election, Christ's redemption, and the Spirit's call. That's
how we became sons of God. But we begin to learn what that
means when we begin to show forth the character of our father in
our relationships with other people. That makes sense to you? I hope I got it out. It makes
sense to me in my head. I hope I got it out in some words
that you can understand. But having said all that, my
focus in this message is not so much how we should live, but
what new covenant law teaches us about our father. There are
several commands that our Lord gives here. And let me make an
aside here. I remember, I left my water there,
that's what I remember. Give me a minute. I've gotta
have this or it won't be good. But I remember as in the religion
that I was raised in, which was dispensational, But there were
some that would say, well, you know, the Sermon on the Mount,
you know, that's the law for the millennial kingdom. We're
not expected to do this now. I beg your pardon, this is the
law of the kingdom. This is the law for everyone
who is a member of Christ Jesus. And you say, well, that seems
awfully radical to me. What else would you expect? God doesn't deal in surface issues. You know the word radical comes
from the Latin word for root. And a radical thing is something
that gets to the root of the matter. And that's what these
commandments and principles do. You cannot simply obey these
things. You can't do these things simply on the surface. It requires
a particular kind of nature. It requires something different
on the inside of you than what you were born with. But the Lord didn't say, well,
you look at these various commandments I've given you and figure out
what God is like. He told us in plain words what
the character of God is that should also be in us. and guide
our relationships with other people, and that is God is kind
to the ungrateful and the wicked. Now, in our day, people take
for granted God's kindness. They go so far as to say, and
this will be the opening salvo of their evangelistic efforts,
God loves you. But you will not find any of
the apostles ever saying that to anybody but the people in
the church. It wasn't said on the day of
Pentecost, and I do not believe that there's a single apostolic
message in all the book of Acts in which the love of God is declared. But this world, our world, takes
that for granted. And they think that they can
go out and just indiscriminately tell people, God loves you, and
because he loves you, you know, you need to do this, that, and
the other, and God's trying to save you and all that. Since
in our day and age, that particular doctrinal error is the predominant
one, a lot of our preaching involves coming into conflict with that.
Brother Henry Mahan used to say, God will meet a man in his point
of rebellion. Consequently, when we preach,
when I preach, anyway, I open it up and say, well, now, where
is it that men are rebelling against the truth of God? And
that's kind of what you focus on. Here's the problem, though. If that's all you do, you end
up with a caricatured picture of God. There are those who believe sovereign
grace like you and I do, and yet they have so emphasized those
particular aspects of the doctrine of God that out of that they
have created a stern, mean, unapproachable, unkind God. There's something
wrong with that. Our Lord said in words that cannot
be misunderstood, He, the Heavenly Father, is kind to the ungrateful
and the wicked. God's kindness upon all is seen
when His kindness is compared to what people deserve from Him. Everyone alive, everyone drawing
breath right now, is a recipient of the kindness of God. How do I know that? Because those
who are still drawing breath are not in hell. And anything
short of hell is an act of kindness on the part of God. Hell is where
we should be. I mean, if you look at us, as we were born into this world,
as we came into this world, and as our actions have earned for
us, the right place, the just place for every one of us is
everlasting hell. And yet right now, none of us
here this morning are there. The scriptures say, you have
not dealt with us according to our transgressions. and everyone
alive can make that statement, and it would be true. God has
not yet dealt with anybody alive. He's not dealt with them according
to their transgressions. Now the day will come when many
on this earth, and I don't know whether it's the majority or
the, God didn't reveal that, but many in the earth, God will
deal with them according to their sin. But right now, God is not dealing
with anybody on earth according to their sins. He's being kind. You say, well, some people got
some awfully tough lives. The toughest life on earth is
far better than the best day in hell. I'll tell you that.
