Welcome To The Blessed Life

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Hey friends, Mandy here. We're back for episode nine in the So Blessed series. We've been walking through Matthew chapter five, looking at what does it mean to live a blessed life, to live the good life. What does it mean according to Jesus, not according to culture or social media or all the other avenues of blessed life that is out there? The message is coming at us. This is Jesus' view of it. And we want this view because this view of the blessed life means that we get joy in any circumstance. And there's nothing else out there that can promise us that. This is the good stuff. And so we want to understand what it means. We want to hear the heart of God. And if you're new here, we want you to know that we exist because we want to see you gather with the girls and the women in your life, gather with your people, make it a practice. We want to see you grow together closer to Jesus and each other. And we want to see you go and fulfill the purposes that God has in and through you of teaching others what Jesus has taught you. That's why we're here. That's our prayer for you. And in order for that to happen, we know that we need the Holy Spirit. We are a ministry that believes in transformation, not just good information, but when we open this book, we believe that power is in it. And when the Holy Spirit is working, we're going to know things we didn't know before. We're going to learn things we didn't understand and we're going to go and we're going to be different. So let's pray and ask the Holy Spirit to help us with that now.

Ask The Spirit To Teach

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Heavenly Father, we love you so much. We adore you. We thank you for this good book. We thank you for the truths in it. We thank you that you sent Jesus to not only die for us, but to actually have a ministry of teaching us your heart so that we could know the deep things of you and that we could convey the deep things of you to others in our lives. So speak to us now, Holy Spirit. Teach us unsearchable things that we did not know. Jesus, it's in your name we pray. Amen. So again, we've been walking through Matthew chapter five. It's Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. And there is more than one chapter in the Sermon on the Mount. We're only going through five in this or chapter five in this study because we want you to go through six and seven in community. So if you haven't already thought about that, we want you to start thinking about it now. What does it look like to gather in community if you haven't been doing it already and read through Matthew six and seven together? If you've already been in community going through this study, this is the perfect way to just continue on the conversation, reflecting on what you've learned already, and gaining new understanding of what Jesus has to say in chapter six and chapter seven. But let's dig into what is in today's chapter, which is the last section of Matthew chapter five. It's the last section of verses, verses 43 through 48. If you have a Bible, go ahead and grab it. Otherwise, I'm going to read those verses right

Jesus Says Love Your Enemies

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now. Starting in verse 43, the title of this section is Love Your Enemy. So we're getting challenged again. God has been challenging us. Jesus' words uh last week challenged us. The challenge continues. But we can do this because we have Jesus. Uh starting in verse 43, you have heard it 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 to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and 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, this is a final verse in this chapter, you therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect.

Redefining Enemy Through The Gospel

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His love is perfect. He is perfect, and he is showing us the perfect way, and he's showing us and revealing the perfect thing that he's going to do for us. You see, this word enemy in this section of scripture in the Greek means in opposition to, right? Like when we think of the word enemy, we might think of like the person who's done the worst thing ever. And or we might think of, you know, if someone's like, hey, what do you think of when you think of the word enemy? You might start just thinking bad stuff about a person who's an enemy. But Jesus isn't conveying, Jesus is conveying anybody who's been in opposition to you, or you've been in opposition to them, that's an enemy. And the thing about this is if we go to Romans chapter 5, verse 10, we recognize that the word enemy is used to speak about us. It says that we used to be enemies of God. And while we were still enemies, Christ died for us. And so we are called into the love of Jesus, the love of the Father, when others cause us harm, when others wrong us. The immediate thought is retaliation or keep on the outside. But Jesus calls us into something higher. And he's not expecting us to do it alone. That's why we were given the Holy Spirit to help us in that. Let's

When Tradition Adds To Scripture

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examine this place where Jesus says again, he says, You've heard it said, we've seen that several times through this last half of Matthew chapter five. To love your neighbor, but hate your enemy. And so very often Jesus is referencing an old testament section of scripture, but this is only half of it. Half of what he says is actual scripture. The other half was kind of added to it. It wasn't in scripture. How many times a day does someone say something? And it's like, I'm not sure that's in scripture, but we take it that way, or we repeat something, or we hold on to something, but then we actually get into scripture and we see that it is not true. Very similar here. The people during this time, that word neighbor had really narrowed down to a specific people group. Their people group, their covenant community was who they considered to be neighbor and who they were called to love. But there are examples in scripture where God told them directly and directed them to love the foreigner among them, like in Leviticus 19, 23. He tells them that. So Jesus is pulling them back and he's expanding their understanding of what it truly means to be a child of God, which is to go beyond even a lack of retaliation, but to actually love and pray for those who cause us harm. It's easy to love friends and family who are loving us back. It takes Jesus to love someone who is not being loving in return. When we talk about this, when we look at the scripture, we have to take the whole of scripture to really grasp the full depth of understanding of what is being said in a section

Mercy And Justice In Tension

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of scripture. Otherwise, we can find ourselves sideways, right? Even looking at this one chapter, there's so much in the beginning of the chapter that helps us keep a right view of the end of the chapter. And that is that God is a God of mercy. Blessed are the merciful, blessed are those who are hungering and thirsting for righteousness. Blessed are the peacemakers. We've seen that last week. We've seen it at different points of this chapter, and we're seeing it again that we need to hold that intention. We need to also hold intention that God is a just God, as we talked about two episodes ago. And so with that understanding, we can see that it is the truth and the mercy and the righteousness of God that we're seeking in situations. It helps us to gain a new perspective when someone harms us because we want them to be right with God and we want them to understand the love of God. And when we are representing God's love, it's easier for the people in front of us to grasp what the love of God looks like. And that is our calling and our purpose is to bring God glory through the way that we live our lives. And this chapter ends with Jesus telling us that we must be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect.

