Pastor Jeff Orluck
Jacque: Beautiful. Beautiful. Well, it's family time. I just want to keep us all on the same page because lots of great things are happening. First of all, today, Ken is making lunch for us. Can we thank him? Yes, yes, yes. We thank you, Ken. We are excited. It's going to be delicious. And then after lunch, we are going to do our apple outreach, our fall apple outreach. Pastor Jeff has a route already very close to the church and we are just going to bring bags of apples to the neighbors and just bring the love of Jesus to them and let them know a little bit about Hope. If you can join us for that, it'll just take a little bit of time, it'll be a nice, beautiful fall walk. Join us for that. Then this Thursday night, Jim and Brenda, you are leading the Zoom prayer meeting. You are. I think you are. That meeting is once a month and it's all the churches invited to join. It's a sweet time. You can pray together on Zoom. It works really well and people from all around come. So think about joining. It's just one hour on Thursday night and you can find the link so easily on the Hope Happenings, which is the email you get every Tuesday that tells you everything that's going on. How many people read those emails? Wow, I'm impressed. Rachael, see that? Yay. She puts a lot of work into it. Thank you so much.
I'm going to make it really fast because a lot of you already know what I'm saying. Women's Encounter is this weekend. You can sign up today. This is a new thing at Hope. We have a square registration table right there, and you can easily sign up. We have a new iPad. Rachael will help everybody sign up and it's really an efficient way. If you want to come to the women's encounter, go there after church, get all the information and sign up. If you want to come to the men's breakfast, you can sign up there. Ladies, today is the first day for the hostesses to sign up for a table for the Christmas Tea. You can sign up there. So here we go. I tell you, you've got to be on top of these things.
The men's breakfast is on the 15th, right? And on the 15th, first of all, we have to make an announcement because one of Hope's young people is now a Mr. and a Mrs. Micah Cobb got married last weekend. Yep. Solana and Jim are pretty excited that they have their first married child. And Solana and Jim are putting on a reception on Saturday the 15th, four o'clock. And they just want to invite anybody, everybody from Hope, who wants to come join the fun and meet Micah's wife Elizabeth. Lana will be standing back by the table, so you can sign up back there for that too. That should be everything. Now I want to dismiss the kids and the teenagers because Daniel has a time with the teens during church now. Let me tell you, because of that, the youth group has been one of the main people to lead the children now. We need a few more volunteers for the children, for the children's ministry, and I'm going to be a helper right now.
Brian: Great. I was telling Jacque just yesterday how I remember a time when in the middle of January or February we had a prayer gathering scheduled, and it was 25 below zero and there was four feet of snow that had just fallen on the ground. And the only option we had was to really cancel for everybody's safety. But now we don't have to do that. We have Zoom. We have zoom, so there is no excuse to not be connected together. Now, I'm 71, soon to be 72, and if you don't know how to use Zoom, you just come and talk to me and I will direct you to Rachael. Zoom is one of the most wonderful gifts, and you know what? We need to all connect with each other. There is zero reason for us not to be connected to each other, even if we can't come into the house of the Lord together at times. I'm excited about what God's going to do through this prayer gathering and all of our other prayer gatherings. Hallelujah. Pastor Jeff is going to lead us today. Is Cheryl with us today?
Jeff: No. Okay.
Brian: Well, I will not give into the temptation to sit up here with you. Pastor Jeff has a very challenging message for us this morning. But part of the reason it's challenging is because we've not always really understood how to apply this message. And so it's a message that sometimes can give us a lot of condemnation or cause us to do things that really God doesn't want us to do. But anyways, Pastor Jeff is going to come and he's going to teach us today on loving your enemies. Wow, what a great message. Pray for him. This is a challenging subject.
Jeff: How's that for an introduction?
Brian: God bless you.
Jeff: We are going to have a message that brings a lot of condemnation. Cheryl and I agreed__ she has been a little bit under the weather this week and she just woke up again this morning and didn't feel she should come, but we agreed that if she had to say something, she would text me. We don't have Zoom in here, but she is watching on live stream, I assume. I'm just going to turn up my volume here so that I'll hear it if she texts. Hopefully, no one will call. She says, "You can tell them I'm recovering." So see, she's already in on the conversation, so that's great.
