So in this series we've done on basic Christianity, this is our third and final week in that and is kind of looking at what are some of the foundational teachings that Jesus Christ had for us that he was trying to get us to understand for how to live our lives. If we're going to be one of his followers today, we're going to be looking in Matthew, chapter five, verses 43 through 48. Now, that is part of the sermon on the Mount. And that's what we've been looking at for a few weeks. Just before this, we were in the beatitudes, and we looked at what that was as this ladder through these different parts of the blessed life that Jesus was talking about.

And he said, when you are climbing this ladder, you get to see the kingdom of God. And so we're looking at what does life look like in that kingdom? We recognize that we live in this world, and there are kingdoms of this world, there are countries in this world, and yet we also know that there are things that this world can't understand until they see it through the lens of faith in Jesus Christ. So join with me as I read through Matthew, chapter five, verses 43 48, Jesus says this. You have heard that it was said, love your neighbor and hate your enemy.

But I tell you to love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you so that you may be like your father in heaven, since he causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good, and he sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have coming? Even the tax collectors do the same thing, don't they? And if you only greet your brothers, what more do you do? Even the gentiles do that, don't they?

So then be perfect. Therefore, as your heavenly father is perfect, let me say a prayer over the word. God, I pray that your word, as you promised, your word, will not return void. In other words, your word doesn't make a hole in our lives. There's not a gap there.

Your word fills our lives up with the things that we need to hear from you. So, Lord, I pray that even though I speak in these next few moments, lord, I pray that it's your word that would fill us, your word that would heal us and restore us to that which you've created us to be. In Christ's name we pray to. Amen. So Jesus starts this little section out.

He kind of jumps quickly from one topic to the next in his sermon on the mount. Sometimes I do that, too. I got a little program that I can actually run a sermon through, and it analyzes it and tells me where I got too choppy and confusing or spent way too long talking about something. And it's really nice. It says, hey, maybe talk less about that thing.

It kind of got lost in the weeds. I'm like, okay, got it. Point taken. I can also do the same thing, literally, just by listening to it. I'm kind of like a lot of like music artists where they don't listen to their own music after they've recorded it, because they just, they're like, oh, I should have done this part different or added this part or something.

And I get the same way, but I've been learning a lot about, like, oh, this is hard to listen to. So my thanks to you guys for hearing me out every week. You know, that's a lot. But Jesus, he starts this little section out and he says, you have heard before that it was said. In other words, you've been taught by other religious teachers and leaders, rabbis, teachers of the law, or sometimes they were called scribes.

You've been taught by these people a certain thing. You've been taught a way of living or going about your life. You've probably set your life on that foundation because that's what the leaders were teaching you to do. And you see, we have this, the copies of the scripture in front of us that we can open anytime we want. And yet, so many times it seems like we choose not to.

We have devotional books, we have websites. We can listen to sermons online or on tv from all over the place. There is no shortage of ability. We have to fill up our lives with good, godly christian teaching and reading from the word of God. And yet the people in Jesus day had one source, the religious teachers and educators of the day.

So they were stuck with that. And so Jesus is telling them, you've heard before that this is what it says, that this is what the word of God says. But I'm telling you this, this is one of those sections. And the thing that he brings up here is that they've been told before to just, you have to love your neighbor. That was in the scripture, that was a command of God to love your neighborhood.

Now, some of us have neighbors that are really easy to love. They're good folks, they're nice people. Sometimes you have a neighbor that has, like, a really loud muffler or a non existent muffler, and they like to leave for work at four in the morning. Or maybe they let a dog out and their door is right next to your bedroom window. And that dog barks really loud and sharp at five in the morning.

I've experienced these things, and it's like, ooh, those are the hard neighbors to love. I know I wouldn't be a good neighbor if I lived in an hoa neighborhood. You know, if they have those homeowners associations, they would be writing me a ticket, like, every week for something that I left laying out or didn't do right. I'd just be like, look, it's my house. I don't care.

And they'd be like, well, you have to care. You signed the contract, you know? And so I know I would be the bad neighbor in an Hoa neighborhood, but, you know, these people were taught you have to love your neighbor. The law says that the word of God tells you that in the Torah, the words of moses. But they didn't have a law that said what to do with your enemy, necessarily.

And so they were taught it's okay to hate your enemy. You love your neighbor, and you fulfilled the law of God, so hate your enemy. And that's okay. You're not doing anything wrong. Now, we might look in that, in judgment and say, well, that's ridiculous.

