I CALLED AND GOD HEARD

Listen to these words from Isaiah 53 - and remember these words were written 500 years before Jesus was born. Read Isaiah 53:2-9. Those are powerful words and we recognize that the prophet Isaiah is showing us what Jesus is going to be willing to do for us. This particular section of the book of Isaiah is called “The Suffering Servant” passage and does that passage not adequately describe what Jesus has done for us? Here is the a picture of Jesus’ act of complete obedience to what God has asked Jesus to do - to give up his life, to be humiliated and killed for us - even though we do not deserve it. Psalm 34 is a Psalm that points out to us that even when we suffer, we should live a life of thanksgiving because even though we don’t deserve it, God has provided for our salvation through the suffering of his son. With Psalm 34, we continue our look at the Psalms during this season of Lent.
Psalm 34 was written by King David as a response to a specific incident in David’s life. David was a young shepherd boy when Saul was king over Israel. Saul had started out as a good and faithful King, depending on God for all he did in the kingdom. But Saul’s ego got the best of him and Saul began to believe that he was successful on his own merit instead of God’s work. So God decides that he is going to have to find a new king who will live faithfully for God. He anoints the young boy David to become the next king - but David cannot take the throne until Saul dies. David then goes into this kingly training program. Saul is not aware that God has decided that David will succeed him and at this point Saul has a great fondness for David. David shows Saul his bravery by defeating the giant Goliath and David aided Saul in battle and on top of that, David as a musician soothes Saul by playing music for him.
After a particular heroic battle against the Philistines, David quickly became known as a military hero in the nation of Israel. The women of Israel, in particular, began to swoon over David’s heroism. There were even songs written by the women to praise David; they sang, “Saul has slain his thousands, but David has slain ten thousands.” So David’s popularity began to surpass that of Saul, making Saul extremely jealous of David. David quickly went from being a protege of Saul’s to being his rival and Saul decided that he needed to get rid of David and Saul became determined to kill David. So we begin to read in the book of 1 Samuel these stories of Saul chasing David throughout the Israeli countryside trying to kill David.
Even though Saul was in the wrong, David also reacted wrongly to the danger from Saul. The events leading up to David’s writing of Psalm 34 came when David escaped an assassination plot from Saul.
David fled to a place called Nob. There David solicited the help of a priest named Ahimelech but instead of being honest about the fact that David was fleeing from Saul, David lied to Ahimelech by just saying that he was on an errand from Saul. So Ahimelech gave David provisions and weapons. When Saul found out this is where David had gone, Saul has Ahimelech and 84 other priests along with all the men, women and children and even all the cattle of Nob slaughtered. So because of David’s dishonesty, the population of an entire town is killed.
David acknowledged to Abiathar, the only son of Ahimelech to survive the massacre at Nob, that he was morally responsible for the slaughter. God is very disappointed with David that David had not trusted that God would care for him. David is reminded that he killed Goliath without any weapons other than a stone, so why does David not think that God would keep him safe from Saul? But David still is acting in unbelief and continues to run and goes to seek shelter with Israel’s enemy - the Philistines. When the Philistines realize who he is, they arrest David and put him in a sort of house arrest. David feared that this was going to be the end of his life - again, not trusting in the promises God had made to him that he would be King of Israel. So David pretends to be crazy so he can escape being killed by the Philistine King. It was against Philistine law to kill a person who is insane. Because of his subterfuge, David was released from captivity. But again, God was greatly disappointed in David that he would not put his trust in God’s protection and instead tried to solve him problems by himself. Psalm 34 is written as David realizes what he has done wrong. David realizes that his ‘sin’ is that he has once again fallen short of what God expects of him - which is total trust in God’s care. So David begins this Psalm saying: “I will forever praise the Lord.” David is saying that he has learned his lesson and regardless of the situation in his life, David will recognize the presence of God and will trust in him instead of trusting in himself and trying to work everything out using his own understanding.
David says he is going to praise God publicly - and he is going to encourage others to praise God. David says that God saved him when he didn’t deserve it - so he realized that he is to live a life where he praises God regardless of what is happening.
So David says to the readers of the Psalm - David says to us - OK I am going to teach you about God. I am going to teach you that you can rely on God. God will hear you. It is not that God prevents bad things from happening - remember Jesus says, “The rain will fall on the righteous and the unrighteous”. God is not an insurance policy against anything bad happening in your life…. but God has promised to always be there with you through whatever is going on in your life. So we should always be praising God for his presence with us all the time! And to prove it, God has sent his son to suffer and die for us. To prove how much he loves us, God allows his son to be humiliated and put on a cross. When you really think about what God has done for you; when you think of the sacrifice God has made for you - for each one of you - then how can you not praise God all the time?
