Um, a reading from Luke 627 to 36. But to you who are listening, I say, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who mistreat you. If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the there also, if someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them.

Give to everyone who asks you. And if someone 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.

But if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. And if you lend to those to 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 children of the most high because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be merciful, just as your father is merciful, the word of the Lord.

Thank you, Jim. And it is my privilege today to introduce to you Hannah Arada. If you've been around Waterstone for the last year or so, you've probably seen Hannah around our building. She's been our preaching resident since last September. Waterstone has a long tradition of partnership with Denver Seminary, who sends us students and we help pay for their schooling while they get to work on ministry skills and learn a little bit about what it's like to work in a church.

And Hannah has been just a phenomenal gift to our church over the last year. What started as a preaching resident where she preached a couple times in here and then helped teach Wednesdays at Waterstone. Shifted around January to a youth residency, partially, and she's been helping our student ministry with Ben Suji upstairs and just doing a phenomenal job. She's crushing it with the kids. They love her so much.

And so I'm really excited that we get to hear from her again today. And she has a great word for us about loving our enemies. So, Hannah, I'm going to pray for you and then we'll welcome Hannah today. So, heavenly Father, God, we're so grateful for the gift that Hannah is for you, bringing her to our church. God, we are so thankful for the many skills and abilities and just most of all, Father, her heart and passion for you.

God, we pray as she speaks today. You would just give her clarity. We pray that your spirit would rest on this place and bring conviction to our hearts of the areas that we need. This word and encouragement where we feel like we're falling short and it's in Christ's name we pray. Amen.

Amen. All right, would you please welcome Hannah Arada. Hi, everyone.

Thanks, Paul. And happy St. Patrick's day. I know I'm wearing all black, but I actually am wearing green. I have some leprechaun socks on, so don't worry.

Don't pinch me, please. Also, awesome. So I am so excited to be with you all this morning. And we are this weekend in our last week of the controversial hard sayings of Jesus series. And we've been unpacking these things that are hard, but I think that they're hard for different reasons.

Some of them have been confusing, like, what is it with the pearls and the pigs thing that Jesus said? Or sometimes they are harsh, like, hate your parents or the canaanite woman story that Paul told us about last week. But I think that some of the sayings of Jesus are hard because they're actually really simple. Jesus tells us exactly what to do. It's very clear.

He says, love your enemies. But when it comes to Jesus, isn't it true that simple very rarely means easy?

The hard part of this passage is actually doing it. And so today we will be unpacking what it looks like to love our enemies. But before we get into that, let's pray. Jesus, thank you for this morning. Thank you for every person that has entered this room, any person, under the sound of my voice.

God, this is a hard saying because we all have people in our lives who have hurt us. God, I pray that we would come into this room tonight from wherever we are in our lives, and we would just know that, God, you are with us. And that when things are hard, God, you walk alongside us. Give us the strength to do these things. God.

God, I pray that we would be open minded, that we would be ready to listen, and we love. And it's in Jesus'name I pray. Amen. Amen. So there's this song that I heard for the first time in high school, and I feel like it is really fitting for this sermon today.

It's called pray for you. Right? It feels fitting. Okay, I will read you some of the lyrics. I pray your brakes go out running down a hill.

I pray a flower pot falls from a windowsill and knocks you in the head like I'd like to. I pray your birthday comes and nobody calls. I pray you're flying high when the engine stalls. I pray all your dreams never come true just know wherever you are, honey I pray for you and I know that this is meant to be a funny song, but we've probably all felt this at one time or another, haven't we? We want the worst for someone because of something that they've done to us.

And so if we've all felt this before, and then we come to a passage like today of love your enemies, what are we supposed to do? This seems really difficult. We don't want to do this most of the time. So let's get into our text for the day. The first thing that's really important to know is that this passage is actually part of Jesus'sermon on the mount.

So it's a small snippet of a much larger sermon. And at this point in Luke's account of Jesus'life, Jesus has been baptized. He's gone through the wilderness to be tempted by the enemy. He started performing miracles, like driving out spirits and healing people from disease. And then he called his twelve disciples, who are all from different social and economic classes.