We are going to talk about the Jesus way. It's a way that Jesus lived and a way that Jesus taught. It's to love your enemies. It is a difficult topic and I think it's misunderstood a lot. In Christian circles, we can really misconstrue it and end up feeling guilty, especially when we are taking steps to protect ourselves in hurtful or abusive relationships. Sometimes in dysfunctional or abusive relationships, you have to take steps to protect yourself. Sometimes you have to cut off communication. Sometimes you have to take legal action. There are different things that happen in our lives when we are involved with people. This message, if you are in a relationship, that's hurtful and you have already taken some steps to protect yourself or to guard your heart, or in some way, to mitigate some of the abuse or difficulty that's happening there.
I don't want this message to confuse you or to bring you into a place of guilt. That's really not the point. And yet the whole concept of loving your enemies is a real thing. And so hopefully we can, we can just see how Jesus did it, we can see who Jesus did it with and we can start, ourselves, to try to practice this. Honestly, there are so many scales of this. I remember back when the war started in Ukraine, we had a conversation on Zoom with the Joy Group and struggling with, how can we go to war with Ukraine and love our enemies at the same time? I think as long as there are people that want to loot, raid, rape and pillage their neighbors, there will probably be wars. Because the right thing to do if you are a leader, is to not let someone next door do that to your people.
The other thing is, we are not in Ukraine. We might perceive Putin as an enemy, but he's a long way away. Where we get to practice loving our enemies is not in the Ukrainian war. Where we get to practice loving our enemies is right at home, in our workplace and in our churches and in our communities. That's where we get to practice loving our enemies: where the people that we perceive to be our enemies might be sleeping in our same bed. Has anybody who is married ever had a time when you perceived your spouse to be your enemy? That's when we want to start applying this message. If you are a preacher, and you start getting people criticizing your messages, you might feel you got all kinds of enemies. Right, Pastor Brian.
Some of you might have listened to, in years past, a minister from England named Graham Cook. Cheryl and I were really enamored with a lot of his teachings back probably 10 or 15 years ago. He told a story once about__ he was a pastor and a church in England, but he started traveling more and teaching more, and he was having various meetings in different places. I think this was still when he was back in England; he eventually moved to the states.
He would have these meetings and these three guys would come and sit in the front row and scowl at him and vigorously take notes every time that he spoke. After two or three meetings started to get a little bit under his skin and he really dreaded them showing up at his meetings because they would sit in the front row, they would literally scowl at him and they would sit and take notes.
These three guys were perceived enemies. He had a dream one night because he was really struggling with this. In the dream he saw, he saw these sculptors who were sculpting this statue. As they were working on it, it was becoming more and more and more beautiful. He was just really starting to be amazed at this skill and the beauty of this sculpture that was being sculpted in his dream. Finally, I think they turned the sculptor around and it was him. And it was the most beautiful image of himself he could ever have imagined. The Lord said to him, "Would you like to meet the sculptors?" He said, "Yes, I would." And it was those three guys. It was those three guys.
You see, when we have a perceived enemy in our life, that's when we get to begin to act and act these words of Jesus. Let's read the words of Jesus and then we'll talk through some of this. This is Matthew 5:43 to 48. This is out of the Passion Translation. It says, "Your ancestors have also been taught, love your neighbors and hate the one who hates you." They weren't just taught that that's human nature. We repay kind people with kindness, and we repay mean people with meanness. That's normal. That's who we are as human beings. It's very rare for human beings to display kindness to people who are mean to them. It just isn't in our nature. If someone takes your toy, you take their toy. If someone hits you, you hit him back. If someone speaks offensively to you, you offend them back. You see that happening on the roads all the time.
However, he says to you, love your enemy. Bless the one who curses you. Do something wonderful for the one who hates you and respond to the very ones who persecute you by praying for them. For that will reveal your identity as children of your Heavenly Father. What will reveal our identity as God's children is that we are kind to those who are mean to us. And we pray for those who persecute us. And we learn how to love those who we perceive as our enemies, for that will reveal your identity as children of your heavenly Father. He is kind to all by bringing the sunrise to warm and the rainfall to refresh. Whether a person does what is good or evil. He is gracious to everyone in the world, even the people that disparage him. He is still kind to them, He still provides for them.