Like we talked about last week, this Psalm points out the difference between the ‘righteous’ and the ‘unrighteous’. The righteous people this Psalm talks about are not those who are perfect, who never sin, who always do what God wants them to do. The righteous are like David, they try and sometimes they do right but often they fail. The righteous are those who know that in their failure, the only hope they have is dependence on God. The righteous are simply those who put their trust in God and do not rely on their own understanding and their own solutions.
David teaches us this as we see throughout David’s life the terrible mistakes David makes - his affair with Bathsheba, his murder of Uriah, his failures with his sons - David admits that he has done wrong and always calls out in earnest for forgiveness from God and because David realizes that his only hope is in God, God forgives him.
What God wants from us is for us to acknowledge our sinful nature; our tendency to try to do it all on our own; to accept God’s forgiveness and to try and do better.
The life of the Apostle Peter tells us the same thing. Peter was a lot like David - impulsive and quick to not trust. And like David, Peter struggled with this idea of trust…. but Jesus was always there to help Peter; Jesus was always there to forgive Peter……
So this Psalm helps us see that we are always going to live in this tension between trying to do what is right and knowing that we are going to often fail. As Paul says, “I don’t understand why I don’t do what I know I should and do the things I know I shouldn’t”. This Psalm teaches us that as long as we sincerely ask forgiveness and as long as we sincerely want to do better, we will begin to live a life of peace with who we are in the eyes of God. We will begin to really understand that we are, even with our faults, we are beloved children of God. And the proof of this is the willing suffering of our Lord - the suffering servant.
So do you desire a good, happy life? Then learn from David that these things come from God - and spend your life praising and thanking him! “O taste and see that the Lord is good; how blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him!”. Amen!

A GATEWAY TO THE PSALTER

Beginning our Lenten Journey

Jesus said: (Read Matthew 5:3-10) We know these words as The Beatitudes. It is a list where Jesus is helping us to see what it takes to have a happy, joyful life. Jesus says that compassion and meekness and showing mercy and such will lead us to a feeling of joy and contentment. Happiness, says Jesus, cannot be found in the things we do for ourselves, but only in the ways we give ourselves to others and to God. This is the same message we hear from Psalm 1 - a Psalm that leads us into this time of Lent. We are going to spend Lent looking at specific Psalms that will help us to better understand who we are as God’s people and how God guides us to live. The Psalms are a fascinating record of real people who were struggling through life just like we are; real people who were trying to better understand who they were in relationship with God and exactly what this meant as they tried to live each day in that tension between the world around them and the life God called them to lead. In the book of Psalms we find Psalms of joy and psalms of sadness; psalms of lament and psalms of questioning. Psalms run the whole gamut of emotions. But even with this great range, the Psalter’s goal is to tell us that regardless of the ups and downs in the journey of our life, we can still live a life of ‘happiness’ - of peace and joy and contentment. Collectively The Psalms are known as “The Psalter”. This psalter is the hymnbook of the Hebrew people. Just like the hymnbook we use, these are the songs that were sung as the Hebrews worshipped. Some of these hymns were used to enter worship - the Hebrews would gather outside the Temple and then sing their way into worship. These are called Psalms of Ascent. The Hebrews sang during worship just like we do and they sang to end worship. But as we pick up our hymnbook and turn to the proper page - or look up on the wall to see the words in order to sing our hymns - Hebrews had these Psalms memorized. They learned them as they sang them all the time. It was the only music they knew and except for a scroll in the Temple, the psalms weren’t written down anywhere. The psalms were not numbered during the time of the Hebrews; they knew them by their first line. So you would say the first line of a Psalm and everyone immediately would know what to start singing. Now we think what a great feat this is to have all these Psalms memorized, but I imagine that we are able do this more than we think. If I say, “Holy, holy, holy” you would continue with “Lord God Almighty!” Or “Silent Night” and you say, “Holy Night”…. and we could go on for a while and I bet you would know a lot more hymns by memory than you thought! There is a story about a dairy farmer who would milk a different cow every day and each cow was known by a Psalm number. As he milked the cows he would memorize a Psalm. So when he milked the cow known as Psalm 4, he would memorize Psalm 4 and when he milked Psalm 22 he would memorize Psalm 22 and he said before he knew it he had all 150 Psalms memorized! We are starting our Lenten study of the Psalms by starting at the beginning - with Psalm 1. Psalm 1 is actually an introduction to the whole