Perfect Father, Perfect Redeemer

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And if we just took that one verse and we didn't know the rest of scripture, we didn't know the gospel, we might start freaking out because there ain't no perfect person. There's only one perfect person, and it's Jesus. And Jesus took his perfection and he gave it to us. He took our sin upon himself. We are justified by one means, and that is the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. That word justified means made right. We were made right with God through what Jesus did for us. He lived the perfect life that we could not live. And then he died the death that we deserved. And in that death, in that sacrifice, he atoned. That means he paid for, he covered our sin. That means when we are living our lives today, when we sin, when we mess up, it's an opportunity for us to return, as we've talked to in weeks past, to Jesus and thank Jesus and ask Jesus to make us new and make us more like him. Let it be our prayer every day. Jesus, make me more like you. I don't need to ruminate in my sin. I don't need to feel like, oh no, I've officially blown it. Like I'm out, I'm kicked out of the Jesus Club because I messed up. When we take on that attitude, we say that his sacrifice didn't matter. Because the whole point of the cross, the whole point of why we say we believe what we believe is because we cannot be perfect. And the whole reason why Jesus did what he did is because we are not perfect. God saw the brokenness of humanity that started way back in the beginning and he had a plan to redeem it. And that redemption came through Jesus. It is the perfect plan of redemption. It's exactly what we need. That feeling that we get when we messed up, God knew that we were going to struggle with that feeling. Because, you know, if you're ever around someone who's like they've laid it all down for Jesus and they're living their life in a way that's really beautiful. And sometimes being around that kind of person, if it can feel intimidating if we're looking at it through the wrong lens, if we're not looking at it through you're loving God and you've been loving him for a long time, and that love is really being conveyed through you. And if I love God the way that you're loving God, if I put God first and I love him, my heart's gonna gradually be transformed the more that I walk with him. It's not like, oh, I come to Jesus and now my life just is all cleaned up. My life isn't gonna be fully cleaned up until I get to heaven. But I'm on a journey. I'm on a journey with Jesus. And each day as I lay my heart before him, as I say, Jesus, today I'm following you. He's gonna make us more and more like him. Our sin is an opportunity to grow closer to him, not run from him. Because in the coming to him, he's strengthening us, he's washing us up, he's making us clean, he's helping us take the next step forward. And our heart, our response is gratitude. Out of that gratitude, we worship. Our lives become worship because we recognize I am the sinner saved by grace. I'm not worthy of the love that Jesus continually pours on me. And when we find ourselves falling short of the glory of God, which is daily, it's an invitation to draw closer to God, see his heart, receive his forgiveness, and walk in it. So each

Bring The Hard Stuff To God

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of our study days concludes with a connect with God moment. And today, you might be thinking, it's too hard to love my enemies, but I can't do it. This is your opportunity to put your heart before the Father and confess that to him. Let him know I'm trying and it's really hard, and I need your help. Let's do that now. Father, we love you, and this can be hard. When someone's hurt us, there are feelings in that we can get caught up in our feelings. We need your heart to burst through our feelings. Lord, remind us what you have done for us, what you've rescued us from. Give us a keen awareness of our own sin. Lord, so that we can understand the depth of your mercy that meets us every day. And by your grace and by the power of your spirit, give us the ability to love our enemies, to greet them, to pray for them. We give our hearts to you now. Reveal any place that you want to work. If you need more time than this podcast is allowing, I encourage you to press pause. Certainly come back to this later and sit with the Lord in it. Maybe get out a pen and a sheet of paper and write your heart out to God and let him reveal more of his heart to you. I can tell you through personal testimony that each time I've given my heart to God in this area, he delights in working. And it may not happen in an instant, it may not happen in a day, it may not happen in a week, it might take some time for God to work on this, but if you'll keep giving him your heart, he will do it.

Prayerful Support And Real Boundaries

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Finally, we have our connect with others moment. Each day of our studies concludes with either a dig deeper or connect with others. We are all about connecting with others here at Brave Girls Gather, especially with more mature believers. So this is a tough topic, and it can be really difficult to know what to do. What does loving my enemy look like? Are there boundaries that do need to be kept in place? What does righteousness and mercy and loving my neighbor all say? And what does that look like for me? And that's when we need a more mature believer to come into this with us and speak to us and speak into it for us. So if you don't have a more mature believer in your life, pray for it. And if you do and you're struggling through this, reach out. Say, hey, can we talk? Can we grab coffee? Um, can I come over and sit on your couch and just tell you about what's going on in this situation? Until you're back here next week, our hope and prayer for you at Brave Girls Gather is that you would gather together with others, that you would grow closer to Jesus and each other, and that you would go and make disciples.