What reward do you deserve if you only love the lovable? Don't even the tax collectors do that? How are you any different from others if you limit your kindness only to your friends? Don't even ungodly do that? Since you are the children of a perfect father in heaven, become perfect like him. That's quite a challenge. But that's the father's goal. If you remember some time ago we were talking about how God is love. I mean he's not just loving, He's love. He is his very essence, who he is. Everything about him is love. That's why he is who he is. That's why we experience him the way we do. But his goal for us is that we would become love. He doesn't just want to make us loving, He just doesn't want to make you nice. He wants to form your heart to become love like he is love. That's being perfect like the father is perfect.
Now I just got a text, so let's see. Sitting in vulnerability, it's okay. Sometimes that's where we are. If we try to respond in a different spirit to our perceived enemies. It's a scary thing. It's not an easy thing, it's a very difficult thing. It brings us into a place of great trust. That's where Robert had us this morning. When we are sitting in vulnerability, we can trust him. Thank you, Cheryl.
I talked about this a little bit at our men's retreat. One of the greatest opportunities to learn how to be like Jesus is in your marriage. All of you who are married, because honestly, if you told me you never perceived your spouse as an enemy, I would probably think you are lying or you've only been married a couple weeks. Although we had a big fight on our honeymoon, me and Cheryl. It was me. Honestly, it was my fault. Your spouse is not your enemy, but it doesn't mean that you don't perceive them as an enemy. Cheryl and I went through a couple year period in our marriage where it felt like everything that she wanted and everything that was about her was contrary to the call of God in my life. I felt like she was the biggest obstacle to me doing God's will. Finally, it was actually the Lord who spoke to me and he said, "No, you got it all wrong. Cheryl is my gift to you." And I said, "How in the world can she be your gift to me when she's against everything that I'm supposed to do?" And he said, "Well, the way she's a gift to you is that if you are launching out in something and you don't quite understand my will, she will help you adjust your path."
So I started to perceive her resistance to things that I thought were the will of God as a gift. Instead of rising up against it, instead of bucking against it, instead of resenting it, I began to thank God for it. And not that I even understood it, but I began to change how I responded to her. And especially in my relationship with God, I began to thank God for her. And the more I thank God for her is my gift. The more I begin to appreciate her. And the more I appreciated her, the more I respected her.
In any intimate relationship, the practice of thanksgiving for the person that is in your life is really a real key to you getting past the perception of them being enemies. But at the moment, somebody who is close in your life, and I'm sure we don't have any teens in here because they are with Daniel, but if you are a teenager, I'm sure your parents feel like enemies. And if you are a parent, there are probably times when your teens feel like enemies. But as soon as someone is perceived as an enemy, then the Jesus way kicks in. And then as soon as someone is perceived as an enemy, then you show kindness to them when they show anger to you, you show patience to them when they are impatient to you. You show the opposite to them of what you think you are getting in return that's negative. What comes negative to you, you return in positive. That's a Jesus way. It's not a natural way.
Fortunately, Robert and Taquaris, over the last months, have been teaching us about the flesh and the spirit and how we grow in the ways of Jesus when our flesh is bucking up against it. But we are constantly making choices. In the heat of the moment, sometimes you make the wrong choice, but you always get the opportunity to humble yourself and repent. Isn't that wonderful? Churches are great places for us to have perceived enemies. What we typically do in churches with our perceived enemies is we are nice to them to their face, and then we talk about them, of course, in very concerned tones, to others.
Jesus taught us to speak the truth in love. And some of us are really good at speaking the truth, but there isn't any love in it, especially on Facebook. I'll just tell you, when you communicate in print, the essence of who you are gets lost. You can say things not intending to be hurtful, but they will feel hurtful to others. They will be misconstrued. Face to face conversation is what you need to have when you are in the middle of a conflict with somebody. You need to be honest with each other. But then the second part of that sentence is in love.
If you love somebody, then, then even if they are, you are in conflict with them, your goal is to help produce life, to produce good fruit. If you feel there needs to be a correction, that's all well and good. But of course you have to understand that we are all human. Each one of us needs correction, and your pursuit of correcting that one is really a matter of loving them. In the church, we really do need to learn how to talk to each other, face to face, how to talk about our differences, how to step into a difficulty willingly, and then how to find a way to do that in a loving way. That's a process. Most of us hate confrontation. Anybody like me? Anybody hate confrontation? I avoided it at all cost.