Psalter. Its purpose is to help us to get an idea of what the message is of the entire Psalter . It is like any introduction to any book that prepares you for what you are going to learn as you read through the book. In other words, what message should we get if we sat down and read through the entire book of the Psalms? And the introduction, Psalm 1, tells us that message would be - that if we live the life described in the Psalms, we would be living a life of joy and peace and contentment - we would be happy in who we are. And, according to the Psalm, the mechanism of this joy and peace and contentment is to acknowledge God as sovereign over all our life and to meditate on the ‘law of the Lord’. We are to understand that the Psalter is not just merely a hymnbook - but a guide to the life of joy, peace and contentment that God has intended for all of us. So we have this Psalm which is the beginning of the book of Psalms that tells us that God’s desire for his people is for them to be happy. Then the Psalmist says - the way to this happiness is to ‘meditate on the ‘law of the Lord’. How do we do that? First we have to remember what ‘the law of the Lord’ is. Our inclination is to think that the Psalmist is referring to the 10 Commandments. And indeed the 10 commandments are a part of it - but the original word from the Psalm is not ‘law’ but ‘Torah’. We are to meditate day and night on The Torah. The Torah refers to the first 5 books of the Old Testament. Meditating on the Torah means that we are to learn and study and remember the events of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. We are to think about how all these stories impact our life and help us better make decisions and choices that will please God and help us to be more faithful. We learn about Abraham and Jacob and Moses and Joshua. We learn about the Hebrews journey through the wilderness and understand how that applies to our journey from salvation to becoming closer and closer to God. And the Psalmist says: This shouldn’t be something that is a burden. It shouldn’t be like that homework we were assigned in English class or Math class that we drug home and had to force ourselves to conjugate those verbs or solve all those algebra problems. It shouldn’t be “OK. I’ll read the Bible cause God tells me to - but I’m not going to enjoy it…..” The Psalmist says that the happiness comes in because we spend time in God’s word because we want to; because the true desire of our heart is to learn and grow and we know that comes from letting God himself teach us as we read those stories of Scripture. In fact the Psalmist tells us that there are only 2 types of people - those who delight in the word of the Lord and the ‘wicked’. The ‘wicked’ does not refer to evil people but to people who see no benefit in spending time reading and learning God’s teaching. Alluding to the Psalmists ideas that if you desire to learn and grow then you will become closer to God and if you don’t, if you ignore God’s word; if you don’t read and study and learn then you will grow in the other direction - you will grow away from God and the true ‘happiness’ that he offers. Sort of like the grinches heart that was 3 sizes too small. This is the value of Lent. Lent challenges us to think about where we stand on that line between Christ and ‘the wicked’. If you imagine Christ as your left hand and ‘the wicked’ as your right hand and your reach out to your left and right sides and imagine a line between the two - where are you? Are you ‘meditating on the law’, studying and learning and growing more towards Christ or are you putting off your daily devotional time, putting off that time of Bible reading and studying and so heading the other direction on that line……. Or instead of a line, the Psalmist uses the picture of a tree. The tree planted by the water grows and becomes strong but the tree who is not by the water, will dry up and be blown away. So as you reflect during this time of Lent, remember the words of Jesus from Luke - Happy are those who hear the word of God and keep it. Amen.

THE TRANSFIGURATION

Transfiguration Sunday is always the Sunday before the beginning of Lent. The occasion we call the transfiguration - just another word for ‘transformation’ - is one of the events which help us answer the question - “Who really is Jesus?” Now, that may seem to be a silly question to you, but for the disciples who were struggling with who Jesus was, it is a very important question. And maybe for us it is a good question to ponder as well. Just because you know the stories of Jesus, you may not really have thought about his identity - and the significance of his identity. We know the Christmas story, we know the Easter story, we could all probably tell some of the other stories in the life of Jesus - but how does that define for us who he is in relationship to us and in relationship to God. “Who Jesus Is” is a much more important question than “What did Jesus do” and the story of the Transfiguration helps us to understand and learn what that means.
The transfiguration leads into the season of Lent because the what happens there can help us begin the Lenten season reflecting on Jesus. Lent is a time of reflection, a time of self-examination, a time of learning and relearning, so having a fixed image of Jesus helps to guide us in thinking about our personal relationship with him and how that affects our daily life.