All the kindness of God to us ungrateful and wicked people. That he doesn't just open up
the earth right now and suck us all down into hell and say,
I'm tired of it. I'm done with them all. He's kind. God's kindness is magnified in
that he is good to the ungrateful. Now, we like doing good for someone. when, or if, when we do good
to them, they say, thank you. Or they are somehow endeared
to us because of the kindness that we showed them. But let's
face it, if we do something nice for somebody, you know, we, there
have been sickness in their household, and we think, well, they could
probably use some help, and we take over some food. Yeah, well, Well,
thank you, but you know, I really don't like this stuff. And particularly
if we're leaving and we see that they go around back to the garbage
can and dump it out. What would we think? That's the
last thing they're getting from me. See, we tend to be selfish in
our kindness. We show kindness from those that
we expect at least the return of gratitude. And if we don't
get the gratitude we were looking for, we're going to quit being
kind. We may not do anything against
them, but we're not going to do anything for them. Look at
this. God is kind to those to whom he has given over and over
and over. And they have not given thanks.
And they've even taken the good things he gave them and dumped
them out as worthless. Think of the kindest thing God
ever did to a man. Send the gospel to him. And how
many people listen to the glorious gospel of the blessed God and
they smile while they're in church and they go out the door, they
go home and they dump it in the trash. Spiritual trash. You know what I mean. And yet
God sends it to them again and again and again. Oh, the kindness of God. How many
times did you hear the gospel? before your heart was broken
by it and you received it with thanksgiving. All the kindness
God showed to us when we were ungrateful and wickedly turned
away his truth. God's kindness is magnified that
he's kind to the wicked Our kindness is generally reserved
for those who please us. Somebody's nice to us, we'll
be nice. We are not prone to act kindly
towards those who have offended us. To those who have done what
they knew would irritate us. We just write them off. Not God. He continues to be kind. Even
as they spit in his face with all of their wickedness. One of the most astounding things
our Lord ever did, ever said. He's hanging on the cross. He
is being taunted. He's been spit on. He's been
beaten, been treated cruelly and unjustly so. He could have called down fire
from heaven and consumed every last one of them. But instead,
he said, Father, forgive them. They don't know what to do. in similar fashion when Stephen
was being stoned. He said, don't lay this to their
charge. You know, I get so upset by injustice,
and I wonder, you know, if the day comes that I'm being persecuted,
maybe even martyred for the cause of Christ, would I have that
attitude? Lord, forgive them. Don't hold
this against them. kindness to the wicked. And from this general principle
there are some commandments that are given here. He says in verse
27, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless
those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. Now, Under the old covenant law,
they were to love their neighbors as themselves. Under new covenant
law, love your enemies. Now understand, when the Bible
says love like this, it's not talking about that sentimental
feeling of affection. That would better go under the
English word like. He's not calling on us to like
everyone, but he does call on us to love everyone. And love
is always manifested in what you do. We all know that when it comes
to romantic love, you know, how many times have people, someone
said, I love you to some potential spouse or something, you know,
and it turns out all it was was words. It never was backed up by action.
I remember my dad told me, never tell a woman you love her till
you're ready to marry her or Never tell a woman you love her
till you're ready to ask her to marry you and never ask her
to marry you until you're ready to get married. That's just my
dad's way. And I'm sure that, I mean, he
never related this detail to me, but I bet you he never told
mom that he loved her until he had a ring in his pocket and
it was followed up with a proposal and then a wedding that came
as quickly after as could be legitimately arranged. That was
just dad's way because love means something. Love is not something
you just say it in order to gain someone's affection. In fact,
saying it is not nearly so important as doing it. Saying it's a lot easier than
doing it. But saying it means nothing without
action. And so what does it say? Here's
the example. It says, love your enemies. Do good. to those who
hate you. Now, just as love is described
not so much by an emotional affection, hate is less about how someone
feels about you, but what they do to you. And if their design is to bring
you down, or if their design is nothing more than I really
don't even care about you. And I'll just do whatever it
takes to advance my own cause. And if you get in the way, that
was your fault. That's hate. They may not bear any essential
animosity. They don't mind if you prosper,
but in their minds, if your prosperity is going to cost them some prosperity,
well, you're to be shoved out of the way. That's what's meant
by hate. It's measured by what a person does. Well, he says,
love those that hate you. Do good to them who are doing
evil to you. Once again, where is that more
expressed than in the life of our Lord Jesus Christ and especially
the last day of it? as he did such tremendous good
to those who were filled with a visceral hatred of him that
expressed itself in the most hateful actions you can imagine. Bless those who curse you. It's a good thing that not everything
that goes through our mind comes out our mouth. It's a good thing
we learned to put a little bit of a gate, isn't it, on how we
feel? But you know, somebody cuts us
off in traffic, we're ready to condemn them to eternal flames.
