Turn with me, if you would, in your Psalter hymnals to Lord's Day 40. In the back, you can find it on page 53. Before we read God's Word, we'd like to consider what Lord's Day 40 has to say as it connects to and helps us understand our passage tonight. Lord's Day 40, page 53. Question and answer 105 through 107 deal with the Sixth Commandment, which deals with God's prohibition that we murder. But we want to look especially at the full extent or the heart of that command that we ought not murder. I will read the question if you would respond with me with the answer. Question 105. What is God's will for us in the Sixth Commandment? I am not to belittle, insult, hate, or kill my neighbor. Not by my thoughts, my words, my look, or gesture. And certainly not by actual deeds. I am not to be party to this in others. Rather, I am to put away all desire for revenge. I am not to harm, recklessly endanger myself either. Prevention of murder is also why government is armed with the sword. Does this commandment refer only to killing? By forbidding murder, God teaches us that he hates the root of murder. Envy, hatred, anger, vindictiveness. In God's sight, all such are murder. And finally, question 107. Is it enough, then, that we do not kill our neighbor in any such way? No. By condemning envy, hatred, and anger, God tells us to love our neighbor as ourselves, to be patient, peace-loving, gentle, merciful, and friendly to him, to protect him from harm as much as we can, and to do good even to our enemies. After having read the Catechism, let's turn together now to our passage in God's Word, which is from Matthew 5. Matthew 5, we'll begin reading at verse 21. Matthew 5, 21. This is God's holy, infallible, and inspired Word that does not fail. Verse 21, Jesus says, you have heard that it was said to those of old, you shall not murder, and whoever murders will be liable to judgment. But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment. Whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council, and whoever says, you fool, will be liable to the hell of fire. So, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there, remember that your brother has something against you. Leave your gift there before the altar and go. First, be reconciled to your brother and then come and offer your gift. Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are going with him to court, lest your accuser hand you over to the judge and the judge to the guard and you be put in prison. Truly, I say to you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny. We want to move a bit forward in this chapter now to turn to verse 43, a passage that also deals with and illumines our understanding of the Sixth Commandment. I'll read verse 43 to the end. Again, Jesus says, 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 so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For He makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You, therefore, must be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect. That's the end of God's Word, our reading of His Word tonight. Let's pray now, before we begin to hear His preached Word, that He would bless it to our hearts. Let's pray. Our Heavenly Father, we ask that You would open our minds tonight that we would hear, listen carefully to, be nourished by Your Word. Bless the one who brings it, for he is weak and needs Your strength. Nourish us, we pray, in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen. Abraham Lincoln is well known for the adage, with malice toward none, with hatred toward none. However, he himself was the object of great malice and hatred during his own presidency. A few occasions I've had the opportunity to visit President Lincoln's museum and library in Springfield, Illinois, where he grew up and where he's buried now. There's a very interesting display in his museum that recounts and tells the story of the many ways that journalists and cartoonists and political rivals and those who didn't think he was a very good president, it's a place, it's a display that shows all the ways that these people hated him and despised him and could not stand him as a president. And it's interesting as you walk through this hallway to see all the names that President Lincoln was called to insult him. He was called inferior, a two-faced ape. He was called a grotesque baboon. And as you walk through this display, you can't help but chuckle a little bit at the interesting ways that these people tried to offend him and show their hatred for him. And sometimes we even like to hold on to our own bad tempers, our hot tempers, and we don't think it's really a terribly big deal. We even laugh about our hot tempers from time to time. You know, we hear about the Dutch temper, the Scotch temper. We hear about the Irish in me. And here's one I came across. The Frisian stiff head. That was a new one. And if that were not enough, we hear and we joke about the red heads and the hot heads and the bull heads from all kinds of nationalities. And the whole matter would be somewhat funny. It's kind of comical if it were not so tragically sad. Because the truth of the matter is that bad tempers and bitterness and rage and envy and vindictiveness and hatred destroy human life and destroy human dignity. Our Lord Jesus, in this passage tonight, teaches us in His Word about the heart of the sixth commandment. And it's this, that in no way, in no manner, shall we injure our neighbor either by thought or by word or by action. Rather, God empowers us as believers to reject murder of the heart and to pursue neighbor love, love for our neighbor at all costs. God empowers us to reject murder of the heart and pursue neighbor love at all costs. We want to look at Jesus' teaching on this matter tonight, on his command to