Before the Transfiguration took place, Jesus had been instructing his disciples. Now, the disciples were pretty wishy-washy when it comes to understanding who Jesus is and what his purpose is. They are dedicated to Jesus; they are committed to his ministry, they feel compelled to follow him - but most days they don’t have any clarity about why. Once in a while we see a flash of recognition of Jesus as the son of God - but most of the time the disciples are really unaware of just who they are following. But we can’t be too hard on those disciples because we are often the same way. Some days we are right there with him; we feel inspired and excited about Jesus’ work in our lives - and then there are days when we couldn’t be farther from even thinking about him.
But on this day, Jesus is praying with and teaching the disciples and then he just looks at them and says, “Who do people I am?” The disciples were honest with him and tell Jesus that people are saying different things. Most people think that Jesus is the resurrected John the Baptist who had recently been put to death. Others thought Jesus was the prophet Elijah from the Old Testament who the Hebrew people believed would return before the Messiah came. Jesus thought for a moment and then said, “Well, then, who do you say I am?” Peter, always the first one to answer any question says, “Why, you are the Messiah, the Christ, the Son of God!” Jesus says, “Good, Peter. But don’t tell anyone else that, yet. For I have to suffer and be rejected by the Jewish leaders and then be killed.” Then Jesus continues, “And for anyone who wishes to follow me, they must take up their own cross, give up their own desires, and keep close to me.” In other words, when you decide to follow Jesus with all your heart and soul and being, they way is not always going to be easy. He continues by saying what is recorded in Luke 9:24-25 “For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it. What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit their very self?” Jesus is asking the disciples - and asking us - to consider our priorities if we are really going to follow him. Either the ‘things of the world’ are going to be important or the ‘things of God’ are important. And we have to decide that for ourselves which we are going to choose. And everyone has to make that choice. We can’t dance around it or put it off or try to play both sides of the fence. Thinking about this and making a commitment one way or the other is a lot of what Lent is for. To think and consider and struggle with this question. Do we prioritize the things in our life thinking of God and Jesus and the church first or do we make the other parts of our life more important and kind of fit God and Jesus and the church in around everything else?
Jesus is reminding us - giving us some fodder for thought - that if we do choose the ‘things of the world’ first, what good is it really going to do us. We can’t take it with us when we die - but if we choose Christ, God and the church , then we have gained eternal life. Even though it may be difficult now to put Jesus first, the longterm benefits far out way any inconvenience we have now!
Eight days after Jesus has this teaching session with the disciples, Jesus goes up on the mountain to pray and with him went Peter, James and John. Peter, James and John are the disciples that were closest to Jesus. All the disciples were important, but these three had a special relationship with Jesus and were often the only ones present when Jesus did especially miraculous things. These three are actually referred to as ‘the inner circle’ - the ones Jesus held in the closest confidence.
so up on the mountain they go to pray with Jesus. Jesus often goes up on a mountain to pray. Someone once called mountain tops a ‘thinness between man and God’. Mountain tops just seem to give you a closer feeling to God. Many Old Testament figures did the same thing - they went up on a mountain to meet God or to feel closer to God or even to have a conversation with God.
Anyway, the four of them get to the top of the mountain and Jesus begins to pray and Peter, James and John fall asleep. Remember this is the same thing that happens the night of Jesus’ arrest; the four of them go into the garden and Jesus begins to pray and there are Peter, James and John sound asleep. That night he wakes them up, he begins to pray again and back asleep Peter, James and John fall. Same thing on the mountain top this time. Jesus starts praying, they fall asleep but this time something spectacular happens. All of a sudden Jesus begins to glow and his clothes become dazzling white. Then two men appear to talk to him - Moses and Elijah - both of which also had miraculous mountain top experiences of their own.
Moses had gone up on the mountain at Sinai to meet with God and receive the 10 commandments and the Law from God. He was up there 40 days and when he came back down the mountain his face glowed - and it glowed so bright the people couldn’t look at him so he had to put a veil over his face. The interesting thing about this glow is that as time passed, the glow would start to face so Moses would go into the tabernacle where God lived and the glow would ‘recharge’ and become bright again! Elijah also had a mountaintop experience. Queen Jezebel sent an army to kill Elijah and he ran away and ended up on top of a mountain. There God came to him in a ‘still small voice’ and talked with him, renewing Elijah’s resolve to do God’s work in spite of Jezebel’s death threats.
