Grace to You Weekend

John MacArthur: You want to know something, people, who's your neighbor? Your neighbor is anybody who needs you. That's it. Anybody in my path with a need constitutes my neighbor. Not because they believe what I believe or think what I think or belong to my group. God loved us when we were enemies and he died for us and it's that very love that we're to have for others.

Phil Johnson: Welcome to Grace to You Weekend with the Bible teaching of John MacArthur. I'm your host, Phil Johnson. It could be a coworker or someone at church, maybe even your own brother, sister, or spouse. It could be any number of people with one thing in common: they don't exactly treat you like a friend. In fact, they may treat you badly. When all you're trying to do is show them Christian love. Maybe you think it's best just to avoid them, but does Scripture really allow you to insulate yourself from your enemies? John MacArthur considers that today, continuing a timely study called Love No Matter What. And now with the lesson, here's John.

John MacArthur: God has some very special and important things to say to us, to me through this. Let me read for you verses 43 to 48 of Matthew chapter 5, and you follow as I read. You have heard that it has been said, "You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy." But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for them who despitefully use you and persecute you, that you may be the sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.

For if you love them who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors the same? And if you greet your brethren only, what do you more than others? Do not even the heathen so? Be therefore perfect, even as your Father who is in heaven is perfect. Let's go back to Genesis chapter 13 and see how the Old Testament honored this kind of attitude toward an enemy.

Abram and Lot had a dispute. There were too many of them and their animals to occupy one plot of land. And verse 6 says that they had so many flocks and so many tents and herds and all of this that the land was not able to bear them. They couldn't dwell together in the same place. For their substance was great so that they couldn't dwell together. And there was a strife between the herdsmen of Abram's cattle and the herdsmen of Lot's cattle. So here you have enemies, you have a minor warfare. How is it to be handled? Bitterly, antagonistically? Watch Abram and you see the virtue of the man.

Verse 8. And Abram said to Lot, "Let there be no strife, I pray you, between me and you, and between my herdsmen and your herdsmen, for we're brethren. Is not the whole land before you? Separate yourself, I pray you, from me. If you will take the left hand, then I'll go to the right, or if you depart to the right hand, then I'll go to the left." Now listen, people, that is an amazing reaction. Abram ended the fight right there because he said, "Lot, you take whatever you want. And I'll just take what's left. You pick out the best and you take it."

That's how to treat an enemy. Give him the very best that there is. The Bible honors that kind of virtue. First Samuel chapter 24 offers us another illustration. I want you to notice the first six verses. It came to pass when Saul was returned from following the Philistines that it was told him saying, "Behold, David is in the wilderness of Engedi." Now Saul was busy chasing David. David was a threat to Saul's throne, a threat to his security. Saul had been trying to kill David, trying every way he could to find David and murder him. And so they said, "David is in the wilderness of Engedi. Go and find him. That's where he is and you can get him there."

So Saul took 3,000 chosen men out of all Israel and these are the crack troops, the best guys, the sharpshooters, you know, the SWAT team. Off they went to find David and his men upon the rocks of the wild goats. And by the way, I've been to Engedi and it is a treacherous and rocky area. He came to the sheep coats, and by the way, sheep coats were little stacks of rocks that they would put at the front of a cave to act like a fence to keep the sheep in. And there was a cave there and Saul went in to cover his feet. Now, that is a Hebrew expression for visiting, I don't know how else to put this, the men's room. And while he was there, David and his men were in the same cave.

The men of David said to him, "This was the fulfillment of the prophecy. Do to him as it shall seem good to you. He's your enemy, get him, David, this is your moment. You know you're God's anointed, get rid of this evil man, this enemy." So David arose and cut off the skirt of Saul's robe stealthily. He snuck up behind him and took a snitch out of his robe. You say, "Well, that David isn't what we had in mind. We're not taking pieces of his garment bit by bit. We'd like to do away with him." But just to show you the sensitivity of David's heart. It came to pass afterward that David's heart smote him because he had cut off Saul's skirt. He was convicted about that.