We would never do that. Except we do, right? I mean, we might call it what some of the people younger than me say. Low key hate. It's.

Low key is low grade hatred. You know, the generation that's up now in their twenties, they have a total language that I don't even understand. You know, it's like, I don't even know, Brittany. Like, if you got that one, if you're much on, like, skippity and all those words, you know, any of that stuff, or are you too old for that? No.

Little bit. You just. Not cool. Hey, you're in my club. Welcome.

Hi. So, anyway, yeah, they've got all these words, and it's like, I don't even know what that means, you know? But we have low key hate for people. You see, we won't just totally shut them out or do hateful things towards them, but we just kind of make sure that they stay on the periphery of our lives. They stay as far away from us as we can, and we say, well, we don't associate with those people because we don't want it rubbing off on us in some way, or we don't like the way they live, and so we don't want to have to deal with that around us.

That's really what they were living out in the time of Jesus, love your neighbor, but hate your enemy. You don't have to do outright hateful things to them, but you can hate them in the way that you cast them out or set them aside. But also I figured what they were talking about when they figured who their enemy was, that one of the biggest enemies that the people in Jesus day had was the nation of Rome. The roman empire was kind of their overlords that were ruling over the people of Israel. They had conquered them in the past.

There been a couple uprisings where the Israelites fought back against them and won their independence for a while. But in the time of Christ, they were solidly under the rule and occupation of Rome. And Rome was pretty much everything wrong with the way God wanted people to live. Whatever God had said his people should do, the Romans were doing the opposite of that pretty much. And the Israelites couldn't stand them.

They hated them. If that was their enemy, you know, if they had to have an enemy, that was it. They would have picked them as their enemy. And a lot of times we don't think, like, well, I don't have any enemies, you know, like, I'm not in high school or junior high anymore. I don't have enemies, you know?

Well, perhaps that's not the kind of enemies that Jesus is thinking of when he talks about this. You know, he's looking at, who is it that's somehow opposing you? And you say, I wish they were out of my way so that I could live my life how I would like. And there was these people that not only was it the Romans, but there were people who were sympathetic to Rome. They said, hey, you know what?

We'll just kind of get up close to them. We'll kind of allow them to do their thing, as long as they allow us to do our thing, and we're going to get along just fine. But I think what Jesus wanted us to understand when he's teaching this, no matter whether it's Rome or whoever it is that you think of as your enemy, he turns it over. And he basically is pointing out that there was a time in our lives where we set ourselves up as humanity, as God's enemy. Now, that's kind of foolish, right?

Like, don't fight against God. Even if you don't love him, you don't like him, you don't agree with God if he's the one that has the power to destroy you. You know, I think that's the being that you should probably try to be okay with. Like, on a totally non biblical non religious way. Just like, say, what does that guy want?

I'm gonna be okay with him. And so that's kind of at a basic level. But Jesus is teaching us that while we were set up as God's enemies, I mean, that started in Genesis three. Like, you turned two pages from the beginning of the Bible, and you already find us saying, no, thanks, God, we want to do it our way. Because Satan said, here, here's this fruit.

God told you not to eat it. But I'll tell you what, God's keeping something good from you. This is what Satan told them. You see, if you take this and eat it, it's going to be pleasing. It's going to be yummy, it's going to taste good.

A lot of fruit. You can't say that about, you know, but it's like, this one apparently looked great. And so it's like, hey, we're going to eat this fruit. It's going to be good food for us. It's going to be just enjoyable, and it's also going to give us power.

Because what Satan said was, when you eat of it, you will become like a God yourself, able to discern on your own what is good and what is evil. We see that echoed throughout all of time, throughout all of scripture up to our day. We see at this point where the echoes of that, the way it takes place, is basically saying that anything that we look at, instead of looking at the word of God and deciding whether he says it's okay for us or not, we look at it ourselves and say, you know what? That's going to be okay for me. And here's why.

So we see that happening a lot in our culture and our society, throughout it, where people have taken what the word of God says we should not do or should not live by those things. But people make a rationalize it, make an argument to try to say that it's okay for them to live that way. And they end up doing that. That goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden in Genesis, chapter three. But you see, even though we set ourselves up as God's enemy, arrival to his throne, if you will, God himself chose not to treat us as enemies, but to save us.

Romans 1218 says these words, as much as it depends on you, as far as it's possible, live at peace with everyone. God modeled that by sending his son Jesus Christ, to be the one who not only broke the debt of sin that we owed, but also to make peace with us. God showed us how to live at peace by doing it himself. But you see, sometimes somebody's going to insist on being your enemy. Like you can't change them necessarily.

