Spiritual Warfare (Part 3)

Second Kings, Chapter 6. Let’s go to verse 8—Chapter 6, Kings, Second Kings, verse 8. I don’t know whether I’m going to read the whole passage, but at least a few verses. I want to continue with the subject we began a few weeks ago. This will be the third sermon related to this period, the ministry of Elisha, of Elijah, spiritual warfare, the weapons we use for spiritual warfare—all these things are involved here.

It says in verse 8 of Second Kings: “...The king of Syria was waging war against Israel, and after consulting with his servants, he said, ‘My camp will be at such and such a place.’ And the man of God—that is, Elisha the prophet—the man of God sent word to the king of Israel, saying, ‘Be careful not to pass by such a place’—where the king of Syria was going to lie in ambush—‘be careful not to pass by such a place, because the Syrians are going there.’ Then the king of Israel sent men to the place the man of God had told him about, and he did this again and again in order to protect himself.....”

Elisha was always warning him: That is where they are going to be; that is where they are going to be. They are going to ambush you. Avoid those places. And that is what the king did.

“.... And the heart of the king of Syria—the enemy—was troubled by this, and he called his servants and said to them, ‘Will you not tell me which of us is on the side of the king of Israel?’...”

In other words, he thought there was a spy among them.

“..... Then one of the servants said, ‘No, my lord the king, but Elisha the prophet is in Israel, and he tells the king of Israel the words you speak in your most secret chamber.’ And he said, ‘Go and see where he is, so that I may send men to capture him.’ And he was told, ‘Behold, he is in Dothan’—a city. And then the king sent horsemen, chariots, and a great army there. They came by night and surrounded the city. And early in the morning, the servant of the man of God arose and went out—that is, Elisha’s servant got up in the morning—and behold, the army had surrounded the city, with horsemen and chariots. Then his servant said to him, ‘Oh, my lord, what shall we do?’ He said to him, ‘Do not be afraid, because there are more with us than there are with them.’ Amen.

Elisha cried out and said, ‘I pray, O Jehovah, open his eyes’—the eyes of his servant—‘so that he may see.’ Then Jehovah opened the servant’s eyes, and he looked. And behold, the mountain was full of horsemen and chariots of fire all around Elisha. And when the Syrians came down to him, Elisha prayed to Jehovah and said, ‘I pray that You strike these people with blindness,’ and He struck them with blindness according to Elisha’s request. Then Elisha said to the Syrians, ‘This is not the place; this is not the road or the city. Follow me, and I will lead you to the man you are looking for.’ And he led them to Samaria—it was the capital of the kingdom of Israel. And when they came to Samaria, Elisha said, ‘Jehovah, open the eyes of these men so that they may see.’ And Jehovah opened their eyes, and they looked and found themselves in the middle of Samaria—in the camp of the king of Israel.

When the king of Israel saw them, he said to Elisha, ‘Shall I kill them, my father?’ He answered him, ‘Do not kill them. Would you kill those whom you took captive with your sword and your bow? Set bread and water before them so that they may eat and drink and return to their lords.’ Then a great meal was prepared for them, and when they had eaten and drunk, he sent them away, and they returned to their lord. And armed bands from Syria never again came into the land of Israel.” May the Lord bless His Word.

Father, we entrust this message to You, Lord, and we ask You to fill us with Your wisdom so that we may present only what You want Your people to receive this morning, in the way You want it to be done.

We also remember, Lord, our sister Isabel, who is sick right now, Father, and we ask You to be with her and with her husband on their way to the hospital. Cover her; keep her safe. We declare Your strengthening power over her, Lord. Restore her completely, Father; may everything already be resolved by the time she reaches the hospital, for the glory of Your name. In the name of Jesus we declare it, Lord. Amen and amen.

THE KINGDOM OF GOD IS BALANCED

I want this message to serve as a kind of counterweight and balance to the message I preached last Sunday. Because I believe we need balanced attitudes. The Kingdom of God is balanced.

I said last Sunday that the writer of Ecclesiastes says there is a time for everything: a time to destroy and a time to create; a time to tear down a wall, he says, and a time to build walls; a time to be silent and a time to speak. He even says there is a time to kill, and a time to heal as well. Everything has its time, and what we need is God’s discernment to know what time it is in any situation in life.

There will be times for you to remain silent. When someone is talking nonsense or speaking badly to you, there will be a time for you to walk away and keep going, not answer the fool, and not feel that your courage is somehow being diminished because you chose the path of peace.