And he said to his men, "The Lord forbid that I should do this thing to my master, the Lord's anointed, to stretch forth my hand against him, seeing he is the anointed of the Lord." You can feel that way about an enemy. After all, he's a creation of God. He's beloved by God. And David restrained his servants with these words and permitted them not to rise against Saul, but Saul rose up out of the cave and went on his way. David also arose afterward and went out of the cave and cried after Saul saying, "My Lord, the King!" Oh, man, can you imagine the jolt that must have been to Saul? And when Saul looked behind him, David stooped with his face to the earth and bowed himself. Amazing.

He paid homage to this evil enemy. And David was a godly man, as was Abram. You see, virtue behaves toward an enemy as we would behave toward a friend because an enemy is a neighbor. I want to show you one other illustration, Second Samuel 16. And again, it's David. Second Samuel 16, verse 5. And this is a, this must have been, oh, it's just I can't recreate the terrible anxiety of this moment in David's life. David was a terrible father. You've got to be a terrible father to end up with an Absalom, but he did. And Absalom, his son, with whom he was far too lenient, turned out to rebel against him. Absalom came against his own father.

Wanted to usurp his throne. Absalom not only came against David politically, but Absalom, frankly, broke David's heart. And finally, David just cried out with tears rushing down his face, "Absalom, my son, my son, my son!" when he heard of his death. But Absalom is after David and David is running, fleeing from his own son. David, who is the king. And in the midst of all of this, verse 5 of Second Samuel 16 says, and when King David came to Bahurim, behold, there came out a man of the family of the house of Saul whose name was Shimei, the son of Gera. He came forth and he cursed continually as he came. This is a profane man. And he cast stones at David and at all the servants of King David and all the people and all the mighty men on his right hand and on his left. He just started throwing rocks at all of them, and cursing foully David.

And thus said Shimei when he cursed, "Come out, come out, thou bloody man and thou worthless fellow!" David apparently was inside the troop a little bit and he was screaming at him to come out. "The Lord has returned upon thee all the blood of the house of Saul. You know why you're getting what you're getting. You know why Absalom has turned against you, because you dethroned Saul, because you took Saul's place." And remember this was a fellow from Saul's family. "Now you're getting your due, David, you bloody man. And the Lord has delivered the kingdom into the hand of Absalom thy son, and behold, thou art taken in thy mischief because thou art a bloody man." Then said Abishai. And Abishai was loyal to David, son of Zeruiah.

"Why should this dead dog curse my Lord the king? Let me go over, I pray you, and take off his head!" This was a pretty primitive time and that's what normally would have happened. And the king said, "What have I to do with you, you sons of Zeruiah? So let him curse because the Lord has said to him, 'Curse David.' Who shall then say, 'Why have you done so?'" What David is implying here is maybe the Lord told him to do this. You see, David is feeling the guilt of his failure with Absalom. And he's saying, "How do you know but that God has not asked him to do this?" David said to Abishai and all his servants, "Behold, my son who came forth of my own body seeks my life. How much more now may this Benjamite do? It may be that the Lord will look on my affliction and the Lord will requite me good for his cursing this day."

And as David and his men went along the way, Shimei went along on the hillside opposite him and cursed as he went and threw stones at him and cast dust. And the king and all the people who were with him became weary and refreshed themselves there. But David's heart was right. At that moment, he loved with the love the Old Testament taught. The Jews were dead wrong in Jesus' day. The Old Testament didn't teach to hate your enemy. That was their evil, prideful, prejudice teaching that. Neighbor encompassed even an enemy. Go back with me for a moment to Matthew and let me share this with you. Chapter 5 verse 10. Earlier in the sermon, Jesus had said similar terms. "Blessed are they who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven."

"Blessed are you when men shall revile you and persecute you and say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake." How should you react? How should you react? Verse 12. Retaliate? No, what? Rejoice. "Be exceedingly glad for great is your reward in heaven." That's what David said. Perhaps the Lord will requite me someday for a right reaction to this cursing. In whatever human relationship you're in, that's what God is after, that right reaction. Maybe you've got conflict in your marriage. Maybe you've got conflict in your family between the children and the parents. Maybe you have conflict on the job. Maybe you have enemies at home and you have enemies at work and people who speak against you. Maybe a brother-in-law or a sister-in-law or a brother or a sister, another part of your family speak evil of you or your children. And it's so easy in our human world to get these things going in these enemies. And we become bitter and we begin to be hostile and instead of reaching out in love to the people.