He's called people that are tax collectors and working for the roman government that has been oppressing the israelite people. And he's called Israelites. These people hate each other, and he's asking them to come together and follow him. And something really beautiful about the gospel of Luke is that it's oriented around freedom, around the good news for the poor, the marginalized, the outcast. Jesus is expanding the circle of who is allowed in to the kingdom of God in ways that are making a lot of people upset, starting with those that he calls to be disciples.

And so he goes down to this level place, and there's a huge crowd of followers, people from Judea, people from Jerusalem, from Tyre and Sidon. And if you were here last week, you'll remember that that was enemy territory. And all of these people have come to hear Jesus and be healed from disease. And then Jesus addresses his disciples directly, and he says, blessed are the poor and the hungry, and those who weep and who are hated and those who are excluded. What?

Why? In this sermon, Jesus is preaching the upside down kingdom. He is preaching to those who are poor, who are marginalized, who are hated and outcast and unclean. And he is calling them blessed. And in a culture that valued the rich, the religious elite, the easily understood and the clean, Jesus reverses this entire value system.

And so far, this sermon might sound really encouraging. Right. Those who had been victims of the social order, might be sitting there thinking, man, I will follow this guy to the end. Finally, someone. He's a voice for the voiceless.

I'll follow you, Jesus. But then Jesus says to you, who are listening, I say, love your enemies. Oh, no, wait, Jesus, I was on board with you, like, right up until you said that. And I think as we dig into this hard saying, it's really important to define our terms. And the first one is the term enemy.

And when it comes to the hard sayings of the enemies that Jesus is talking about here in this hard saying, it's important to look at that term in a biblical context. As many of you know as Paul just shared, I am getting my master's at Denver seminary, and I've been studying the biblical languages. And this semester, my professor actually has been helping us to understand what enemy looks like in the Old and New Testament. Now, in the Old Testament, enemies, when they use that word, they're talking about the enemies of God. These are people who hate, reject, and actively oppose God.

And then there's enemies in the New Testament. But these enemies are referring to any person who is inflicting harm on you. And the greek word for enemy comes from the root ecto, which means to hate. It's used for anything from a human adversary to the capital E, enemy, Satan himself. And so, in our passage for today, Jesus is talking about how we interact with the human person that we hate.

And although you might not be able to think of some Disney style villain in your life, or even somebody that you would label as a enemy, I think it's safe to say that we all probably can think of somebody that fits into one of two categories. The first one is you versus me, or what I like to call direct enemies. Has there ever been anyone who has caused you pain? Anyone who's rejected you, ignored you, or made you feel small? Has there ever been anyone who's bullied you or made you question your identity or your ability?

Has anyone ever caused you discomfort or embarrassed you? And then there's the US versus them. Enemies or indirect enemies. These are people that maybe have a different worldview from you, people that have a different political view than you. Maybe they have a different set of values, or they look different, or maybe they offend your sensibilities, and just them being in the room makes you uncomfortable.

Or maybe there are even other believers who worship and believe differently than you do. These are what I call the US versus them enemies. And so maybe somebody has been unkind to you or hurt somebody you love. Maybe you're a parent and your child has been bullied. Maybe you have a really challenging boss or coworker.

Maybe someone has spread lies about you or betrayed your confidences. Maybe you've been manipulated. Or maybe there's somebody in your life that hasn't necessarily harmed you directly, but has this reputation of getting away with doing stuff, and they somehow never get caught. They always get let off the hook. This last scenario happened to me in student.

There was a student in my class at Furman university, Godens, that we'll call Tom now, y'all. Tom was not a good guy. He had this reputation for treating women horribly. I even had a couple of friends that had had conversations with him that weren't awesome. And he didn't know my name, but I knew his.

I wanted to steer clear from him, and I did as best as I could. Told every woman in the vicinity, like, don't talk to this person. He's the worst. Okay. But inevitably, Furman was a small school, and guess where he moved in my junior year?

The apartment directly above mine. Awesome. So he was part of a fraternity, and they would have these huge rager parties. And when my roommates were right below, were trying to have a quiet night in, watch a movie, have a good conversation. We would also have the sounds of our ceiling physically shaking from the party happening above us didn't really help with our love for this man.

And so, naturally, Gretchen, my best friend from college, she and I would scheme his demise. We didn't actually want to hurt him. Like, I want to be clear, we didn't want to hurt this person, but we just wanted to make his life incredibly inconvenient. We had some really good plans in mind. Like, you know that clear scotch tape that you can use for all kinds of crafts?