Let me tell you something. I was forced to confront things that made me really, really uncomfortable in my job. And you know what I learned? If you start to do it, even though you hate it, you actually get good at it. You actually do. When you first try to do it, man, your heart's speeding. Your palms are sweaty, your mouth is dry if you are like me, I'm just telling you that's how it was. But we are learning, and God helps us. And he teaches us how to communicate with one another, heart to heart about the real issues, and they are not always easy. But in church, where you are rubbing shoulders with people fairly closely on a regular basis, you are going to have perceived enemies. And you need to be able to have a conversation to say the hard things and to hear the hard things too. It's not about you just making your point. We are talking about relationships here.
I think in the church, if we can learn how to do that, maybe we can take a step closer to what it means to really love enemies that are going to hurt us. In America, we are not an occupied nation. Think about this. Jesus gets approached by a Roman centurion. Now, what do you think all the Jews around Jesus thought about this Roman centurion, they hated him. He was a gentile dog who was stealing the food out of their homes. His soldiers were raping their daughters and they were just having to do with anything they wanted in that nation. The Jews hated them. They were hated.
This Roman centurion walks up to Jesus and says, "Jesus, my servant is sick." Last time, we shared about a generous spirit. Jesus says, "I'll come heal him." Now how do you think all the Jews standing around Jesus responded. What was their response to that? Tilt! What? He's going to go into the home of that gentile doc. He's going to defile himself in a gentile home and he's going to heal the servant of this centurion whose soldiers are taking food out of our homes. That's loving your enemies on a level I haven't had to learn yet, but I have had to learn how to love my enemies at work. I have had to learn how to love my enemies here. Well, maybe not here, at churches. Hallelujah. Are you with me?
Let's look at this: Matthew 5:38 and 39. Jesus taught some really cool things here. This is, again, the Passion Translation. Jesus said, "Your ancestors have also been taught, take an eye in exchange for an eye, a tooth and exchange for a tooth. However, I say to you, don't repay an evil act with another evil act, but whoever insults you by slapping you on the right cheek, turn the other to him as well." When somebody offends you, that's what this is about. That's what he is talking about. You understand if you get hit on the right cheek, then someone is using their left hand. Brian, why don't you come up here. If you are going to hit me in the right cheek, what hand are you going to use?
Brian: My left hand.
Jeff: See, now that's a punch. But if I was going to hit Brian on the right cheek to offend him__ he's talking to people who are under him. He's talking to servants with their masters or Jews with Roman centurion. I would take my left hand back and I would backhand him, right? That's an offense. Do you understand? Jesus is not saying here, if someone tries to hurt you, don't defend yourself. What Jesus is saying here is if somebody offends you, if they hit you__ we see it in all the medieval movies. They take their gloves off and they backhand them with a glove to offend them because they want to fight them. So you cause the offense, so that you can get into a fight. How many of you know in your close relationships, the people who are closest to you know exactly the buttons to push? They know them. They've got those gloves and man, they'll just backhand you with those gloves whenever they feel like you are getting under their skin. It might not even be about you. It might be they had a bad day at work and they are taking it out on you.
What Jesus is saying is when somebody offends you respond in a different spirit than the way that they are treating you. You see, if they hit you on the right cheek, if they backhand you, if they offend you, they have control of that situation. They took control by hitting you. You can let them continue to control the situation by lashing out, or you turned to them the other cheek, meaning, this one you didn't ask for. They did it and it was against your will that they did it. And the next one, when you turn the cheek, you say, wow, if you are really that frustrated, do you need this one too? You are responding in an opposite spirit because the natural thing to do is to hit them back. If they say something harsh to you, the natural thing to do is to speak harshly back. I don't know about you, It just comes out. I mean, I don't have to think about it.
You know, I don't know why Cheryl's so crabby with me, but I'm going to get her back now. I don't have to think that way. If I perceive Crabbs in her voice to me, I'll just respond crabby back. I need more of Jesus. Depending upon our, our, our level of, of self-esteem, our level of self-worth, sometimes you can walk into church and somebody's busy with something and they don't greet you the way you think and you say, "What did I do wrong?" And the next thing you know, you have a perceived enemy. They are not an enemy at all, but they are a perceived enemy. Now what are you going to do? They just fell into the camp of the Jesus Way.