Instead of seeing them as our brother and our neighbor as the Old Testament does, we begin to see them as the enemy and we miss the point of what Jesus says and we fall to the low level of Pharisaic religion. That's not to be. So the Old Testament was very clear, and Jesus is in absolute agreement with it. Can I introduce the teaching of Jesus to you in verse 44? And I'll just introduce it today and we'll go into it next time. We saw the tradition of the Jews in verse 43. We saw the teaching of the Old Testament implied behind verse 43, but perverted. And now the teaching and the truth from Jesus himself.

This is the Lord's corrective to the error of the Jewish system. And he gives five principles to correct the faulty love of the Pharisees and the scribes. Five short statements, sequential statements that ascend to the very highest statement of all. They have a beautiful flow and ascent and we'll see that next time. He says five things, let me just give them to you. Love your enemies, pray for your persecutors, manifest your sonship, exceed your fellow men, and imitate your God. And people, when we finally ascended to that fifth principle, you are going to see, perhaps, in a way you've never seen before what Jesus meant when he said you're to love your enemies. It is the most powerful statement, I believe, in the New Testament about the meaning of love.

Let's just take that first one for a moment. Verse 44. "But I say to you, love your enemies." Jesus speaks with authority here. He is the Lord of the law, he is the Son of God. One of the things we learn in Greek is that Greek verbs change their form depending upon what pronoun is used. For example, you don't need pronouns like I, you, he, she, it, they, them, your, etc. in Greek, because the verb form indicates which pronoun is proper. It's in the ending of the verb. So whenever the pronoun is put in front of the verb, it is put there for intensification.

It would have been enough to just have a verb form, "I say to you." I say, uh, could be several verbs. Could be, say, lego, I say to you. But if it is ego, lego, it means, it means I say to you, and the emphasis is not on the saying, the emphasis is on the sayer. And so Jesus, by using the emphatic pronoun, is intensifying the fact that he speaks authoritatively. "I say to you." Setting himself up as one who can speak over against their system, no matter who their teachers have been. No matter how long a list of renowned and well-meaning and well-known and astute rabbis there have been, "I say to you." And so he is the Lord of the law. And what does he say? The first principle as we move up the steps, love your enemies. Love your enemies.

And the idea we learned from the Old Testament is that your enemy is your neighbor. To illustrate that, look with me at Luke 10. Luke 10 verse 25. A lawyer came to Jesus. He said, "What do I do to inherit eternal life?" He said to him, "What is written in the law?" And he said, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself." Now, the question is, the lawyer says, "All right, if what you want me to do is love my neighbor as myself." Fair question, verse 29, "Who is my what? Neighbor?" Who is it? You want me to love my neighbor? Who is it? Jesus said, "Let me tell you a story."

A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and this man going down fell among thieves, who stripped him of his raiment, wounded him and departed leaving him half dead. They beat him up and robbed him and left him on the road for dead. By chance there came down a certain priest that way, and when he saw him, he passed on the other side. Now, a priest was a man who represented God to the people, a man who stood in the place of God. A priest was one who connected people with God. A priest of all the people in society should have been one to behave as God behaved. He was God's representative. And the priest came along and he saw the man and he said, "That man is not in my group." And he went to the other side of the road. Who wants to touch him? He's not my neighbor.

He's one of the rabble Jewish people who's probably not even belonging to my religious party. He was followed a little later by a Levite, one who was of the great heritage of the Levitical priests as well. And when he was at the place, he came and looked on him and passed by on the other side. And he said, "He's not in my group either." And off they went. But a certain Samaritan. And that word conjures up all kinds of thoughts because the Samaritans basically were a race of people, originally they were Jewish people who intermarried with the pagans who infiltrated the northern kingdom. They became half-breeds and the most despicable thing to a pure-bred Jew was for somebody to defile the uniqueness of being a Jew by intermarrying with a pagan.

Can you imagine, the Jew wouldn't even enter a Gentile house. The Jew wouldn't even eat with a Gentile utensil. The Jew wouldn't even eat food cooked by a Gentile. They wouldn't even go into a Gentile house because they believed that the Gentiles aborted their babies in those houses and they were desecrated places. They believed the wildest and craziest things about the Gentiles, and they despised them. When they came back to their own country, they would shake the dust off their garments because they didn't want Gentile dust dragged into their land. And when they went from the south to the north, they would go across the Jordan up the east side and cross over at the top so that they wouldn't have to go through Samaria. They didn't want to defile themselves with that polluted land.