love, his command of love under three points. First, we want to look at its negative prohibition, as God calls us, not to murder. But what exactly does that mean? It's negative prohibition. Second of all, it's positive demand. What then should we do if we ought not murder? And then finally, the command's delightful possibility. It's negative prohibition, it's positive demand, and it's delightful possibility. Now, brothers and sisters in the Lord Jesus Christ, before we look just a bit more carefully at what Jesus teaches us regarding the Sixth Commandment, it's important that we look at something that he teaches just prior to our passage. Jesus here is speaking to a large crowd and He reinforces a very weighty truth that He has come to earth not to abolish the law and the prophets, but rather to fulfill them. He has come to accomplish the law and He's come to teach that anybody who relaxes the law, who either adds to it or takes away from it in any way shall be leased in the kingdom of heaven. And so clearly, Jesus is very serious about the law of God. Zeal for righteousness and for the perfect standard of God is a major concern for Jesus. And beyond that, Jesus also proves that he is the divine interpreter of the law. In this section of the Gospel of Matthew, we're going to notice in just a moment that Jesus is going to place his own authoritative pronouncement and interpretation of the law over against that of the legalistic ways of the scribes and the Pharisees and over those who taught the law from ages past. And so, we're going to notice that he will introduce his teaching this way. You've heard that it was said such and such. But I tell you, you see, Jesus is sharpening the edge on every precept of God's law. He wields, as it were, a surgeon's scalpel. And the sharper it is, the more capable it is to cut deep down to the source and to the heart of the problem and to the heart of what God's law and His commandment is really talking about. He sharpens here the edge of God's law first by exposing and condemning the evil disposition of the heart that lies at the root, at the foundation of every transgression. That's what he does first as he looks at the negative prohibition of the sixth commandment. And then second of all, he places over against the evil disposition a positive demand. He explains the positive obligation of how we are to obey and fulfill the Sixth Commandment. Well, what's evident for us from this passage, first of all, is that Jesus had a major problem with how the Jewish leaders of the law had applied the Sixth Commandment. But what exactly was their problem? What exactly had these ancient interpreters gotten wrong about the Sixth Commandment? Well, they had said, in our passage it records, they had said, you shall not murder. Boys and girls, you know that it certainly was God's command to Moses and to all of Israel that they should not murder. We read that every Sunday, don't we, from Exodus 20, from Deuteronomy 5, and from other places in Scripture. So there doesn't seem to be a problem here with what the Pharisees and the scribes were teaching about the sixth commandment. Now, of course, the ancient teachers had also added to the commandment a consequence. They had said, whoever murders will be liable to judgment. It's an addition. True. But is there really anything wrong with it, per se? Well, not really. In fact, there's scriptural support that that consequence, the consequence of judgment for murder is true. They were on target. Genesis 9, verse 6, for example, shows that their interpretation of the consequences of murder were right. Whoever sheds a man's blood, it said, by man shall his blood be shed. An ancient reference to capital punishment. By all accounts here, even the Pharisees and the scribes of Jesus' day understood that they had no right to murder a human life. That that kind of activity was terribly displeasing to God. They understood that even after the fall, man retained certain aspects and characteristics of being made in his image. Spirituality, an intellect, a will. Because God takes delight in those things, in human beings, it is wrong for one person to kill another. They understood that. The teachers of Jesus' day seemed to have it all together on the issue of murder. On the surface level, there doesn't seem to be a problem here at all with the manner in which men of long ago were interpreting and applying the sixth commandment. So what is Jesus getting at here? Maybe he's being a bit too picky, perhaps. Maybe he's putting too sharp of an edge on the commandment. Not at all. Remember that Jesus is the prime interpreter of the law of God. And he sees down to the heart of the commandment. He saw that for the scribes and the Pharisees and for the ancient interpreters and teachers of the law, what was wrong was not what they had said, but what they had left unsaid. Jesus exposes the fact that they had not taught, they had not applied the sixth commandment as fully, as faithfully as they should have. They hadn't gone far enough. To teach against and to condemn those things that truly cause the murder of a precious human life. That's what Jesus is getting at here. Just imagine, brothers and sisters, in the Lord, if a minister decided to preach on the Sixth Commandment, but he limited his exhortation to a simple warning that we shouldn't drive too fast on the freeway, we shouldn't do drugs or drink too much alcohol or shoot guns in the air, lest we injure somebody. If that's what he limited his sermon on the Sixth Commandment to, would his sermon, would his warnings be getting to the real heart of the matter of murder? Wouldn't he be failing to expose the deeper spiritual cause that produces murder? See, that's what Jesus is doing in this passage here. He's digging deeper to unearth the