Well, you know how it tears really easily? Well, we wanted to cover his entire kitchen island with little individual separated pieces of tape so that he would have to peel out every piece with his thumbnail before he had to return his keys. At the end of the year, we wanted to line his cabinets with marbles so that he would open the cabinet and then just marbles would just fall all over him, and he would wonder, how did on earth do you get an infestation of marbles? How does that even happen? We actually tried to plan where we would go in and shift his furniture one quarter inch to the left every day for six months so that he one day would look and say, when did we redecorate?

These are the things that we wanted to do. We just wanted to make him feel confused or inconvenienced in some small way. Now, did we ever do any of it? No. The worst we did was glare at him from afar, and that was all we would do.

We never did any of these plans. But isn't there something about planning things like this that makes you feel some kind of small act of justice has been done? Have you ever felt this way? Does anyone come to mind?

There's a reason why everyone claps in the movies when the bad guy, the villain, gets caught. It's so satisfying when we feel like justice has been served, even in some small way. So when we come to passages like this where Jesus is saying things like, love your enemy, and when someone steals from you, give him more stuff or turn the other cheek, that's incredibly unsettling. Is he saying we're supposed to take things lying down to let someone keep bullying us and give in and never stand up for ourselves? Because that's what it sounds like Jesus is saying here.

But again, we need to define our terms because we need to know what Jesus means by love. And as we look at this passage, everything hinges on the way that we define love. I think our culture has a lot to say about what love means. Love is a feeling. Love is a big romantic comedy holding the speaker over your head, outside in the rain.

It's a grand gesture. Love is showing up for people or friendship. Love is letting people do whatever they want. Love is getting rid of boundaries. Love is a noun or a state of being or love is an action or a verb.

So which one is it? Those are all extremely different. And so, as opposed to looking at how our culture defines love, it's important to understand Jesus's definition. In the hebrew mindset, Jesus would have been operating out of the hebrew definition. Normally when they talked about love is in the context of God.

It was expressed through Hefed, or covenantal faithfulness, and Levav, which means heart. So Jesus and the people of his day would have understood this love as God's faithfulness and commitment to his people in the human heart. And whereas we associate hearts with Valentine's day and good feelings, in Hebrew culture, it was the center of behavior and decision making. So when Jesus says love, he is saying that we are meant to commit to God, as he has committed to us, that covenantal faithfulness. We've entered into covenant with him.

And then we've been told to reflect this commitment through our actions and decisions. That's the heart piece. And this is even reflected in Jesus's sermon in verses 27. Through 30, it says, love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you.

Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who mistreat you. And if someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other. Also, if someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them. And now that we have a deeper understanding of our terms of enemies, as someone who has harmed you in some way, and love as committing to God and reflecting his heart, how on earth do we actually do this?

Because I know that the hardest part of this passage for me is turn the other cheek. This could so easily sound just like letting people do whatever they want to do. But that doesn't sound right. That doesn't sit well with us. When we've walked with Jesus for any length of time, it doesn't really make much sense.

But if it doesn't mean letting people do whatever they want, what does it mean? Well, as we talked about earlier, the kingdom of God is an upside down kingdom. In a society where we have taught to be fighters, even sometimes for good reason, Jesus is asking for the exact opposite. Now, what do I mean by fighters? Well, particularly in the last few years, this has looked like a lot of different things.

Our culture has developed this sense of individualized custom, justice. We've been taught to cancel people when they fall from grace, to repost angry us versus them, messaging on social media to villainize people for being different, or the way that they see the world being different, rather than actually engaging with them in person. In a lot of ways, we have learned to get angry and cut people out and then call it fighting for justice, when in reality we just prefer that to the discomfort of actual discourse. Now don't mishear me. There are some scenarios where we do need to fight for justice for the oppressed and the marginalized in our world, for giving voices to the voiceless.

But I also think that a lot of the time we want to be right more than we want restored relationship.

And if we understand what biblical love looks like, Jesus says that we are meant to show this love to the ones who we find hardest to love. Whether that's someone who has hurt you, someone who has different values, or is on the absolute opposite side of the political spectrum. We can't just love those who are easy to love church, not in the upside down kingdom. And Jesus says in verses 32 and 33, 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 so I don't think I have to do a lot to convince you that this is why. This is a hard saying of Jesus. And so when Jesus uses the word love in this passage, he uses the word agapate, meaning to be full of goodwill, to regard the welfare of what Jesus is advocating for is for his people to regard the welfare of their enemies and to wish them goodwill. And I want to be clear.

