If Jesus Was Serious | Week 3 | (4-26-26)

Dr. Woods Lisenby preaches on the subject, "You May Be Children."

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

You know, one of my favorite things over the past eight years has been uh taking my kids to the park. We spend a lot of time on playgrounds, and just about anytime we travel, we go to the playground. We live within walking distance of this place called Loretta Park. It's over in Mobile. And uh we have gone there so many times. I have hundreds of videos and photos of my kids playing on the playground there. And it's funny to look back at the ones from like early on, whenever August, our daughter, whenever she was younger, um, and she was you know little and how close we would stand to her as she climbed the stairs and we're right there, her hands behind her, as she go to the slide or holding her hands, and and compare that to just like the other day. We were there uh weekend before last. And uh Brianna and I were just like sitting on the bench while our youngest son Wyatt, who is not even two yet, he's just like scaling the walls, like like dangling from the monkey bark. He goes to the top slide on zone, just like rips down it, and we're like, all right, he's cool. That's very much like the third child kind of, you know, we love you, but like if you get hurt, we'll we'll figure it out, you know. Uh and one of the things that I love about the park, if you've ever been to the park, you've likely seen one of the most ordinary miracles of life. Two kids, total strangers, show up to a park. One's been there for a while, the other one has already uh uh shows up and joins some elaborate game that the first has created. And it's like these kids uh the ones there, they say hi. They don't even say hi. They just jump right in, and in 30 seconds, they are in this deep shared world. They each have their own roles. They've been uh they're running around, they know what to do, and they've become best friends. It's like they've been best friends since birth, even though they just met. They didn't ask each other first, hey, where do you go to school? Or uh which side of the bay do you live on? Or uh what uh they didn't stalk them on Facebook or Instagram, you know, before they decide if they could be friends or not. They just played. And and it's this pretty universal experience that kids have. You've probably seen it just about anywhere. Like I've I've seen it uh uh in different parks in Mobile and Baldwin counties. I've seen it uh while we're in the airport, waiting on a flight. I've I've seen it whenever we're at a hotel pool on vacation, my kids are swimming, and then some other kids join, and they swim up, and then five minutes they're all playing uh their own version of Marco Polo, whose rules have completely changed from the rules I knew growing up, and they're gonna change again in like 90 seconds, but everybody's on board with it because they're just kids in the pool and they're playing. And the question that keeps coming back to me every time uh that I I see this, this ordinary miracle, is this when did we lose that? At what age does that stop being normal? When does the simple human capacity to receive another person, regardless of where they come from or what they look like, uh when does that get knocked out of us? Because somewhere along the way, uh most of us stop running up to strangers to play with them. When we approach somebody we don't know, we start sizing them up. We start sorting them and putting them into different groups, we start drawing lines. We you've been in this series for the past uh few weeks called What If Jesus was serious? Where we've been walking through the sermon on the mount and we've been asking, what would it look like if we took Jesus at his word? What if we actually believed him when he told us these things and gave us these instructions? And if you read this, not as poetry and not as some aspirational language, but as actual instruction for our lives. And what would it look like if we took the things seriously that he said about how we are salt and light and supposed to be a beacon for the world? And and today, the thing he says is perhaps the hardest thing to ever take seriously, not just in the Sermon on the Mount, but in the whole Bible. Listen again to what Matthew chapter 5 says. You have heard that it was said, love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your father in heaven. Love your enemies. Are you kidding me? I mean, if we're gonna uh take a vote on the most preposterous sentence Jesus ever said, this would be a top contender. This would see the seems to be the most outlandish, right? Hard to understand. Because you tell somebody forgive somebody seven times, seven times. Okay, forgive somebody, okay. I get that's hard, but I understand what you're saying. Uh, if it says uh sell your possessions and give that to the poor, that's not ideal, right? It's convicting, but at least I understand you know the tangibility. I can hand that over. But love your enemies, pray for the people who try to make your life harder, the people who have a real reason for for you not to like them, the people who've hurt you, love those people? Take Jesus seriously when he says that? Now that that is hard. And Jesus knows what he's asking, right? He says it's basic to go ahead and love people who love you back, even the tax collectors do that, right? Even the people who have no framework for who God is, they can love people that are nice to them. So if you if your love stops at loyalty, then you haven't shown anybody something they haven't already seen. Uh and then he gives us this line that I want us to sit with today. All right. He says this love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your father in heaven. He causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good. He sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. I mean that line, that you may be children of your father in heaven. You know what's great? I didn't pick this text for today. We didn't try to make it line up that this text is about children on children's worship Sunday. The Holy Spirit just did that. Sarah, uh, when we plan our series, we we pick different ones and we kind of write them out. Sarah, uh, this was the first series she picked, and she picked it last year. And this text just happened to be for us today on Children's Worship Sunday. And so I think there's something beautiful that the Holy Spirit has for us in this particular line that you may be children of your Father in heaven. Because that's it right there. That's the reason for this absurd command that Jesus gave us. Uh, we love this way because this is what God's love already looks like. God already sees us as his children, and and God sees all people as his children. The sun rises on the good and the bad, the rain falls on the field of the saints and the field of the swindler. God's grace is a posture before it's a transaction. This love to love one's enemies that is a reflection of who God already is and who God has always been. And Jesus says if you want to be recognizable as God's kids, right? This is the family resemblance. This is how you look like God. You love others, even when it's hard. Uh, the the thing that makes us look like the Father, it's not our biblical literacy, right? No. It's loving the people whom we might not want to love. Now, uh, you might be already thinking of a few people as I'm talking, right? That's normal. Our minds often go to different places when we hear this verse. Maybe you've heard it before and you're going back to the same people you've struggled with in the past. Often when we hear this word enemy, we think really big, really broad in terms, right? We think of like nations at war. Or if it's not nations, we think about like religious conflicts throughout history. Those are the enemies. Or maybe uh in our climate, we think about it in like this political opponents, these people that we never break bread with. And though it's true as humans, we have a habit throughout our history of looking at groups of people that are not like us and deciding that they must be against us and naming them as enemies. I think the truth is most of our energy is not spent on enemies around the world on the other side of the planet, or enemies in Washington, or enemies that we will never meet. I think uh most of our energy is spent on the enemies right here, on the people that are closest to us, the coworker who got that promotion that you wanted, or uh the in-law who doesn't quite approve of you the way you'd like. Maybe the neighbor whose dog is barking at three o'clock in the morning. Or the that friend group, they just kind of drifted away and it felt personal, targeted. You know, there's a French philosopher, his name is Rene Girard. Maybe you've heard about him. He wrote a lot about how people end up in conflict. And uh, I often come back to this work when I read this verse about enemies. I can think about what he said because uh Girard argued that our deepest rivalries are never with people that we'll never meet, they're not with people on the other side of the planet uh because we don't interact with those people. No, the enemies that take up the most of our headspace are the people that are most like us. But get it just a little bit wrong, right? Uh it's it uh we we're not envying people in another country whose lives they bear no resemblance to ours. We envy the same family in our neighborhood whose kids uh are the same grade and they got the thing that we wanted. Those are the people we often think of with the most angst, right? We compete with the people that are closest to us because we're reaching for the same things that they are reaching for. So our enemies end up being the people that we see every day. Like that sibling who's been quietly two steps ahead of you your entire life since you're like six years old. Or that college friend whose Instagram looks like the brochure that you thought your life would be and it hasn't been that, or the neighbor whose yard is like the cover of a magazine. Those are the people who end up being the ones that take up our headspace. The we think of with ire or anchor. It might even be the person who's sitting in the row right in front of you in this church. So when Jesus says, Love your enemies, he's not just talking about people across the ocean. He might be talking about the people you've got to see tomorrow or sit next to tonight. But on this Sunday, where the children are leading us in worship, I can't help but think about all the times in the Gospels when Jesus uses children as a picture of what love from the Father actually looks like, of what a relationship with Jesus is actually like. I mean, think about it. In Matthew 18, it says this the disciples come to ask Jesus, who is the greatest in the kingdom? And Jesus could have named a rabbi or priest. He didn't even name himself. He calls a little child over, sets the child in the middle of the group, and says, Unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. In Mark 10, uh, parents are are bringing their children to Jesus, and the disciples are blocking them, right? They're holding them back like they're security at a concert. And Jesus gets indignant. He says, Let the little children come to me. Don't hinder them, because the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. And then in Matthew 21, after Jesus had cleared the temple, the children there start shouting praises. And the religious leaders, they are upset and they rebuke the kids. And Jesus quotes the Psalms back to them. And he says, Out of the