spiritual source of the sin of murder in contrast to what was believed before traditionally. And so he says, you have heard that it was said, don't take a human life by killing a person unjustly. That's what the law was limited to in the past. But, as the prime interpreter of the law, I tell you, he says in verse 22, the source and cause of murder is anger and hatred. Even these things, Jesus says, And the catechism for us adds envy, desire for revenge, words and gestures which dishonor our neighbor. These kinds of things, Jesus says, are considered by God to be nothing less than murder. We can murder a person without even laying a finger on him or her. You might remember that evil Nabal used mere words to insult David, God's anointed. In 1 Samuel 25, and yet his language was full of deadly poison and venom. Proverbs 12, 18 teaches that reckless words pierce like a sword. Many of our friends and our co-workers have been robbed of their honor and their dignity and watched their futures disintegrate before their very eyes because of slander and backbiting and gossip coming from our lips. people closest to us have grown deathly discouraged because out of envy for their success we've abandoned them. We've stopped altogether encouraging them in the faith. And we fail to rejoice and celebrate with them for God's goodness to them. These things too, God says, are destruction of life. That's Jesus' one main lesson that we need to grasp tonight brothers and sisters, in the Lord. He's teaching that sinful anger, the kind that leads to bitterness and to rage, to insulting words, to vengeful thoughts and looks and gestures of contempt, that is by its very nature murder. Murder of the heart. And as we read in our passage, the Jewish legal system did not have a way to deal with or punish things like angry speech toward a brother. In fact, apparently these things were taken very lightly. As it is in our own society, it's the end outcome of murder that the law treats, but not the root, not the beginning that takes up residence in our hearts. But Jesus raises the sins of hatred and envy and anger to a new spiritual significance. And like a crime scene investigator, He works backwards from the crime itself to the underlying motive that lies in the heart. He says to his audience, you may think that calling your brother rakah, that's the Greek word. Some of you may have it in your Bibles, which means you imbecile, you empty-minded fool. Jesus says you may think that saying that to your brother doesn't mean very much. It's a triviality. You may think that calling your brother Moray, you worthless, slow-minded, rebellious, apostate person, you may think that that's not a big deal. Trivial, unimportant, hardly even answerable to a council of elders. But Jesus says, I tell you, anyone who shows this spirit of contempt and utter disgust and hatred and disdain for a fellow brother has murdered in his heart and will be liable not to a council of men but to the fire of hell. This kind of offense, murder of the heart, though it may seem trivial, is deadly in the eyes of Christ. God calls us, dear congregation, to say no to murder in all of its deadly forms. But saying no to death means saying yes to life. And that yes is a radical yes. Our Lord calls us in the second place to go on the offensive, to search out, to seek out our neighbors, to love them actively. We are not simply to spare our neighbor the worst. We are to give him the best, Jesus says. And the catechism, along with it, reminds us that God commands us to love our neighbor as ourselves, to show patience, peace, meekness, mercy, and all kindness towards him, and prevent our neighbor's hurt as much as possible. And even more than that, this kind of love and goodness should extend even to our enemies, which we'll see in just a moment. You see, here's another way that the Pharisees of Jesus' day hadn't gone far enough in their application of the Sixth Commandment. They'd left out something central to the Sixth Commandment, and that is the principle of love, without which the commandment loses its meaning. But they were without excuse. For Moses had commanded them frequently to love God, Deuteronomy 6, and to love their neighbor, Leviticus 19, 18. Jesus shows them and He shows us what the commandment meant from the very start. God's positive demand in the sixth commandment is that we love our neighbors and our enemies. And we even pray for those who persecute us. But why is God so concerned? Not only that we don't take the life of our neighbor, but that we positively put ourselves out there to love them, to abide by the principle of love, to search out our neighbors and our family members and even our enemies, and to love them as ourselves, to be patient and peace-loving. Why is God so concerned that we go on the offensive to love those around us? We all have experienced from time to time strained relationships, haven't we? Either with friends, or with relatives, or with neighbors across the fence. And I'm sure the thought possibly has come through our mind, can't I just leave them alone? Must I love them so actively? As long as I don't hate them in my heart, can't I just leave them alone? These people that I don't get along with very well. I mean, what, after all, is the big deal, we might ask? It's not as if our relationship, these strained relationships, affect my relationship with the Lord, does it? My attitude or actions toward my co-workers and government leaders, it doesn't have anything to do with my religion or my worship, does it? I mean, aren't these two separate areas of my life that really don't intersect and don't touch ever? But once again, Jesus responds to our attempts to relax the law, to relax the commandment. And He answers with an answer so sharp, so pointed, that it forces us