Sometimes people might set up as your adversary. They might. Maybe you're in that hoa neighborhood and you're not quite living according to all the rules, and somebody picks you as their target, where they're just dead set, determined that you're going to move out of there. Perhaps it's been when you were employed, or for those of us who are still in that age of life, you know, you find someone that really just grates your last nerves, and they're trying to get you either promoted or fired. Have you ever seen that where somebody tried to get somebody promoted so at least they didn't have to, like, work on their tier anymore?

On their level, that seems terrible because they might become your boss, and then how much worse does it get, right? But whatever it might be, there might be somebody that sets themselves up to be your enemy, and there's not much you can do about it. You might live according to romans 1218 and try to be at peace with everyone, as much as it depends on you, but you might still find that you have an enemy. And Jesus says, well, what's our title today? Love your haters.

Maybe Taylor Swift got it right. In one of her lyrics, she says, haters gonna hate. Actually, she said, they're gonna hate, hate, hate. But anyway, that's about all I know. I try to not follow her music or her lifestyle too much, but nevertheless, there it is.

And you know that's true. Sometimes those haters are going to hate you. People are going to make you an enemy, and there's not much you can do about it. In fact, Jesus had said in the beatitudes that if you love him and follow him, there will be people who persecute you. Those are enemies that you can't necessarily change.

They're going to hate you just for the simple fact that you follow the truth of Jesus Christ. But Jesus says that we should pray for them. We should pray for those who are enemies, those who hate us. We pray for them because prayer might not change them. It might not change certain situations.

The first thing that prayer does is it changes me when I pray for others, when I pray for people, especially for my haters, for my enemies, the thing that it does is it changes my heart towards them. Now, they might not all of a sudden become right in their actions, but the first thing that's going to happen is God's going to check me and make sure that I'm living, how I'm supposed to live. He's going to show if there's any hypocrisy or any wicked ways in me. Perhaps there's a time where some of those people that have become my enemy by their choosing might have had a little bit of a reason to. Perhaps I egged it on at some point.

Who knows? And so the first thing is to check me before they get checked and figured out. They might not ever change at all, but my heart towards them will change. When Jesus was asked about who a neighbor is, he mentioned this, or he told this story of the Good Samaritan, and I reference it quite a bit because I think it's very impactful on how we live. You see, this Samaritan that was traveling, he came across a man, a jewish man, presumably, who had been beaten up and left for dead.

He had been attacked and robbed and left for dead on the side of the road. And two good, religious jewish men had left him there, and they refused to help him out. But the Samaritan that would have been the enemy of the jewish man, they were set up as enemies. They did not like each other, Jews and Samaritans. This man stopped to help him out.

This man not only risked his own personal safety because the robbers could have been using that man as bait for the next good. You know well what we call good Samaritan. To stop by the next kind and generous person that would stop and help him, and they might have been looking to get more people in. This guy was a bait or somebody that could lure more people in. But he not only put himself at risk to help this man, but then he also put him on his animal, his donkey, and carried him to the next village or town, where there was an inn that would.

That would take care of the man and give him lodging. He had bandaged him up and poured oil and wine. He gave him first aid. He brought him to the inn, said, give this man care, and I'm coming back through after my business is over. And when that happens, I will compensate you, the innkeeper, for any cost that this man has incurred.

And so Jesus said, you tell me, who is a neighbor? The two guys that were supposed to be his neighbors, his countrymen that ignored him, or the one that he would have naturally had anger or hatred towards, who had compassion on him. So Jesus shows us who neighbors are. He actually says in the beatitudes, he says that the followers of Christ, those who are living this blessed life, would be peacemakers. You only need to make peace with those who are considered an enemy.

If it's your friend, if it's somebody that's just like you, you don't have to make peace with them. And Jesus says that the peacemakers will be called sons of God. Here in our scripture that we read in Matthew, chapter five, Jesus says that we should do this to be sons of our father in heaven. You see, the way that we look at this is Jesus is teaching us to be the children of God. But he uses the word son very specifically in the world that we live in.

It's interesting because people, they like to change the language, especially in the Bible where it says men like in common for humanity. They like to modernize that and say people. And a lot of times I might do that. If it says that, I might kind of translate it on the fly if I think it fits. And if it says sons, they change that to sons and daughters or children.