So here they are again, Mose and Elijah who had come down from heaven and were now speaking with Jesus. The disciples woke up and saw what was going on and were really confused, yet they said they had this wonderful feeling as they watched. It must have been a very good feeling because Peter wanted them all to build shelters to live in and they would all just stay up there! But about as soon as Peter made all these plans, a cloud formed right above the mountain and came down and covered them and God’s voice was heard saying: “”Look! This is my son. My chosen on. Listen to him!” Then the voice was gone, the cloud lifted, Moses and Elijah were gone and Jesus no longer glowed. All that was left of this great experience were Jesus, Peter, James and John.
The last verse of this account is pretty interesting - it says “And they didn’t tell anyone about this until long after...” No doubt - who would have believed them. But it changed them and their commitment to Jesus was renewed and refreshed and stronger because they witnessed first hand the revelation of who Jesus was.
Jesus was the Son of God, the Messiah, the Promised One. They were reminded of his authority as God said, “Listen to him!”
And what are we suppose to listen to? Right before jesus says the thing about following him he says, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me”. So as we move into Lent, as we consider our struggle with who Jesus is and what he means to us, as we think about what it means to take up our crosses and deny ourselves - we remember this transfiguration - this transformation that happened on that mountain.
As we go into Lent - go with these questions - Who is Jesus to me? What does it mean for me to take up my cross? And after I think about those questions - think about “What difference is it going to make in my life?

Amen.

IT’S ALL ABOUT LOVE

Think about songs with love in the title. I imagine if we started right now we could name songs with ‘love’ in the title for the rest of the service. Country songs, pop songs, rock songs, Christian songs - and if we expanded the list into naming songs about love - we’d be here for the rest of the week. Love is a Many Splendid thing, What is Love, It’s all about love, Love theme from Romeo and Juliet, Have I told you lately that I love you, we could go on and on. Then we could start naming movies and books and TV shows about love - what about poems that are about love? We could just name love things forever. We even have a holiday centered around love - it is almost Valentines Day and it is a day about love. We as a culture are obsessed with love. So my next question for you is this, “What is love?” How would you define the word ‘love’? What does love ‘look like’? How do you recognize love in yourself and in another person? Most of us would answer those questions a little differently - or maybe a lot differently.
The Bible also has a lot to say about ‘love’. The Bible answers all these questions for us - it helps us to understand what love is, it helps us understand the attitudes surrounding love and it helps us to learn what love looks like as it is lived out in our lives. What the Bible tries to do is teach us how as followers of Christ we look at love differently than our popular culture. What the Bible tries to do is teach us this concept of ‘perfect love’ - love that produces relationships, peace, respect and understanding between people. It helps us know what is expected of us as God’s people as we interact with each other in the community of faith, in the community around us and as we live in relationship with God.
The word ‘love’ appears over 600 times in the Old and New Testaments. However - you’ve probably heard this before - the Jews and Greeks had different words for ‘love’. There was no one ‘love’ word like we have - we just have the word ‘love’ and it covers a lot of different connotations. I use the word ‘love’ to describe how I feel about a TV show and about how I feel about my children - and clearly that is not the same emotion! In the Old Testament which was written in Hebrew, there are three different words used at different times. ‘Ahab’ is a Hebrew word that means ‘impulsive love’ or ‘spontaneous love’ - it is that love you have for someone when you don’t really know them but you see them and immediately feel some type of attraction. There is ‘hesed’ which is the type of love a married couple has after being married for many years - called ‘covenant love’ - it is a love that comes from a standing relationship and sometime we find it in the Old Testament as the word ‘lovingkindness’.
Then we have ‘raham’ - which is a compassionate love, a caring love. You see someone hurt or sick and that immediate response of wanting to take them in your arms and make it all OK.
When we jump to the New Testament which was written in Greek we have even different words that are used. These you might be a little more familiar with - We have ‘eros’ which is a romantic type of love - that little flip your heart does when you see the one you love; ‘phileo’ which is brotherly love, companionship, friendship - the love you have for someone you know and care about; and finally ‘agape’ - perfect love, the love God has for his people - the type of love we are to strive for as God’s people. Interestingly enough the word ‘agape’ for love is not used anywhere else in literature except in the Bible.
Now you may say this is all pretty interesting and you aren’t going to remember all this and it is nifty information to know - but practically what do all these strange sounding foreign words have to do with trying to figure out this love thing... And the answer is - the Bible points out all these different views of love because in order to understand the scope of how much and in how many different ways God loves us we need all these different illustrations to get the whole picture of God’s love. In all these ways - a romantic love, a compassionate love, a brotherly love, a covenant love.... and so forth. God loves us in all these different ways. God loves us with such an all encompassing love that it takes six words to get the whole extent of it.
