"Am I Really Supposed to Love My Enemies?"

“Am I Really Supposed to Love My Enemies?”
Luke 6: 27-31
October 26, 2003

Intro: Today we are concluding our series of messages entitled “Hot Topics in Religion.” And we’re going to examine the question “Am I Really Supposed to Love My Enemies?” The answer to the question is YES. We really are supposed to love our enemies.
-Now I don’t know @ you but that seems impossible. How in the world can you love someone who doesn’t love you? How in the world can you love someone who wants to do you harm and tear you down? It’s much easier for me to love people who already love me.
-I have no trouble at all loving my wife, Emily. We got married b/c we love each other. We enjoy being w/one another. Emily is genuinely interested in who I am as a person and, believe it or not, after 11 years of marriage I still want to impress her b/c what she thinks @ me is important.
-I don’t have any trouble loving my children. They’re a part of who I am. I take care of them and have a genuine interest in seeing them grow up to be good, productive citizens.
-Now there are times when we all get on each others nerves. There are times when we have arguments and fight w/one another. But at the end of the day we still love each other. But Jesus comes along and tosses in this monkey wrench of saying that not only are we to love those who love us but we’re even to love those who don’t love us! Many of us read that and think, “Are you kidding me?”
-Late one summer evening in Broken Bow, Nebraska, a weary truck driver pulled his rig into an all-night truck stop. The waitress had just served him when three tough looking, leather jacketed motorcyclists - of the Hell’s Angels type - decided to give him a hard time. Not only did they verbally abuse him, one grabbed the hamburger off his plate, another took a handful of his french fries, and the third picked up his coffee and began to drink it.
-How would you respond? Well, this trucker did not respond as one might expect. Instead, he calmly rose, picked up his check, walked to the front of the room, put the check and his money on the cash register, and went out the door. The waitress followed him to put the money in the till and stood watching out the door as the big truck drove away into the night.
-When she returned, one of the bikers said to her, "Well, he’s not much of a man, is he?" She replied, "I don’t know about that, but he sure ain’t much of a truck driver. He just ran over three motorcycles on his way out of the parking lot."
-Sounds like justice, doesn’t it? When someone wrongs us our first instinct is to get them back! Our first instinct is to make them hurt as much as they hurt us. That is the world’s answer to being wronged. But Jesus gives His followers a different response they’re to have. He tells us we’re to love our enemies.

Sermon Idea: Today in our passage of Scripture we’re going to see Jesus sharing w/His followers how they’re to respond to those who are their enemies. Now some of you might think, “I don’t have to worry @ this b/c I don’t have any enemies.” Just to be truthful, if you don’t have any now you’re going to have some pretty soon. It’s one of the unfortunate things in life that there are some people who are never, ever going to like you no matter what you do.
-So the question becomes “How are you