But the thing is, Jesus uses that word very specifically. I believe. He doesn't use a general word that means all children, but he uses the word sons. And as you get to looking at it, you think, why would he do that? You see, to understand that, I think we've got to understand biblical patriarchy.

And I'm just going to breeze through this really quickly because I spent time on it a few weeks back or a couple months ago anyway. And it's interesting because just this week I happened to be on Facebook checking a couple things out. And some of my, they were actually pastor friends that, that are scattered around the country. They posted the same thing. And it basically was attacking the idea of patriarchy in the world.

And they said a Christianity rooted in patriarchy will always blah, blah, blah, and they talk negative about it and what it does and how it supposedly demeans people and belittles them and controls them and all this. They said a Christianity rooted in the gospel of Jesus will do this. And so they were trying to juxtapose patriarchy and the gospel of Jesus and saying that they're two separate things. Now, I'll say this. If you understand patriarchy as is used in a modern vernacular, it seems to be male dominance, male in charge, holding it over women and all that stuff.

And I'll tell you, that is never biblical. It's a misunderstanding of the Old Testament of God. See, patriarchs think of guys like Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Think of all these guys. What patriarchs did in the scriptures, in the biblical times was their job.

Yes, they were potentially wealthy. Boaz was another famous one of these. They were probably a wealthy. They were the landowners. They had people that were their servants that worked for them, and they were responsible for their care.

But also what the patriarch's job was, was anybody in their whole, like, under their umbrella, under their care, anybody that they had responsibility for, it might not just be family, it would be distant relatives and extended family and all this. Anybody that they were responsible for. If that person got themselves into a bad situation, maybe they got into debt and had to mortgage their family inheritance, their land. Maybe they had done something foolish and squandered all their wealth like the prodigal son did. Maybe it was somebody like lot, the nephew of Abraham, who just didn't necessarily do anything wrong, but an invading army came in and captured him and just kind of carried them off.

And Abraham took his 318 trained fighting men that lived in his household like he had a mercenary army. Right? How cool is Abraham? He's like 100 years old with a mercenary army, and he leads them into battle, goes after five kings that have attacked these other king. And when we think kings, it's not like whole nations like today we have.

They would have been like city, city, state kind of things. But he attacks these five kings and their army and gets back everybody that was taken, including his nephew lot. He didn't do that for personal gain. In fact, he refused any reward except for that which he offered to God. He gave God a tithe, 10%, by the way, if you're giving today, we have a basket on that black table in the back.

Feel free to give towards anything that might support the work of the kingdom of God or fixing air conditioners. But anyway, so the. The thing that Abraham was doing was acting as a patriarch is supposed to. He was taking the might that he had, the power that he had, the resources that he had, and going after the one that was lost. Now look what our heavenly father has done.

When we were yet the enemies of God and we were lost in our sins, he sent his son to come after us. Romans five eight says that when we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. When we were still the enemies of God, God was at work making peace. And so to understand what a patriarch does, and then when the patriarch is dying, he leaves his estate to his offspring. The eldest son, the firstborn son, gets a double portion of what the other sons would get.

And so sons are the inheritors of the father's estate or kingdom or whatever it might be. And so when Jesus is telling us to be sons of God, he's not saying, well, you all have to act like men, you have to change your gender if you're a woman. He's not saying anything like that. What he's saying is you get the status of a son. You get to inherit everything that God has for you.

Jesus said when he had died and rose again when he was ascending into heaven, he says to his disciples, he says, I'm going to prepare a place for you that one day where I am, you can be there as well. You see, as we get adopted into the kingdom of God, as his sons, we get to inherit everything that God has for us. Men, women, you're sons of your father in heaven. If you receive the free gift of grace of Jesus Christ, then you can receive that inheritance. Jesus teaches here.

He talks about what, it doesn't say it in the scripture, but he talks about common grace. Common grace is a simple theological term. It's not that deep. It's basically saying the grace that is in common for everyone, the grace that God gives to everyone, regardless of whether they've followed him or not or accepted him or not. Jesus uses sun and rain as an example.

You know, we all need rain. Our bodies are around 60% moisture, 60% water. The planet is covered. About 70, 71% of the surface area of our planet is covered in water. We clearly need water.

If it doesn't rain for a couple weeks with this Florida heat stuff starts turning brown really fast. Like, you know, really quickly. When we start needing rain in Florida, we've got to have rain. We need water. But also, he talks about sun.