to stand up and take notice. Jesus says to us, if you are offering your gift at the altar, and remember your brother has a legitimate grievance against you, leave your gift. It's in the imperative. It's a command. Stop right there in offering your gift and your worship. Go to that brother. Be reconciled. Make peace between you. Love peace and pursue it. And then go. Complete your worship and offer your gift. See, Jesus has summed up for us in very practical terms what is the heart of the Sixth Commandment. He says, Therefore, take notice. This is the positive application of the rule. That your heart must at all times be filled with love, not with anger, not with hatred. In fact, if you're trying to bring your offering of worship to God but have not yet been reconciled with your brother, are not yet loving that brother as actively as the law would command us to do, our worship will indeed suffer. If you know that a brother or sister even thinks that you have a reason, that they have a reason to be upset with you or dissatisfied with you, it needs to be your primary concern to be reconciled with that person. Lest your worship to God be compromised. Lest our offerings of worship, even the worship of our entire lives, are rendered unacceptable before God, We need to seek peace and love with our neighbor. That's God's command. Again, you see how Jesus penetrates to the depths of the importance of the commandment and He focuses our attention on its heart, which examines the orientation of our hearts. Neighbor love, reconciliation, need to be the desire of our hearts as we seek to fulfill the Sixth Commandment, even as we as believers right now enjoy the reconciliation and peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. It's because we enjoy that peace with God that we then need to actively pursue that kind of reconciliation and peace with one another. And Jesus says the time for that peace and love and reconciliation, the time for hatred and the time for vindictiveness to stop is right now. Don't delay. He says in verse 25 to 26, Settle matters quickly with your adversary before it's too late, before reconciliation becomes impossible. But this love, this command to actively love our neighbor extends beyond those who are across the fence. It extends beyond our love for our family members and friends. It extends, Jesus says, even to our enemies. One commentator tells a story of an old tribal leader who agreed wholeheartedly that it was very bad to kill anyone. However, it eventually came out that by anyone, he only meant those who were members of his tribe. An enemy or anybody outside of his tribal clan, they could be killed. That's how he viewed the sixth commandment. His understanding was, you shall love your neighbor, but hate your enemy. And apparently, that was also the typical way that an average Israelite applied and summed up the second table of God's law. But this, as you know, is a blatant perversion of God's intent. Because the Lord had, in fact, specifically commanded in Leviticus 19, you shall not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the children of your people, and you shall love your neighbor, those outside your camp, as yourself. I am the Lord. You see, God here emphasizes love over vengeance even when it pertains to our enemies. And He promises that He will make justice. He will take vengeance on the wicked. It's His job. Even if He does it by the appointed sword of the government. We ought to love our neighbors actively. We ought to love even our enemies. keeping in mind that at one time we too were enemies of God. Romans 5 verse 8 tells us that God showed His love for us in this, that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. We've received the love, we've received the grace of God through Christ while we were enemies, while we were despisers of God. And that good news, that beautiful gospel that we know, that we believe, that we hold on to day by day, that gospel compels us then to do the same, even for those who hate us and despise us. We ought to love them and abide by the principle of active love. And we need to be careful that we don't fall into the error of creating a strict division between neighbor and enemy and fall into the practice of asking, well, exactly who then is my neighbor? Jesus says that's the wrong question to ask. It's wrong-headed. The question, He says, is rather, what kind of neighbor should you be? What kind of neighbor must I be as I strive to fulfill the sixth commandment? And the answer is clear. A neighbor who shows love toward even my enemies and persecutors. Because now, all people are my neighbors. Again, you notice, Jesus gets to the heart of the commandment. He digs deeper. And the heart of the commandment is nothing less than that our inner disposition needs to be one of love towards all others. Brothers, friends, neighbors, even enemies. That's the way that we ought to fulfill in a positive way. The sixth commandment, out of gratitude, out of thankfulness for the grace and the love of Christ shown to us. Brothers and sisters of Christ, our Lord Jesus took on human flesh. He entered a hostile world that was cluttered with walled fortresses. It was, and in many ways still is, a world of walls, a world of barriers. And these barriers, whether they be military, economic, political, Religious, these barriers reveal that we live in a world that is tainted by sinful hatred for those around us. We build walls to keep out those we hate and despise. And we set up barriers to keep us from the obligation to love those outside. But central to Christ's mission in coming to earth was to break down those dividing walls of hostility. Dividing walls of hostility between the Jews and the Gentiles. Between different ethnic groups. Between people in households. Walls