There will be other times to confront. There will be times—I believe war is necessary. I believe armies are necessary. I am not a pacifist. If I am running from a group of people who want to kill me in an alley and a well-armed police officer comes along and draws his revolver, I thank the Lord and say to him, ‘Amen, go right ahead, sir.’ Yes or no?

I wish many people who are pacifists would find themselves in a situation like that, so you could see how they suddenly forget all the principles of pacifism. It is very easy to talk about pacifism when others are paying with blood for your peace and for your freedom to be a pacifist, in fact.

But I also believe that Christ is the Prince of Peace. And I believe that, as the Word of the Lord says, we must overcome evil with good. And God has given us weapons of light to overcome evil. Violence usually only brings more and more violence. Look at the state of the Middle East. Even the Arabs themselves, within their own midst, cannot stand one another; they keep killing one another in a terribly violent way.

That is why love alone will be the solution to marital problems, to problems between parents and children, to all things. We know that. We understand that.

There is a balance. There is a balance that must be maintained.

CONFRONTING

Last Sunday I spoke about the need to confront. You remember this prophet who refused to strike the other prophet who asked him to strike him so that he could put on a bandage and appear before King Ahab and confront him. That second prophet refused to do it, even though it was by the word of God, and in his disobedience God struck him, because there are times when we will have to wound a loved one in order to heal him.

Do you know that? Sometimes you will have to speak a strong word to a son or a brother who, for example, is abusing drugs and asks for money, and you give him money and he goes on destroying himself. And sometimes you will have to let a disobedient child reach the end of his rope, as the wise father did with the prodigal son, so that he may learn. Because if you are always stepping in, helping him, and getting him out of his troubles, he will never learn. Sometimes love has to be tough, you know?

And one has to face things; one even has to wound. And there are moments when one has to wound. I believe we are in a culture where sometimes people have to be wounded so that they may come to know the Word of God. We cannot always be soothing them with lukewarm compresses. They will never learn. Sometimes one has to wound before healing. One has to confront before healing.

But we have to be careful about the attitudes within our hearts. I believe that if a Christian wounds, he should do it clinically; he should do it on principle and not out of carnality. He should not do it vindictively; he should not do it simply to get even or to release the anger he has inside. Rather, he should wound as a physician wounds, taking the scalpel and cutting open in order to heal, or amputating a leg because he knows that clinically and medically, that is what the patient needs, because if he does not do it, he is not doing the patient any good.

So the Christian confronts. The Christian speaks the truth, sometimes even with pain, and does so with a spirit of mercy and always desiring reconciliation.

SEEKING PEACE

You know what? The believer’s first choice is to seek peace. The Apostle Paul says that, insofar as it is possible, we should try to live at peace with all men.

Notice that he tells us to do everything possible, which means there are some people with whom we will not be able to live at peace, even if we do everything possible. So at that point, I leave it to your judgment. What is the next step to take? But insofar as it is possible, the believer’s first choice is to seek peace. We are people of peace and love.

I say that because the conclusion of this passage is different from last Sunday’s conclusion. That is why I am seeking balance, right?

Last Sunday the Lord confronted King Ahab and told him, ‘Because you let the man under My ban escape, now you are going to lose your kingdom, and you are even going to lose your life. Your life shall be for his life, and your kingdom for his kingdom.’ Because Ahab refused to carry out the order to destroy that man, who had become accursed before God because he had directly confronted God.

So Ahab falsely extended grace to that man whom God had told him, ‘You must wipe him from the face of the earth.’ Let us make sure, as I said, that we obey.

Now look at this case here—how interesting. Because in this case we see the opposite. In this case, through divine intervention, Elisha captures the Syrian army, or this band, this Syrian group that entered Israel to capture him. And we are going to talk a little; in a moment we are going to go back. But now that Elisha has these people captured, brought right into Israel itself and surrounded by the Israelite army, and the king wants to kill them, what does the Lord direct Elisha to do in this case? To show mercy and spare these men’s lives.

And perhaps—why? Perhaps because they were simply soldiers under orders from their superiors. We do not know the specific reason, but at that moment the Holy Spirit placed Elisha in a very deep, very great mode of mercy and grace, because he not only spared their lives but also gave them a great banquet, a great meal, and then, after they had eaten, sent them away in peace. And the Word says that after that gesture, armed bands never again returned to Israel.

You know, grace and mercy very often have tremendous power, more powerful than violence itself, than confrontation itself. So I believe, brothers and sisters, that we have to ask the Lord to give us wisdom in life about how to balance one thing with the other. Because that is what I see in the Gospel, and that is what gets me into trouble so often with so many people I know as time goes by. Because what I try to do is maintain the balance found in the Word of the Lord.