And, I mean, I could go on and on about sun like I did last week about salt. I'm not going to do that. But one of the cool things about sunlight, he says as he goes into the sunlight thing, one of the cool things about sunlight, like, I'm sure you're aware of how it works. Like, you know, it's good for, like, keeping the planet warm. You know, it's good for keeping us circling around something and not just, I guess, floating aimlessly off through space, you know, gravitational pull, all that stuff.

You're probably aware of sun being active in the photosynthesis of plants and making plants grow and stay green and all that stuff. But some of the things that might be super useful for you as far as sunlight goes, is just if you struggle with mental health and well being, sunlight is one of the best things to alleviate that. Sunlight is one of the best things. If you're going through a time with some depression or some struggle of anxiety that you're going through, just being out in the sunlight for 15 or 20 minutes helps with that. It also helps to create vitamin D in your body.

Just absorbing the sun rays on your skin creates vitamin D, which is good for your health and for your immune system. Just being out in the sunlight helps with that. If you're out in the morning, early morning, when that sun is just coming up over the horizon, it's kind of that orangey red color. Or in the late evening, when it has a setting, and it's that same tone. The rays of the sunlight are actually kind of changed as it hits that atmosphere, that angle and hits us, that it's actually more in the red spectrum of light, which is therapeutic in the sense of it relieves inflammation and things like that.

So if you can catch it, and even as much as you can, maybe not look straight into it, but right next to it, as much as you can look into the morning sunrise or evening sunset, it's helpful to your body in ways that regular noonday sun isn't. Sun is a beautiful thing. And Jesus says that the sun, the rain, they are both for everyone God has given us, and he's just using those two. There's plenty of examples of common grace, but the fact that we live in a habitable space, a planet that is made that's fine tuned for life, God has given that grace to everyone, whether they're following him or not. See, Jesus, he lived his.

His life amongst many different people. He lived with people that were similar to him. They were religious. They were trying to follow the law of God. He hung out with people like the Pharisees, who he also called hypocrites and sons of Satan.

I mean, there's some really nasty stuff that they say to each other. They accuse him of having quite the questionable parenthood, parent lineage thing. They're like, well, we know who our dad is. He's like, yeah, of course you do. Your dad's Satan.

So they got into it a little bit of throwing some words on the street, you know, kind of thing. But they, you know, he hung out with them, but he also hung out with tax collectors, who would have been considered one of the enemies of the people. He hung out with women that were just considered sinful. We don't know what exactly it means they did, but he hung out with sinful people, tax collectors and Pharisees alike. And then just regular, common, everyday people.

The tax collectors were hated quite a bit in their day because they had sided with the nation of Rome. They were jewish men who had decided that they would go ahead and work for the Romans, because they would have a better life that way. There are a lot of people today that do that. They choose to side with evil people with evil schemes because they are able to benefit from it and live in a rich, well cared for lifestyle. So the tax collectors had that.

They had that financial benefit. Jesus hung out with several of them, called one of them to be one of his disciples. That guy threw a party with all of his tax collector buddies, and Jesus attended that. He went to the home of Zacchaeus. Same thing, a chief tax collector, which means, like, super hated, you know.

And the reason they were hated so much is, get this, they were taking money from their countrymen, from their fellow Jews, and taking it and then turning most of it what they hadn't extorted from the Jews anyway. They were taking it and turning it in to the roman authorities. The roman authorities would then take that tax money and do many evil and wicked things with it. Personally, I feel the same way about my tax dollars and yours as well. Like, I'm mad on account of your tax dollars and what they're going for.

Maybe you weren't. And by the time I say the next couple things, you might be like, yeah, I'm kind of ticked off about that, too. You know, I can't believe they take my money that God bless me with and take it and do some of these things. See, Jesus said, blessed are the peacemakers. But how many?

Can you even remember how many billions of dollars this country has spent on other countries being able to go to war over the last two years? I've lost track of it. It seems like every time we turn around, they're asking Congress for another ten or $20 billion worth of killing machines. I'm kind of sick of that, to be honest. I don't care what the cause is for or who it's for.

Let's talk peace. Jesus says the peacemakers are the ones that are children of his father in heaven. I'm tired of warmongers, child mutilators, human traffickers. Have you heard any of these arguments about what's going on at the border with all these people coming across? They're not really talking about the real problem.