that come up even in the church. Christ came to bring peace. To tear down the walls. To bring reconciliation with God and with one another. And to send the love of God into the hearts of men. And so He entered into our time. He entered into our space. He adopted our infirmities and our weaknesses. And through His entire life, He embodied the far-reaching biblical principle of love of the Sixth Commandment. He loved His enemies to death. Even death on a cross. He loved us, the seemingly unlovable. and He poured into our hearts the love of God. He made us to be sons and daughters of our Heavenly Father. And He did this. While we were still sinners, while we were alienated from God, He did this. What a tremendous love for which there is and never will be a duplication. We are sons. We are daughters for the sake of God's only begotten Son, Jesus Christ. And now, because of that fact, dear congregation, it now becomes our joy, our privilege, our task as the people of God, carrying the message of the Gospel to share in the mission of our Savior. It's our delightful task to love and to pray for the salvation of those who hate us in return rather than murder them in our hearts. That becomes our task now as the people of God. And the call comes to us in verse 48, be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. We're called to be complete, full grown, lacking in nothing in the way of love for our neighbors. We mustn't be satisfied with a halfway obedience to the law of love as the scribes and Pharisees were who never dug deep enough to uncover the heart of God's commandment. We ought to strive, our passage says, to imitate the Father's love and perfection. His perfection specifically in the way that He loved. In the way that He showed grace and goodness to all men. For indeed, He is our faithful Heavenly Father. And our patient God, who makes His Son to rise on the evil and on the good, who sends His rain on the just and the unjust. He's the one who held out His hands continually to a people who are obstinate and disobedient. Israel, the church. In the same way, we can't stop short of embracing in love even those who hate us, who are obstinate toward us, who persecute us. In doing this, we pattern our love after our Heavenly Father's love and we reveal that we have been transformed by doing Christ's work, by showing the kind of patience, the kind of love, the tenderness, the gentleness, and the mercy that Christ has shown to us. We're to take delight, brothers and sisters, in sharing the Father's love, but we also need to be honest with ourselves, don't we? We need to be honest with ourselves because even the love of the most mature believer among us tonight is but a faint shadow compared to the perfect and infinite, marvelous love of God. So much so that we're forced to ask the question, is that kind of love even possible for us? Because we are so prone to hate God and hate our neighbor. Is it even possible for us to fulfill the law, the commandment of love, to begin to imitate our Heavenly Father? Is it even possible? There's only one man who never let the sun go down while he was still angry. Who never harbored in his heart revenge even though he was reviled against time and time again. There's only one who fulfilled the essence of the Sixth Commandment, whose love extended to the corners of the earth. Praise God for our Lord Jesus Christ. But though by nature we do hate God, and by nature we hate our neighbor, yet by the power and the grace of God in Jesus Christ our Lord, we do have a real beginning of new obedience. by which we can truly love God and truly love our neighbor, even our enemy, brothers and sisters. And our Heavenly Father promises us to give us that gift and provide us with the ability and the power to love those who are unlovable, to fulfill the law of love. As we pray, as we call out to Him, He promises to provide that gift. And by that same power and grace of God we can fight day by day against our own murderous nature. We can put on the new man and walk in the light of Christ our Savior who once and for all abolished death and darkness and brought life and immortality to light. Amen. Let's pray. Our gracious Heavenly Father, We realize how prone we are not to love you and our neighbor, even our enemy, but how prone we are to hate in a variety of ways, whether it be through our words, our gestures, our facial expressions, by the murder of our heart. Lord, we are grieved by our sin, Grieved by the way that we have not avoided, kept ourselves from the negative prohibition of your sixth commandment. And Lord, we are fully aware as well of the ways that we have not been as faithful as we should to fulfill the positive command of your law. To love generously, to pursue peace and reconciliation with those around us. With joy and with gratitude for the reconciliation that we enjoy with you, by my faith in Christ. But Lord, we are thankful that You promise as our Heavenly Father by Your grace to work in our hearts to give us the strength to love, to make those small beginnings real beginnings of obedience in this life, to love those around us, to care for their needs, to pursue the good of our neighbor, the good even of our enemy, though they persecute us. We thank You for our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ who never let the sun go down while He was angry, who has provided for us peace and reconciliation with You, our Father, and with those around us. As we trust in Him by faith and cling to the promise that You will provide the power and ability necessary to love, may we pursue love in the week ahead. Strengthen us, we pray, by Your Spirit to this end. May we take joy and delight in that possibility of loving our neighbors, imitating our Heavenly Father. In Your name we pray. Amen.