mouths of children and infants are your ordained praises. There's this thread running throughout the Gospels where Jesus keeps holding up children as a sign of what life with God actually looks like. And then we come back to this text in Matthew 5, and Jesus says, Love your enemies that you may be children of the Father. We were all once children, that's no secret. That's how biology works. But Jesus is saying something more than that: that you are still children. You are still God's child. You are uh the child of God, is the greatest identity that you can hold. You know, that's the family we belong to, that's the resemblance we are trying to bear. And the father's identity, it has this particular shape. And it's a shape that actually includes the people we want to leave out. That to look like the father means to love our enemies. And I want to be careful here because uh there's a way of reading this text that says, like, be like children, and it sounds really like sentimental, really like sappy. Sometimes we read it and think it's just about our intellect, just about how we think, right? But Jesus isn't telling us to be naive. He's not asking us to forget the things that we've learned, he's not asking us to pretend the world is not broken and that we haven't been hurt or harmed. Maturity isn't the problem. What he is uh pointing us to, what I think Jesus is helping us to see is that uh every time he calls a child over, Jesus is pointing to the child's openness, to the child's willingness to receive, the unguarded posture, right? The capacity the kids have before we train it out of them to receive another person without first running them through whatever filter we have for whether or not they qualify to be our friends. The kid on the playground doesn't decide whether the other kid deserves to play. The child just makes room for the other to come in and join. That's what Jesus is asking from us. That's what it means to be a child of God is that we are people who make room, that we let our default posture towards another human being be openness, be one of welcome, be one that is even deferential to somebody else. Not because we've lost our minds, but because we found our family. Because we found the people that we want to belong to, and the people we want to belong to sometimes are hard to love. I'm gonna be honest, I know I can be hard to love sometimes, but I'm glad that you're trying. And I'm gonna be honest, some of you are hard to love sometimes, but I'm gonna never stop trying. Because that's what it means to belong to the family of God, is that we are open to one another, even when we can be difficult. And the thing about openness, it's what makes loving the enemy possible. It's what makes us be able to look at somebody else. Because if we're closed, if my default is to size you up and to decide whether you're worthy of my attention or not, like that, then it's impossible to love the enemy. That we've already put them in a category, we've already put them in a box, we've already separated ourselves from them. But if we can stay open, if we can be willing to receive the way a child does, if we can hold on to that possibility, then Jesus' command stop sounding impossible and start sounding like something we can actually do. You know, when we see the other person as a child of God, we can actually pray for them. Not pray they fail, right? You see your coworker that's bothering you, you can pray not that they don't get that promotion, but you can pray for them by name for whatever else it is that they're going through. And watch what happens when you let your heart be open. Watch what happens to your life. Watch, watch what happens to how you see the world, right? Your in-law who's always been a little chilly to you. I encourage you. Don't speak to them in a way to which you're trying to always win. Listen to them and respond with openness. Receive your neighbor as a person before you see them as a problem. And even when they are problems, never stop loving them. That's what it looks like to look like the Father, to be part of what God is inviting us all into. And think about the fact that today, the children of this church, they have led every part of the worship this morning, right? They've read scripture for us, they've prayed for us, they've sang, they've danced, they've stood up here, and we have followed them. And if you're a kid in here right now, if you're a child, hear me right now. You are a child of God. Today, right now, you are loved and you are valued for what you offer the church and just for just for who you are, not when you get older, but today. And every kid in this room, I'm so thankful for you. And I'm thankful that you are part of this church, and that I'm a part of this church with you. And if you're an adult hearing of me right now, the same is true for you. You are also a child of God. And I'm so thankful for you, and that we are part of this family together. Uh, the the years on you don't change the fact that you are God's child. The grudges you carry, they don't change that. The list of people you'd rather not sit next to this week, they don't change that. The father is still the father, he still has the sun rise on you and everyone else. And the family resemblance is still available if you choose to be open to it. Maybe today is the day that you let yourself be a child again. Not naive, not ignorant, but open. Open enough to pray for somebody you'd rather not pray for. Open enough to let the person uh next to you be your fellow traveler rather than your adversary. Jesus said, Love your enemies that you may be a child of your father in heaven. And the kids have been leading us all morning. Maybe they are leading us further than we've ever realized. In the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit. Amen.