Adding Love: God, Neighbors, and Enemies: full transcript and answers

▶ 0:36 And we’re going to talk about adding love to our faith. The New Testament word for love—definition is affection, goodwill, and a love feast. And so we have to add to our faith virtue, knowledge, self-control, patience, godliness, brotherly love. And the reason we’re adding is because we didn’t have them when we got saved, so we got to add them. The Bible definition, the Bible explanation, is way superior to your Greek or Hebrew definition of a word. And 1 John—we’re going to look at love from a noun perspective, used as a noun. A noun is a person, place, or thing. 1 John 4:8 and 1 John 4:16 says God is love.

▶ 1:30 So love is a person, and that person is God, and we got to add love to our faith. Colossians 1:13, God has delivered us from the power of darkness and translated us into the kingdom of his—your translations almost all of them will say dear Son, but the word is more powerful than that. It’s the same word, agape love. See, he translated us into the kingdom of his love Son, who is love, God. So Jesus is God’s Son—or in other words, Jesus is God. Another place that proves that Jesus is God. That’s the noun. If we’re going to add love, we got to add God to our life, his love. All right. His love—Bible use of love used as a verb, okay, an action word.

▶ 2:39 Matthew 22:37, love the Lord your God. All right, we’re supposed to love God who is love. We’re supposed to love Love. Matthew 22:39, love your neighbor as yourself. We’re supposed to love—and an action. This is an action. There has to be some kind of behavior, some kind of expression to our neighbor and to our God. See, we got to add that to our faith. And then the more difficult one for most people is Matthew 5:44, love your enemies. Oh my gosh, love your enemies. You see, you got to have an action, a behavior of love toward your enemies. So love is an action in all three of these scriptures. All right. God is love, and love is an action toward my neighbor, toward myself, toward my enemy, and toward my God. There is an action involved.

▶ 3:52 Now, how to love God—the action, the verb. What do I do to love God? You see, do I just say I love God—that’s an action—or is there more to it? 1 John 5:3, this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. You see, I demonstrate my love for God by obeying his word, especially his laws. 2 John 6, this is love, that we walk after his commandments. You see, just verbally saying I love God doesn’t mean a hill of beans unless action backs it up, and we honor and keep his laws, his commandments, his words. We do what pleases him, not ourself. How do we love with action—the verb—our neighbor and ourself?

▶ 5:01 You see, how is that done? Romans 13:8, love does no harm to a neighbor; therefore love fulfills the law. You see, if you love God you’ll obey his law. If you do nothing verbally, financially, physically to hurt your neighbor, you have fulfilled both loving God and your neighbor. Ain’t that beautiful? So love is an action. And before you’re going to be able to love your neighbor, you got to love yourself. You can’t do anything to verbally, physically, spiritually, financially harm yourself—then you can pass that on to others. Ain’t that beautiful? Hallelujah.

▶ 6:10 Now comes the toughy. How do you love your enemies? I mean, you know the Bible says a man’s enemies can be those of his own household. Yeah, you can have opposition in your own home. How you going to love them? You know, you’re going to hate him back? You’re going to get into a war? You live in a community—you’re going to get into a war? Or you going to find a way to deal with those that are in opposition to you? How to love your enemy—here we go. Luke 6:27. Okay, we all know our English. We graduated from public school. We are sharp. We know that the subject of this paragraph is love your enemies. We know that the following explains and elaborates on the subject, and we know the end sums it up. Right? Are you English experts out there? Subject: love your enemies. All right. Do good to those who hate you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. Bless those who curse you—those who go, you’ll never amount to nothing.

▶ 7:32 When I went to Detroit from Kentucky, those northerners hated me. They laughed at me and mocked at me. I had an accent and I was a dumb hillbilly, and they called me a dumb hillbilly. And I had never experienced the world yet. I was down there in that cozy little country setting, and man, no bullies, no gangs, no nothing. And to be a hillbilly—never amount to nothing. You—I didn’t even know how to play baseball. Never played baseball in my life. And so they tag you, you know—you’re this, you’re that—and they despise you. They don’t want you on their baseball team. You ain’t know how to hold a bat, you stupid hillbilly. Pray for those who spitefully use you or insult you, slander you, falsely accuse you. I’ve been to court four times from people falsely accusing me, slandering me, defaming my character—four times. To him who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other. You know, somebody hate you so much because you’re a hillbilly so long that you finally go, I’m not a stupid hillbilly, and they smack you upside the head—you are too. Come to your senses. Supposed to turn the other cheek. He who takes your cloak, do not withhold your tunic. Cloak is a coat like we wear, and the tunic is an inner garment. You know, so basically they take your coat and you give them your tunic—you’re naked. And the Bible’s against running around naked, and most people in society don’t want you run around naked, because most of us aren’t worth looking at naked. You know, people read this and you got to understand—you got to dig into this to know what he’s talking about.

▶ 9:27 So give to everyone—now he just doesn’t use the enemies—he says give to everyone that asks of you. And know—hey, I want your car—okay, here you are. Hey, I want your house—okay, here you are. Hey, I want your clothes—okay, here you are. Your tools—okay, here you are. And not just your enemies—now it’s everybody. And how many of you know Jesus didn’t run around naked? He didn’t give them everything. He didn’t give everybody what they asked for. And we’ll get further into that. He who takes away your goods, don’t ask them back. They borrowed from you for so long they just take it for granted they can come and get your lawnmower or edger or whatever they need anytime they want—don’t ask them back. Now you notice—ask—so they’ve been asking; they just stop asking. We’re getting to the end of the subject, so he’s wrapping it up, and he summarizes it as saying, as you want men to do to you, do to them likewise.

▶ 10:33 You see, so obviously this is an illustration of how to love your brother and your neighbor who is not criminals. They just don’t like you. Maybe they don’t like your race. Maybe they don’t like the color of your hair. Maybe they don’t like the way you talk, where you’re from—like this stupid hillbilly from the Appalachian mountains. But they’re not out stealing from you. They’re not out beating you up, kicking you on the ground. They’re not criminals. He goes on to say this: if you love—he’s starting another subject—to receive. If you give out things to get back, you love to get love, you lend to get something out of the act of lending, if you do good because you want that person to acknowledge you and do something for you—he says, what do you more than others? Sinners do that. Now he switches to sinners.

▶ 11:31 Sinners are malicious, purposeful violators of God’s word. Another word for sinners in our language is criminal. Okay. Criminals. So he’s switching the subject now. See. And he goes on to say, if you want to be sons of your Father, you do things better than the sinner. Hallelujah. People verbally attack you—you don’t verbally attack back. They physically get angry and want to beat you up—you don’t want to beat back. You try to avoid it. Are you there? You see, this is maturity. This is sons of God. How you know most of the church in America aren’t even close to being a son of God and maturity, and we’re quite comfortable with it. But we got to get uncomfortable with it so that we can change this nation.