What the Lord is wanting to teach us, he wants to form us a different kind of heart so that when we are offended, when somebody offends us, they might even purposely offend us, we are able to respond in a different way. And when we respond in a different way, we reveal to them that we are children of the Father. Pastor Brian talks about how he grew up and how a lot of the things he couldn't do because they were against his religion. What I remember talking about those types of things was, well, we have to look different than the world looks. We can't do the same thing the world does because then we look like the world and we have to look different than them. But the way you look different from the world isn't by whether you go to movies or play cards or drink alcohol or dance. That's not how you look different from the world. The way you look different in the world is that you are kind and loving and prayerful when somebody offends you. When you are generous in your love to those that don't deserve it, that's what makes you different from the world. It's your character, it's your heart. It's becoming love that makes you different. It's how you respond to your perceived enemies.
The next one that he talks about is Matthew 5:40. He said if someone is determined to sue you for your coat, give him the shirt off your back as a gift in return. We are Americans; we will not tolerate injustice, especially when it's against us. When someone is trying to take something of yours that they don't deserve, that is not okay. We do not like other people to control what we can and cannot have. I rise up. But when we respond in opposite spirit, you see, they are under control. They are trying to take something away from us. We say, "Well, if you really need that, how about this too?"
How many of you read Les Miserables or seen the movie? I got hooked on that book. It's a long book. It's a long, long, long, long book and it's full of narrative. It was a hard read, but I got hooked on it in the first two chapters because in the first two chapters, the, the, you know, the hero, the story Jean Valjean has just got out of prison and he's trying to__ his identity card says he was a prisoner for 21 years. So he can't get a job. No one will trust him. He is persona non grata. He's cold, he's hungry, and he hasn't eaten since he got out of prison. And he ends up at the doors of the home of the local priest in this village and the priest, much against the council of his, of the two women who, you know, the maids, who take care of him and clean his house and all that much against their council, takes him in and feeds him dinner.
Not only that, but he brings out his finest silver and sets the table with all of his best dishes to feed Jean Valjean. And then he brings him upstairs and gives him a warm bed and a warm room and bids him. Good night. Well, in the middle of the night, Jean Valjean gets up when everyone is sleeping, goes down, goes into the silver cupboard, fills it up with a bag. Well, the priest hears it happening and goes down to see what's going on. And when Jean Valjean finds out that he's been caught, he takes one of the pieces of silver and he whacks the piece priest in the head, knocks him down on the ground and runs out the door. That will serve him right for showing kindness to a convict.
The next day, in the middle of the day, Jean Valjean returns with a gender arm or a policeman on either side of him. "Father, this gentleman, we caught this gentleman with all of this silver. And he says that you gave it to him. We assume that it's not true because he's a former convict, so we are bringing him back to you and he's under arrest and we want to return the silver." And the priest says, "Oh, why did you leave so early?" He runs back into his house and he grabs two silver candlesticks that hadn't been taken and he runs out with him and he says, You forgot these. He says, "My friend, I intended for you to take these too." And he sticks them in the bag. The gendarmes are just like, "What? Do you mean to tell me you gave him this silver?" He says, "Yes, yes. That was my intention all along was to give him the silver. You have arrested him unjustly, gentlemen, and I would expect you to release him, or I'll have to report you to your superiors." That was the beginning of the change of Jean Valjean. That was the beginning of his transformation. I'm always amazed because Victor Dumas wasn't a Christian like we are. He probably wasn't one at all, but he sure understood the Jesus way.
Romans 12:20: Instead, if your enemies are hungry, feed them. If they are thirsty, give them something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals of shame on their heads. And then what I wrote here was by giving them beyond what is wrongfully taken from us, it puts us back in the driver's seat of the relationship. And we go from being controlled to controlling the circumstances. They take from us what we don't want to give, but then after they take what we don't want to give, if we give them something else, additionally, now we are doing that by our own choice. You see what happens? You give yourself power to do something beyond what they did to you. And not only that, you extend a blessing of the Father and you reveal yourself to be a child of God. You have no guarantee that they'll repent, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that you were becoming love.