I've heard people say it, you know, we should never curse anyone. We should never wish harm on
anyone. Rather, we are to bless those
that seek our harm. I think most often the best we
manage to do is just not retaliate. But the Lord's called us to do
more than simply zero. He says, not only withhold your
hand from vengeance, bless them. Do good for them. pray for those who mistreat you. That doesn't mean pray that God
will take them out. This guy today, he did such and
such, Lord, get him out of the way. Pray for them. Of course, the best thing you
can pray for them is God will save them. But also just simply pray good
for them. And then he goes on to say, if someone strikes you
on one cheek, turn to him the other also. Does he mean that literally?
Yeah. Now, you and I don't confront
much physical violence. I'm thankful that we're the beneficiaries
of 2,000 years of the gospel being around and some of these
things being taught. But there's places in the world
you're as likely to get beat up as not. Now we say, humanly
speaking, everyone has the right of self-defense. And yeah, and
you know, I think a man ought to, anybody ought to defend his
friends, his family, his nation. But that's not what he's talking
about here. He's talking specifically about
physical persecution. If somebody in hatred of what
you believe hits you, right back up and tell him again,
turn the other cheek. If he hates what you said and
hit you for it, I'm talking about saying the Gospel, say it again.
You've got one more cheek. Give him that one if that's what
it's going to take to tell him the Gospel one more time. If someone takes your cloak,
do not stop him from taking your tunic. Under the old covenant
law, you weren't allowed to take both from a man. You couldn't
leave him without clothes. But the Lord says here, hey,
if they want to take, and of course he's speaking unjustly
here, they want to take it from him, just let him have it all. Give to everyone who asks you.
And if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back.
Do to others as you would have them do to you. You say, if somebody
steals something from me, I'm not supposed to demand that they
give it back? That's what the Lord said. Now,
I'll tell you something. You'd never be able to do that
apart from already being a son of God. and having the nature
of your Heavenly Father within you. You can't. And I don't know that we're,
I certainly know that we don't do this all the time, even though
the Spirit of God lives within us. We're not perfect in any
of this. Well, Verse 35, but love your
enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting
to get anything back. Now, long ago, there were banks,
but banks were for only the rich and the well-established. And if you needed to borrow money,
you went to your family. or friends or whatever, you know.
And here's what the Lord's saying. And I remember a person telling
me something like this. They said, look, I'm not going
to loan you anything, but I'm going to give you this. And if
you ever want to give it back, that'll be okay. That's what
the Lord is saying. Why? And here's a principle that's
important for us to learn. If God has given you excess,
he didn't give it to you to hoard. He gave it to you to give away.
See, the Lord does not spread his blessings evenly. There are rich and there are
poor, even among the people of God. And here's what he's saying to
them. I did that so that you rich will have a chance to find
out what I did for you. When Paul was teaching on giving,
he says, you remember the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, who,
though he were rich, yet for our sakes became poor, that we,
through his poverty, might be made rich. You want to learn
what that means? If you really want to get a visceral
understanding of what that means, Give away what you have. He's
not saying starve yourself. Paul said, he said, I'm not looking
that you impoverish yourself like Christ did, but there should
be some evenness, you know? And when we do these things,
we learn by experience what our God did. Well, there's a reward for this.
You say, well, preacher, I thought you said there wasn't rewards
in heaven. Well, not the way most people talk about them.
Certainly not the kind of rewards. And I know this, seeing that
we have all spiritual blessings in the heavenly places in Christ.
