Love According to the Bible The Standard We Keep Ignoring
You know, the interesting thing about growing up in one scenario and coming to the realization of another as it relates to uh parenting and child rearing is that there are certain things that we have experienced in our lives that were just normal for us that we wouldn’t want at all for our children. Amen. Like for example, as a boy, I can remember vividly the dirty hairy movies, you know, Clint Eastwood and the gun that looked this big, you know, he goes around and shoot people up and when he gets mad at him and Charles Bronson and guys like that.
the there was a whole genre of film, the the vigilante cop film, where there’s a bad guy who who who does something that’s horrendous. And the rest of the film was this process of you watching as the vigilante cop just plows through bad guy after bad guy after bad guy, and you wait for that moment when he will get the guy who is the baddest of the bad.
And by the end of the movie, you can’t wait for this guy to get what’s coming to him. Now, you don’t have to admit that you’ve ever had that experience before. Some of you may never have had that experience before of watching one of those films and finding yourself by the end of the film just eager to see someone get what’s coming to them.
But is that an appropriate attitude to have? Today we deal with a continuation of what we looked at on last week. And I hope that as you see as we’ve gone through these various antitheses that you’ve seen that they have built upon one another, that there has been a relationship between all of these antithesis.
And when as we come here to the last antithesis to the end of chapter 6 and deal with the issue of our enemies and our attitude and disposition toward our enemies in one sense we’ve come to a summation of all of the antithesis that have gone before. In another sense we come to a summary of the second table of the law.
a summary of commandments 6-10. This is a foreshadowing of a conversation that Jesus is going to have later in Matthew chap 22. And some of our kids in their scripture memories have been doing. Matthew chap 22 37-39. And they know exactly what’s coming here. The greatest commandment. What’s the greatest commandment? And Jesus says the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And the second one is like it.