It is not only words that God uses to explain how he loves us. We have story after story especially in the Old Testament about how much God loves his people. When the Jews assembled the Old Testament and named the books they indicated for us the book that was the ultimate book on love - the book that we often find named “Song of Solomon” in many versions of the Bible is actually called ‘Song of Songs’ - and more modern translations used that title. ‘Song of Songs’ was the original title of the book. That name, ‘Song of Songs’, is the Hebrew way of saying - the best of the best. In other words the Jewish scribes wanted the readers of the Hebrew Scriptures to know that this was the ultimate book of the collection - it was the ‘book of all books’. We don’t hardly ever used it but the Jewish authors of the Hebrew Bible felt that this book was essentially the book that should be read first - this is the ‘best book’. ‘If you want to pick a book to read, this is it!‘ is what the Hebrew writers were trying to convey.
For a Jew it is still an important book - every year during the Shabbat - the worship - during Passover, this book is read in its entirety as part of the Passover worship service. It really doesn’t take too long to read aloud and it is truly a beautiful peace of poetry which talks about the love between a young man and a woman he loves. In this poem are just wonderful images of the love between a man and a woman. It is almost sappy and drippy love - ‘your fragrance is like sweet honey’, ‘your eyes are like a dove’, ‘ you are like a lily of the valley; as delicate as a rose‘ ‘You are as beautiful as an apple tree’. Maybe not the same images we would use but you get the point. On and on these two people express this love toward one another. There is even a portion of the poem where we see that famous scene of two people who love each other running across the field toward one another in slow motion with their arms out until they finally meet in the middle in a hug. That is in that poem - 1000s of years before we ever saw it in a movie!
And the reason the Jews think that this love poem is so important is that this is to give us a picture of how God loves us. It says to us - remember that time in your life when you were head over heels in love with someone - those times when you would look at someone and your heart would do a little flutter, where everything about that person was just perfect and they could do no wrong. They could be totally incompetent and homely as all get out, but to you they were the most beautiful thing in the whole world. We remember that - Song of Songs says - that is how God loves you. Think about it - have you ever considered that God loves you in this way. That God’s heart does a little flutter when he sees you, that he looks at you with that same perfection and that same way of overlooking all your faults. That to God you are as beautiful as an apple true and your fragrance is like sweet honey; your eyes are like doves..... That is how God loves each and every one of you. What the Song of Songs does is help us understand when we hear - “God loves you” - now we have a picture of what that looks like.
While the Old Testament spends most of its time teaching us about how God loves us, the New Testament is much more concerned about how God’s loving us compels us to love others. And we learn very quickly that it is not easy. Love your enemies was the thrust of the passage that we read this morning - how easy is that? Love those who strike you and steal from you and persecute you; love those who borrow from you and don’t return what they borrowed, just let them have it; if someone asks something of you - give it to them regardless of what it is. Jesus tells us to wear a Tshirt that says “It doesn’t matter what you do to me, I’m going to love you anyway.” And worse of all, the Apostle Paul in that great description of love in I Corinthians 13 tells us that love has to be patient - patient? It might be easier to love enemies that to love patiently.
A couple things - this is not an all inclusive list. We are not to memorize the things Jesus said and the list Paul gave us and carry it around with us like a little checklist of how we act around other people - what both Jesus and Paul are trying to get us to see that as God’s people, we are to be different that everyone else. Jesus says, ‘anyone can love their friends, but it takes someone special to love their enemies - and that special person is you.’ Show people that living as God’s people makes you different - and this is the best way to do it. It is not a checklist but an attitude towards others.
But there is one more important point - and that is this - none of this is possible for us to do - we can never achieve this ‘different’ attitude, this ‘different’ way of treating people - we can never love our enemies until we truly believe that God loves us; that God loves us just as we are. That God loves us with our warts and our faults and our failures - God loves us like star crossed lovers running across an expanse of waving daisies with open arms. You have to believe that with your whole heart. Not because the Bible tells you to do it, not because I’m telling you to believe it - but because it is true. God loves you just as you are right now.
When that happens - when you finally put aside all these reasons God can’t love you, when you put aside all these things you think you have to do before God can love you, when you finally buy into the fact that God loves you regardless and there is nothing you have to do, then you will not only begin to be able to love your enemies and do all those things Jesus asks you to do - but you will also be able to love yourself.
Amen!