Laying down our own will is really, really hard. And this doesn't mean that we're meant to invalidate our emotions or pretend like everything is fine. Human relationships can be so hard. Relational wounds are sometimes the deepest and most profound wounds that we carry and experience in this life. And what it doesn't mean is that you have to let a harmful person back into your life.

And it also doesn't mean that you have to take things lying down.

Before I go any further, I want to say this. I am not talking about abuse in this context. If you are in an abusive situation, please come talk to somebody on our staff. We would love to come alongside you. We would love to connect you to resources, to pray for you, to get you out of those scenarios.

So if that is you today, please come and talk to one of us. We want to come alongside you. You are not alone.

But I think what this does mean when we say love our enemies is that when we follow Jesus, we commit to loving the way that he loved, and he did it radically. And we, as image bearers of our God, are called to be life giving as our creator is life giving rather than retaliation. It looks like looking at our enemy and desiring life for them. Notice that I didn't say with, but for them, it looks like praying for them to know the Lord. It looks like laying down our own desire for justice and trusting that God's got it taken care of.

It means that with the mind of Christ, you can make the conscious choice to offer life when that person may well deserve or expect the exact opposite. And this saying is hard because it's way easier to retaliate. It's way easier to vent to your friends about that frustrating coworker. It's way easier to be passive aggressive to your roommate, that you ask them to stop doing something and they keep doing it. It is way easier to surround yourself with everyone who thinks, looks, and votes exactly like you do.

It's way easier to detach from relationship and just give up. It's easier to use a you versus me and an us versus them mindset because we love to feel self righteous. Most of us don't like hard conversations. We'd rather stay comfortable. Fade into the background and chalk it up to, oh, we just kind of lost touch.

It's way harder to love the way that Jesus asks us to church. And if we're honest, I think we tend to love grace and mercy when it's directed to us. But when it's for those who have hurt us, all we want is God's wrath to come down on them for his justice to come down on them. So how could Jesus ask this of us? This is such a real human experience.

This is really hard. It would be so much easier to go the way of the world. So let's look at these last two verses starting in verse 35. Jesus says, 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 children of the most high, because he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your father is merciful. And so Jesus says that we should love our enemies for two reasons. One, because our reward will be great. And second, that we will be children of the most high, God.

So first, our reward will be great in this upside down kingdom that Jesus is ushering in. When we love like Jesus, what we receive is not the fleeting satisfaction of some kind of earthly justice, but a heart that actually mirrors the heart of God. Our reward is knowing that we believe in a God that is not only just, but is our comforter. We can take comfort in the fact that even if justice on this earth doesn't take place when we can see it, that we have an eternity waiting for us. Well, all will be made right again, and there will be no more tears and no more pain.

And second, we will be children of the most high. We are adopted into the family of God when we follow Jesus and when we allow the Holy Spirit to lead in our decisions, in our relationships, God is our good father, and we can actually begin to see people the way that God sees them. People just as desperate for grace and mercy as we are, people just as in need of love as we are. We love like Jesus because when we were still in rebellion against God, he displayed his faithfulness by sending his son on our behalf so that we could spend eternity with him. We love because God first offered us life when we deserved death.

He chose mercy and grace. And so when Jesus says, to love your enemies, he's asking us to choose to hope for life for them, the same way that God offered life to us. He says, be merciful, just as your father was merciful. And so to love your enemies means to see past someone's gritty humanness and trust that God is pursuing them in their sin and their walk with him, just like he's pursuing you. And I want to be clear.

This love is a command, but it's never forced. Jesus is not asking us to somehow earn his love by loving people perfectly. We can't. What he's saying is that when we truly understand the love that God has offered to us, we start to live like it in the way that we treat other people. This kind of love is an outflowing of gratitude, not something to add to your to do list of ways to win God's favor.

It's so much easier to hate than to choose to love them. But if we choose to follow Jesus, it involves us taking on a posture of humility and allowing God to transform us into people who can offer mercy to those who we have deemed unworthy of that same mercy.