I believe that sometimes the Word of the Lord speaks and calls for confrontation, and sometimes it calls for mercy and peace. And so we have to speak about both things. We have to ask the Lord for a balanced spiritual personality in life, and we also have to ask the Lord, as a church, as a congregation, to be a balanced church. And we have to ask the Lord to raise up a balanced universal Church, with a capital ‘C,’ that knows how to blend God’s truth with the Lord’s grace, God’s justice with God’s mercy.

Because that is how God is. God is love, and He is also a consuming fire. God confronts, but He also nurtures and loves. God is man and woman at the same time, so to speak; He is neither of the two. But a woman loves, a woman attunes herself to pain, a woman feels what the other person is feeling and tends to be more merciful and more forgiving. A man is more legalistic, more judicial, let us say, in the way he sees things, because God made him that way and gave him different wiring.

In His personality, God blends both things: He blends justice and love; He blends clarity and also the embrace. Both things are there.... and we should imitate God in that same attitude.

When we confront evil in society, in the world—as in this time when there is so much wickedness and so much evil teaching, and so much corruption coming out of the highest levels of society and culture—what should the church’s conduct be? Are we always going to stand there with a baseball bat in hand, pointing the finger, criticizing, passing judgment, accusing, calling down fire, throwing stones from behind our fences, shut away inside our own yard and doing nothing but throwing stones at unbelievers? Or are we also going to exemplify in our lives the goodness, love, grace, and prosperity of God, and thereby convince others that it is worthwhile to obey and walk in the ways of the Lord?

The church has to walk a balanced path. I ask the Lord, “Father, help us, as a community and as individuals and families, to be so blessed, so prosperous, so full of life, so exuberant in our joy, in our hope, our happiness, our laughter, and the quality of our relationships, that people look through the window with envy, saying, ‘Wow, if only I had what those evangelicals have,’ and that they would come to the Lord simply because of the quality of our life, because of the joy and blessing that we have.”

Now, when they come in looking for that, we have to tell them, “Look, you see us looking so nice and everything, but we have paid a price, you know? We have had to obey the Lord; we have had to clean up our lives; we have had to put our house in order; we have had to refrain from doing many things we would like to do and do other things we did not want to do. So if you want the same thing, you have to follow... Look, here is the recipe: it is called the Bible, the Word of God.” Do not do what God says not to do, and do what God says to do. And you will have the same peace and the same joy that we have.

Do you see? Many Christians want people to come to our church, but do you know what? People will always come to church with conditions. They will tell you, “We will stay in your church if you do this and that, or if you do not tell us this and that.” How is the church going to behave in that case? We cannot do that, because what kind of doctor has a sick person come to his office and only tells the sick person what he wants to hear, without giving him the right medicine? A bad doctor.

So we have to ask the Lord for that balance between the two things. I see here that Elisha, in this case, showed mercy to the enemy. Last Sunday I spoke about the confrontation that sometimes has to take place; sometimes we have to take an upright, clear stand and say, “You shall not pass this way.” You have to do what the Word of the Lord says, and people must be told the truth.

But we have to know that the Lord is also a God who will often use the weapons of love and grace to bring others to the knowledge of God, and that if you stand there beating people down before they even enter the house of the Lord, they will never come in.

We must love the fallen. We must love the person who is caught up in drugs, the person who is caught up in homosexuality, the person who is caught up in vice. We must love them, and when they enter the church, we must thank God that they are there and make sure that we offer them, as Elisha did, the finest banquet.

If you have to give up your seat so that person can sit there, do it, and God will bless you. If you have to drive him back home in your car, do it, because it is an investment in the Kingdom of God. If you have to sit down and talk with him, reason with him, and try to persuade him with the arguments of the Word of the Lord, do it, because the Word likewise says that we must be gentle so that we may bring unbelievers to the knowledge of the Lord.

That is to say, we have to be very compassionate and full of grace toward fallen people because their minds are distorted. The Word says that if—how does it go?—if the gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing, it says, because the enemy has veiled their understanding so that the truth of Jesus Christ will not shine upon them.

There are many people out there who want God and, in a sense, love God, but they are confused. The devil has blinded their understanding and filled their minds with diabolical arguments that they have received in universities, from the culture, and through the media, and their minds are distorted. And so they need someone to speak to them about the principles of the Word of the Lord, with a mixture of clarity and grace.

How wonderful it is when grace and clarity come together! Then you speak the truth of God without an agenda, without a sense of superiority, as though I were better than you. None of that. When you speak the truth, communicate the truth with a sense of humility and brokenness, knowing that you are the first one who needs the grace of God, that you are walking in the ways of the Lord because of God’s mercy, and that if you enter the Kingdom of God, it is because God is incredibly merciful, and that you must extend the same grace and the same mercy to someone else.