I may never have the opportunity that this priest did. I may not respond the way he did. But where I can learn it is right here with you guys right here, right at work. Let's see what my wife has to say. "Wow! This is a great message," she says. So then she says, when you are giving like that__ and this is a really good point. You can do something like that out of spite. That would be wrong. She says, "All done with a pure loving heart." Right? "Well, you want this, take this too!" That's not exactly the idea.
Let's just go to verse 41. We all consider ourselves to be servants of Jesus, right? That's all well and good until someone actually treats you like a servant, right? We like to be called servants of Jesus, but we sure don't like to be treated that way. Those of you that are in the service industry, you get that all the time. Hopefully, when you are calling a customer service number and you've been on hold for 45 minutes and you are at the end of your rope because this company is so inept with what they are doing to you, that when the CSR answers the phone, you don't take it out on her or him because they get it all the time and it's not their fault.
Hopefully, you treat your servers with respect at restaurants. They know what it's like to be treated like servants and they just have to suck it up. They may or may not do it that Jesus way. But that's just on the side. In this scripture, in the Passion Translation, it says, "And should people in authority take advantage of you, do more than what they demand." In the New Living Translation, it says, "If a soldier demands that you carry as gear for a mile, carry it to see the first mile." You are being treated like a servant. You are forced to do it whether you want to or not.
I love to serve my wife, but I hate to do it when she's demanding it. Anybody else like me? Let me do it at my own free will. Well after you do it because it's humanity of you, then do the next thing of your own free will. The first thing that's required of you is done against your will, but the second thing you do is done in your will. You turn the tables; you flip the tide. And you reveal yourself as a child of God.
There is a lot of things about loving your enemies when it comes to a larger scale. Things like Pastor Brian and I were talking last night. He says, "I don't know how to love the Taliban, with what they believe and what I see them do." He says, "But you know what? There is no Taliban in my life, but there is a lot of people that I struggle with. And if we can learn there, then the Lord will help us at whatever level we find ourselves in this fight." Cheryl has more to say. Cheryl and her daughters clean homes. She says, "I have had to clean enemies’ homes, Jeff" And she has. Enemies who were enemies before she cleaned their home. That's humbling. "That was hard," she says, "But I loved it." Well, she says, "I'm demanding?"
Do you remember the scripture we shared last time when we talked about being generous in spirit? I just wanted to read it again because this is the logical sequel to being generous in spirit. It's the next obvious step. Colossians 3 verses 12 through 14. This is the scripture that we talked about a month ago when we talked about being generous in spirit. One moment here. Let me see what she has. She says, "I'll show you demanding." She's not loving her enemy right now.
Colossians 3:12 to 14: You are always and dearly loved by God, so robe yourselves with virtues of God since you have been divinely chosen to be holy, be merciful as you endeavor to understand others, part of the issue with your perceived enemies is you may not under even understand them. If you step forward with mercy first and seek to understand them, which will require conversation, you might find out you don't have an enemy. You might have a friend. It's so good to be in a relationship together with people who aren't like you. Do you realize that one of the best gifts that God will ever give you is people who are really different from you?
Most of you are probably pro-life, I assume. You should go make a really good friend who is pro-choice and you should have real honest conversations and get down beneath the political verbiage. We had candidate forms here and we had the two people running for Senate and 37 a were here. Our Republican candidate, right away the discussion was abortion. She said, "Well, I'm pro, pro-life." But I realize as soon as you say I'm pro-life, what you do is you tie yourself to the whole political rhetoric around the pro-life movement. Not that that's not true, but it has become meaningless because it's just jabs back and forth. If it's all up on that level, then you are not going to get anywhere with anything. But if you have an honest, personal, intimate, meaningful conversation with somebody being that goes deeper than that political jargon, you might actually find a solution to the bypass. Even if it's just you and one person that you have chosen to befriend, that would be really a powerful thing.
Be compassionate, showing kindness toward all. All would include your enemies. By the way, be gentle and humble in your patience with others. Tolerate the weaknesses of those in the family of faith. That's a really good one. And of course, we, actually, are taught we don't just tolerate them; the people who seem to be weakest, we give the highest place of honor. We respond in an opposite spirit to what our nature would do. Instead of ignoring them, we actually honor them. Forgiving one another in the same way you have been graciously forgiven by Jesus Christ.