So when I was in college, I fell in love for the first time. I met this guy through a church internship. And while for a while I thought I would even marry him, we attended and worked at the same church, and we had developed such a sweet community there. And we dated for about nine months. And then we broke up completely out of nowhere.

And then after six weeks, with much trepidation, we tried to start dating again, which lasted for about six months. And then inevitably, we broke up for the final time. And there was another couple in that friend group who had been dating for a long time. And the girl. Katie and I had become really close friends during that time.

We had walked with each other through all of our relationship issues. And in the end, she and her long term boyfriend also broke up. And then I heard from another friend a short time later that Katie had actually started dating my ex boyfriend. Obviously, this was extremely painful given the fact that she had walked with me through not one, but both of my breakups with this man. She knew the pain that I had felt.

I had been vulnerable with her. I had trusted her with my thoughts and my emotions. And when my friend told me what was happening, it was all I could do to sit on my bed and just kind of laugh at how absurd the whole situation was. I felt confused and angry and betrayed. No one had ever broken my trust like that before.

And I wasn't even mad at my ex boyfriend. We were in a really small community, so I figured one of these days he'll probably start dating somebody that I know. But I was so angry at this person who I had called a friend and I found myself venting to anyone who would listen. And if I'm honest, I spoke poorly, not only about this girl, but about my ex boyfriend from a place of anger and pain. And I felt so self righteous and I just let myself stew in it.

But later that week, I went on a walk. And this was in 2020, so everyone was going on walks. That's kind of what we did, right? And as I was listening to worship music, the song God is Love by Chris Renzima came on. And the chorus says, he is good, he is God.

What I earned is not what I got and he is just yet also kind. What I deserve is not what I find what more can I say about him? My God is love. Now, normally this song makes me feel comforted and radically loved by God in the middle of my messy life. But this time, the Holy Spirit grabbed ahold of my heart and he filled me with conviction.

I felt the Holy Spirit say to me, I offered you grace when you did not deserve it. What makes Katie any different?

Whoa, talk about heart check. And what was so wild about this whole moment with the Lord was that although I felt really convicted, I also didn't feel like God loved me any less. I didn't feel like he was angry with me. He didn't invalidate my feelings or pretend that nothing was wrong. He didn't condemn me or tell me to remain friends with this person that had so clearly broken my trust.

What he asked of me was to reflect the same love that God showed me. And it was really hard when all I wanted to do was make her feel the pain that I felt. To tell her all of the reasons that she was a horrible friend, to even pray that their relationship would end. God asked me to offer her grace. And it's been four years since this happened, and there are still moments when I don't want to do that.

None of this is easy, but that's why we do it with God. And maybe this morning the Holy Spirit has been bringing someone to mind as I've been talking, maybe someone has hurt you and you're realizing that God is asking you to pray a new prayer for them instead of praying that a flower pot would come out of nowhere and knock them in the head. Maybe he's asking you this week to pray life for that person.

And Jesus tells us in the gospel of John, by this, everyone will know that you are my disciples if you love one another. And so may we, as a body of believers, choose to do the hard thing to be a church that seeks to love in ways that are uncomfortable, but are healing and transformative and surprising in a world that so desperately needs it. And as we close, we are going into a time of reflection. The band is going to play, and we want to offer two questions for you to reflect on. We'll actually have a prayer team in the back if you would like someone to pray with you.

And maybe you're not at a place yet where you can pray for that person. And all of this feels way too hard. That's okay. We're all in process. And like I said at the beginning, simple does not mean easy when it comes to Jesus.

But if that's you, I invite you to go pray with someone. There's power when we pray in community, especially when we don't feel like we have the strength to pray on our own. So here are the questions. First one is this. Is there someone in your life who God is asking you to offer life instead of hate?

And what would it look like if we, as a church, committed to offering life to people who expected us to offer death or retaliation?

Let me pray for you, Jesus. Thank you for this morning, God. This is a hard saying of Jesus, but, God, I just pray that you would give us renewed hearts that can see you the way that you want us to. God, would you help us to give us new hearts for people that have hurt us, that have harmed us, that make us uncomfortable? God.

And would we offer them life? And, God, would we know that we can't do it without you. So as we reflect on these things, God, I pray that we would maybe feel conviction, but never condemnation. God, that you come alongside us and that you walk with us as we become more like you. We love you.

And it's in Jesus'name I pray. Amen.