And here came a Samaritan, an enemy, who would look at that bleeding Jew and say, "Good for him!" About time some of them got their due the way they've treated us. But the holy, pious priest and Levite didn't see him as a neighbor and the despised and hated Samaritan did. And he went to him and bound up his wound, verse 34, and poured in oil and wine and set him on his own beast, brought him to an inn and took care of him. And on the next day, when he departed, he took out two denarii and gave them to the host and said, "Take care of him, and whenever whatever you spendest more, when I come again, I will repay you." Boy, he was magnanimous, wasn't he? He got involved and he bound up his wounds and he loved him and cared for him, put him on his beast and led the beast to the inn and paid the fare at the inn and said, "I'll pay the rest when I come back if it's more."

"Which now," says the Lord, "of these three, think you was neighbor to him that fell among the thieves?" He said, "He that showed mercy on him." Then said Jesus to him, "Go and do you likewise." You want to know something, people, who's your neighbor? Your neighbor is anybody who needs you. That's it. Anybody in my path with a need constitutes my neighbor. Not because they believe what I believe or think what I think or belong to my group. God loved us when we were enemies and he died for us and it's that very love that we're to have for others.

Phil Johnson: You're listening to Grace to You Weekend, the Bible Teaching Ministry of John MacArthur. Our current study is called Love No Matter What. Now, today John talked about loving enemies, seeking their highest good. And it's clear he was talking about non-Christians who cause problems. But what about when conflicts come from where you wouldn't expect, as close as the same church pew and the person causing the trouble has bowed the knee to Christ? Is the prescription the same? Here's how John answered that question.

John MacArthur: Well, absolutely, it's the same. Because it defines this kind of love as love for an enemy. A non-believer may be an enemy, but in reality, another Christian may be an enemy as well. Somebody in your own family may be an enemy or your own wife or husband may have taken an adversarial position against you. So, yeah, loving your enemies is a huge category of people, all those people who offend you. All those people who seek to do harm to you, all those people who assault or attack you or stand in your way or trouble you would fall to one degree or another into the category of an enemy. And whether they're a non-believer or a believer, you have the same responsibility. This leads me to mention again a book titled Anxious for Nothing.

And the reason I relate to that book is because I think it's very difficult for people to make meaningful relationships with others, particularly with enemies. If they don't have control of their own lives, their own emotions. If you are a worrier, if you are a person who tends to be a conspiracy theorist and think people are against you or plotting against you, very hard for you to behave in a way that is God-honoring toward your enemies. So it's really important for you to get a grip on your own life and make sure you're on firm footing and that your trust in the Lord is solid and firm and you're not worrying.

There's a chapter in the book called dealing with problem people. And again, it relates to how well you order your own life and how much trust and faith and confidence you have in the Lord. But there are so many other issues that are in this book covering the areas of relationships that lead to worry that will be a great help to you.

Phil Johnson: That's right, friend. Whenever someone tells us he or she is battling fear and worry, this is the book we suggest. To order your copy of Anxious for Nothing, get in touch with us today. Anxious for Nothing is affordably priced and shipping is free. It comes with a study guide in the back that will help you apply what you're learning to your life. To order a copy of Anxious for Nothing, go to gty.org, or call 800-55-GRACE. Our website again is gty.org, and our phone number 800-55-GRACE. When you visit our website, you'll also find thousands of free resources. You can download more than 3,600 of John MacArthur's sermons free of charge in MP3 and transcript format. And that includes John's current series called Love No Matter What. You'll also find daily devotionals, Grace to You Television, blog articles, all of these resources that can help deepen your understanding of Scripture and enrich your worship. If you're not sure what to try first, click on Grace Stream. That's a continuous loop of John's teaching through the entire New Testament. Our website again, gty.org. Now for our entire staff, I'm Phil Johnson. Thanks for being here today and be back next week as John MacArthur continues to show you what true biblical love looks like. It's another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace to You Weekend.