You see, the real problem is there's people who are trying to come across the border looking for perhaps a better life, but mixed in among them are people who have evil intents in their heart. I don't just mean the people that maybe were released from prisons in some of the countries that they've come from and they've come here to apply their destructive ways to our land. I mean, they're actually being paid to smuggle others across the border. And then they charge those people thousands and thousands of dollars that they know they can't pay, and so they have to give it back in servitude in many different ways. The men might be employed in some kind of drug trade, and the women, you can imagine what they make the women do to pay off their debts.

And a sickening. And we're not even talking about that. They're talking about, oh, well, it's harming our cities or our economy. Can't afford it. And in the meantime, I'm looking at it and saying, do you not understand that there are people whose lives are at stake here and our country, our government is arguing about that, and they're using my tax dollars to pay their salaries, to sit there and argue about the wrong things.

And I care about people because Jesus cares about people. There's people that are human traffickers, child mutilators, warmongers, abortion pushers, if you don't know what I mean by that. It seems to be. I've heard a few politicians talking about it. That seems to be the biggest thing in this election to them, is making sure that women have the right to have abortions.

Look, you can argue about that all you want, but if they're pushing it that strong, I know somebody else in history. If you read the Bible, there were people that were sacrificing their children to foreign gods, hoping that it would somehow bring them wealth, health, and success. And that's never the path to that. For people who are using my tax dollars for these things, to me, those people are the worst. Those people are causing so much pain and sufferings.

And so I get why the Jews hated tax collectors. I get it. I understand that. I want to hate them, too. And yet Jesus said, not my followers.

My followers don't have hatred for their enemies. See, we're called to love these people. So it's like, how do we do that? How do we have this. This hatred for what they're doing?

See, Jesus started with this saying. He says, you know, you've heard it said, love your neighbor, but hate your enemy. Well, we changed that in our day. You know what we say? We say, well, love the sinner, hate the sin, but we still, in the same way, cast them out.

Tell them that this is not the place for them. They don't belong here. You don't fit here because you don't believe like us or live like us. So you can just kind of stay out there, literally, and go to hell. Like that's where you're headed.

That's fine with me. And we just make it, we don't literally make room at the table and say, there's room for you to sit at this table because we're all sinners at the foot of the cross in need of the saving grace of Jesus Christ. Later on, Jesus, even though he had patience for the people who had been taught under this dogma or doctrine, he wasn't judging them, but he was giving them a way of life. He was saying, this is how my followers will live. You'll have this particular identity in the world.

When you love your enemies, they'll recognize that. That's different. When my followers recognize that they love their enemies, they'll say what's going on with them and they'll want to join that. Jesus is saying that you'll love one another, but you'll also love your enemies. And after he had risen into heaven, he sent the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost and by the power of the Holy Spirit, enabling them to love one another, the church grew in one day from 120 people to 3000 people.

And shortly after that, 5000 people. As the community saw the way that they loved each other and welcomed others into their community, into their church, the church grew exponentially. They didn't fix all the social ills of the world. In fact, Jesus had told them, the poor, you will always have with you. But what they did do, what he was saying was, I can't, I'm not going to send you to fix all the problems in the world.

I'm going to call you to love those who are in the world that are creating some of those problems. Because when we were sinners and enemies of God, he saved us because he loves us. And so he calls us to love those who are our haters or our enemies. How does understanding ourselves as once being enemies of God, yet loved by him, how does it impact our view of other people? Next question.

What does it mean to be perfect? Therefore, as your heavenly Father, as perfect, how can we strive towards this in our daily lives? I want to tell you that the word perfect in your scriptures, in the New Testament, is a word that speaks of the perfection of your aim. That you're aiming towards something and that you're headed towards that one thing. And that as you aim your life towards that one thing, you are living your life on a perfect course.

Your aim is perfected. That doesn't mean that we get off. I mean, I remember the first time I shot a bow and arrow? I lost an arrow under the sod and we never found it. Sometimes as good as your aim is, you might not quite get it right on the execution of that aim.

But nonetheless, as we are aiming towards perfection, or towards what God calls us to do, that is what perfection is. Next question how does the cultural context of Jesus times, such as tax collectors and roman occupation, how does that help us understand Jesus teachings on loving his enemies? And then the last question that you might look at is, are there modern day equivalents to the tax collectors and pagans that were mentioned in the sermon, and how should we interact with them? If you're joining us online but you have never attended in person, let us know that you're watching by leaving a comment. And please give us a thumbs up on the video.

If there's any way we can pray for you, or if you would like to know a little bit more about this church or relationship with Jesus, text us at 833-39-7926 and be sure to check out our website@seedfnfamily.org, dot thanks for watching and we pray that God blesses you this week.