There are a lot of things that I don't have answers for in this area.
I did want to say this, just kind of another balancing act, where it says if someone wants to take your coat, give them your shirt as well. We live in America. We have a legal system that allows for us to work through the courts to get equitable solutions and not be treated unfairly. It's not wrong to use the legal opportunities that have been provided for us in this nation to try to get equitable solutions when you have legal conflicts. Everybody talks about our so happy nation. But when they are legal, legal differences, you don't have to feel guilty because you are trying to get what's right in a fair and inequitable way. That is not the opposite of loving your enemy.
You can actually love your enemy and have a legal battle with them. Did you know that? Because what I'm talking about here__ understand, when we mix it all together and we get it all wrong, we end up just thinking, well, a Christian has to be a doormat for everybody. That's not what I'm trying to say. People are in the middle of hard things and they are doing their best, and I will pray with you and we'll find a way for you to do your best. But what I really want you to look at is that every opportunity you have to deal with someone you are in conflict with, let's say on a more personal level than that like we've been talking about, you are giving the Holy Spirit and opportunity to form his love in you. That's what we are here for. That's why we are here with each other. God gets to use us to rub each other wrong and form new love. That's what your marriage is for. That's what your children are for. I had one friend in church, he said, "I used to think I was a really good Christian until I had kids."
As we are trying to understand this and as we are pursuing this Jesus way, here is what I put: Consider what you are thinking, what you are feeling, what you are saying, and who you are saying it to. That may help you realize if you are loving or hating your enemies. I'll say that again. As you pursue this Jesus way, consider what you are thinking, what you are feeling, what you are saying, and who you are saying it to. And that may help you realize if you are loving or hating your enemies. Amen.
Let's pray. You are so remarkable, father, the way you love. I've known you for over 50 years and I feel like I'm just at the beginning. I'm so glad we got all the eternity to get this. But Holy Spirit, we open our hearts to you right now as we ponder these words that Jesus spoke and we ponder the ways that Jesus taught and we yield to you, Holy Spirit because we want to choose the Jesus way. We want to choose your path. We see all too clearly our inability to do this easily. It seems like so easily the wrong things come out, the wrong emotions, the wrong words, the wrong response. But we trust you every day as we seek to follow you, that we will change, that our hearts will change, our thoughts will change, our responses will change.
We ask you, Holy Spirit, to be faithful in just nudging us, convicting us, and empowering us to be children of our heavenly Father in every way. We love that we've chosen this path, father. It's not an easy path, but it's a good path and it's life. And we thank you for your life. Just come and fill us right now, Holy Spirit. Wash us. Give us an anointing to leave this place determined to become love. Amen. Thank you Lord.
Brian: Thank you Pastor, Jeff. Sometimes, we just don't know how to love. One of the things that we, the church, has done in the past is that we don't trust Holy Spirit enough to be able to speak to people, so we make a bunch of rules for people to follow and that we say that's how you can love. But at the end of the day, you all have a relationship with the Lord and God is able to speak to us. He's able to speak to us. I would just encourage you that there are challenges in relationships. And when we come to a place where we actually don't know how to love somebody who is a perceived enemy, just ask the Lord this question, what is one thing I can do that will represent you in this? What's one thing I can do that will represent you in this relationship? And just do that one thing. When you finish that, then ask him, what's another thing I can do but just take it one step at a time. I think that portrayal of who Jesus really is will go a tremendously long way in bringing the kingdom of God to the earth. Thank you, Lord. Let's raise your hands together.
And now, may the Lord bless you and may the Lord keep you. And may the Lord make his faces shine up on you and be gracious to you. May the Lord turn his face towards you and give you his peace. And may you be empowered to love those who are different from you, who you might even perceive to be your enemy. This, we pray in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
We'll have people that pray with you at the altar here. Jim and Brenda will be serving communion this morning, over to my right. And those of you who are watching by live stream, we thank you for joining us today. God bless you. Send us an email; stay in touch with us. Thank you so much for being part of our faith community. Have a wonderful day. Bye-bye.
Transcript taken from the Sunday morning service 10-2-22. If you would like to watch the full service, click the link below.