Matthew Chapter 5,

5, V,

V. V. 43 to 48.

You have heard that it was said, you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.

But I say to you, love your enemies

and pray for those who persecute you. In order that you may be sons of your father who is in heaven.

For he causes his son to rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you?

Do not even the tax-gatherers do the same?

And if you greet your brothers only, what do you do more than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?

Therefore you are to be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect.

When we looked at this text last week, my main concern was to rightly understand

verse 45 because of such terrible misunderstandings that could result if you got

verse 45 wrong which would set everything else in the wrong light.

Love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you. In order that, you may be sons of your father who is in heaven.

One of the reasons people stay away from the sermon on the mount.

Some have even developed very sophisticated theological justifications for staying away from the sermon on the mount is that they read

in the sermon on the mount sentences like this that sound too conditional to fit with the

gracious promises found elsewhere in the New Testament.

If you love your enemy the way God loves his enemies, then you will be sons of your father in heaven and when they hear those if then kinds of sentences they say that that's law that's legal that must be part of the old that gets put away and on this side of the cross we don't believe

that we don't read that that was for another time and maybe some future time but not now

in Christ.

And so I tried to relieve us of that misunderstanding last week by simply saying that what

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