If everybody's got all of them, certainly there cannot be any,
you know, you've got a little, I got a lot or whatever. He says, excuse me, verse 35. Your reward will be great and
you will become or you will be sons of the Most High. Now, don't
misunderstand what he's saying here. He's not saying if you
do these things, you'll become sons of the Most High. He's not
talking about our position, our relation to God, because that
is not based on anything that we have done. He says your reward will be great,
and here's the reward, here's the great reward you have. You
will be sons of the Most High. Now, since He's not saying that
these things will give you that position, what does He mean? He means that you will be bearing
the likeness of your Father. When I was a little boy, Nothing made me happier than
someone said, well, you're certainly your dad's boy. Meaning I was
acting like dad. I got a picture of me when I
was about one year old, one years old, and I'm standing on the
little stoop outside the house we lived in Key West, Florida
at that time. And now I am in that, uh, it's a, it's like a
coverall. And I don't know what else mom
had under there, but she told me that she always fully dressed
us, you know. And I'm standing in my father's
shoes. These little feet about that long and shoes about that
long. Why? I wanted to be like my dad. And when somebody said that I
was acting like my dad, that was, to me, great reward. How much more, how much greater reward is it
that as we conduct ourselves more and more like our Father
conducts Himself with the people of this world? What great reward
to be like the God who saved us. Now, we're never going to
do it perfectly, but every little bit. Every little bit is rewarding. There's an old phrase, righteousness
is its own reward. And that principle fits here.
Likeness to the God of our creation and the God of our redemption.
Likeness to Him is the reward. It's not if you act good. If
you give to the poor, God's gonna give you a bunch more money.
If you gave everything you had to the poor, He might just leave
you poor the rest of your life. So what if in so doing you reflected
the image of your father? We're not looking to gain things
like the world is. Our great reward is this, to
be with him and to be like him. And we will achieve neither of
those in perfection here. But certainly, as we grow in
grace and as we are more consistent in our obedience to these things, what a reward comes from it.
It sets us free from the bondage of the people of this world who
are in bondage to the things, who are in bondage to themselves,
which is about the worst bondage you can ever have. There are three parallel scriptures. First Peter 1.16 says, Be holy
as God is holy. And that's quoting Leviticus
11.44. In Matthew 5, the Sermon on the
Mount, which is parallel here to Luke 6, the Lord Jesus says,
Be perfect therefore. as your heavenly Father is perfect." And we think, well, holiness
is kind of above me, perfection's above me, so Luke put it in words
we might more readily understand. He said, verse 36, be merciful. just as your Father is merciful."
Now, you tell someone to be holy, in the common view of holiness,
they think it's all about stuff you don't do, and you kind of
hold yourself aloof from all the people that do them. If you tell people to be perfect,
then they're going to say, okay, I'm just going to have to re-energize
myself and try harder not to sin and all this." Luke turns
it all on its head from that particular interpretation of
those words. He says, you want to be perfect
like God's perfect? You want to be holy like your
Father in heaven is holy? Here's how. Be merciful like
he's merciful. Now, you can't write enough commandments
to cover all of that. What is it to be merciful to
someone? is to have pity on them, is to look at them in all their
wickedness and not snarl your lip at them as though they're
unworthy to be in your presence, is to look at them as those who
are by nature just like you, bound in sin, bound to destruction
unless God intervenes. And it is to do, as Paul said,
forgive one another's sins as God, for Christ's sake, forgave
you. The law of the new covenant.
I almost hate calling it a law, because every time we hear the
word law, we think, oh, a bunch of rules that we don't want to
do. You know something? And I believe this is true of
every believer. I would love to be merciful like
my Heavenly Father is merciful. I truly regret. In my relationships
with people, what I regret most is when I wasn't kind. when I responded to their anger
with my own, when I responded to their hate with my own, when
I responded to their abuse with my own. But thank God our Father
has given us a rule that even if we don't get it done, we certainly
want to. He is kind to the ungrateful
and wicked. In a minute, we're going to celebrate
the Lord's table. And in symbolic form, we will
see exactly what those words mean. How kind he was to us in
all our ingratitude and our wickedness. He sent his son. He did not spare
him. but gave Him up for us. While we were enemies, while
we hated Him, He loved us. While we were abusing Him, He
loved us. And what was the result? We are no longer in bondage to
the law of sin and death. We've been set free. We are sons
of the Most High. God help us to live like it.