“If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. If you do what is good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. And if you lend to those from whom you expect to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners to be repaid in full. But love your enemies, do what is good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High. For he is gracious to the ungrateful and evil. Be merciful, just as your Father also is merciful.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Well, we survived the week at camp. Really, we only had to survive three full days. Monday and today were barely half days. Camp days always feel extra long (because they are), but the week always feels like it rushes by at breakneck speed. We’re all tired—I suspect most of the kids will sleep a fair bit of the journey home—but it’s a good tired. Yesterday, we came back to the theme from day one: Loving God. This time, though, we dove deeper into what it looks like to love God. Most notably, it looks like loving the people He loves. That’s easy with the people we are inclined to love. It’s harder with the people we aren’t. So naturally, that’s where we focused. Let’s take a closer look.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus took about a third of the total sermon to offer the people a series of reinterpretations of well known laws, each time pointing them toward deeper truths and the higher righteousness of God. Each one of these starts with the phrase, “You have heard it was said…” Jesus did this because, again, these were laws everybody knew and had heard many teachings about. They were familiar. This very familiarity is what made Jesus’ reinterpretations so shocking.

In the passage that Luke parallels here, Jesus said, “You have heard it was said, love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” The part about loving your neighbor is a direct quote from the law. The part about loving your enemy was not. It was a commonly held and understood idea, though. Everybody knew friends were to be loved and enemies were to be hated. The very fact that you hated them is what made them your enemies, and because they were your enemies, you hated them. It was a vicious, but common cycle.

Then Jesus flipped the script. He said that the ethic of the kingdom of God is one of loving one’s enemies. This is because the ethic of the kingdom of God is one of loving everybody. Even your enemies are somebodies. Well, if God loves everybody and expects His people to do the same, then that everybody necessarily includes all the somebodies…including the somebodies who happen to be our enemies.

Everybody loves the people they like, the people who are part of their tribe. That’s natural. But God’s righteousness is bigger than that. And if we are going to live in pursuit of His righteousness, then our reflection of it must be bigger than that too.

Jesus makes this point rather memorably here in Luke’s reporting of it. “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. If you do what is good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. And if you lend to those from whom you expect to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners to be repaid in full.”

In other words, if you only love the people who are like you and who you like, what kind of reward do you expect for that. That’s not a reflection of God’s righteousness. Pagans do that. Sinners do that. Atheists do that. You can find the worst person in the world and he will almost certainly show at least some measure of love toward his friends. Far from doing something out of the ordinary, you’re barely clearing the bar of ordinary when you stop there.

If you are going to claim to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, then you need to actually love Him. That means valuing the things He values. If you are going to love your neighbor as yourself, the definition of neighbor Jesus uses is broad enough to include enemies. So, His followers are expected to love even enemies as themselves.

Okay, but what does this actually look like? Jesus goes on to tell us. We do what is good to and for them. We are kind to them. We are generous with them. We give and lend not because of what they might be able to do for us, but because it is the right thing to do.

This kind of tapping into God’s higher righteousness is not easy. Sometimes it is excruciatingly hard as Jesus knows all too well. But when we are willing to follow His example, God is going to see that and reward that in significant ways. We may not see those rewards until heaven, but they will come. They will come because our God is a good Father who loves to reward all of His children when they are obedient to His commands. And, in loving our enemies, we will be living in obedience to His commands.

Right at the tail end of our passage here, Jesus gives us a justification for all of this. “For he is gracious to the ungrateful and evil.” The apostle Paul spoke of this as well when He noted that God demonstrated His own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. He loved (and loves) us so much that He did all the work to make us able to be in God’s kingdom when we were still living in open rebellion against His kingdom and authority. That’s some kind of love.

And because He was willing to do this, so must also we be. Or, as Jesus puts it in the end, “Be merciful, just as your Father also is merciful.” God is patient and loving and generous and kind with us even when we aren’t interested in receiving His love. That’s simply the kind of God we serve. If you love Him, you will gradually become more like Him. And becoming more like Him will make the world a much better place. Let’s do that as we keep going higher in our relationship with Him.

This has been a fun week, but I’ll be glad to be home. We’ll get back to our regularly scheduled programming next week. See you then.