We have to know with what kind of heart we speak the truth and with what kind of heart we confront. There is a very mysterious and almost even amusing passage in the Gospel according to Saint Luke, where the Lord had an encounter with the disciples.

Let me see. The Gospel according to... I will find it in just a moment; do not worry. And if not, I will not spend too much time on it. Yes... in the Gospel according to Saint Luke, chapter 9, verse 52, let us say—52.

Luke 9:52 says: “...the Lord prepared to go to Jerusalem and sent messengers ahead of him, who went and entered a village of the Samaritans.” Remember that the Samaritans and the Jews hated each other. The Jews wanted nothing to do with the Samaritans because, in their view, they were impure people who did not deserve the grace of God. They had a mixed religion—just imagine. They were people who taught heretical doctrine, and the Jews said, “Those people do not deserve the mercy of the Lord.” And the Samaritans likewise hated the Hebrews. Just as today many people hate Christians, and there are many Christians who even hate the people out there; but we must never fall into hatred toward unbelievers. Instead, we must love them with the love of Christ.

Then it says that “...they entered a village of the Samaritans to make preparations for the Lord so that... I imagine, he could stay and lodge there that night on his way to Jerusalem. But they did not receive him....”

Notice, the Samaritans snubbed the Lord. They did not receive him. They told him, “That man is not coming in here; let him find a hotel somewhere else. There is a Holiday Inn over there in the next town, so let him go there.” They despised the Lord. They did not receive him because his appearance indicated that he was going to Jerusalem.... In other words, they saw that he was Jewish. “We do not want you here.” They paid him back in kind.

“...When his disciples James and John saw this, they said, ‘Lord’”—I imagine that as they said this, they were rubbing their hands together—“‘Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven, as Elijah did, and consume them?’”

That knowledge of the Bible came in very handy there, did it not? What does that refer to? For those who do not know, the Bible says in the Old Testament that once some soldiers came looking for Elijah because the king had sent them to take him prisoner. Fifty soldiers came, and the captain of the soldiers came and said very imperiously to Elijah, “We have come to arrest you because the king commands you to appear before him.” And Elijah said, “Well then, if that is how it is, may fire fall upon you and consume you.” And fire fell, and the fifty soldiers were scorched. Then another fifty soldiers came, now angry because of what had happened, and they tried to arrest Elijah. Once again Elijah said, “Then may fire fall from heaven and consume all of you.” And once again it consumed them.

There you have that aspect of judgment and confrontation and fire and brimstone that God has. God has that mode as well and can do that.

Finally, another captain came, and he was much wiser. Having already seen what had happened to the others, he came and knelt very respectfully before God’s prophet, and he said, “Sir, would you be willing to appear before the king?” Elijah said, “Well, that is fine; in that case, I will go.” How good a gentle word is at the right moment!

That is why I tell you, as the saying goes, it is better for them to say, “He ran from here,” than, “He died here.” The writer of Ecclesiastes says it is better to be a living dog than a dead lion. This soldier understood, and so Elijah went. That story had stuck in the minds of these disciples of Jesus Christ, so when their Lord was snubbed, the biblical scholar in them came out and said, “Lord, do you want us to make fire fall upon them as Elijah did?” And instead of telling them, “Yes, boys, go ahead. Let us scorch them all. Let us wipe out everyone here,” the Lord—

Look at what he said: “...Then he turned and rebuked them, rebuking them and saying, ‘You do not know what spirit you are of, because the Son of Man did not come to destroy men’s souls but’”—to do what?—“‘to save them.’” And they simply left; they went to another village.

You see, what happened here? The Lord discerned that what was in the hearts of these disciples at that moment was carnality, a desire for revenge, and a devaluing of the lives of those Samaritans whom they despised. It was pure carnality, pure ethnic hostility, pure Pharisaism, a complete lack of understanding that failed to recognize that these Samaritans were simply wounded and felt despised. They had not been understood by those Hebrews, who should have known better because they had the Word of God at their disposal, and they were reacting out of their woundedness, out of their pain.

So the Lord wanted to give them an opportunity and said, “All right, I will go somewhere else.” And that is why he said, “No, do not you dare.” Why? Because the Lord Jesus Christ had given the disciples power and authority, but not so they could use that authority in a carnal way. You see, God has given us prophetic authority, brothers and sisters, and I believe that in the last days God will give the church more and more prophetic authority to shut and to open, to tear down and to build up, as he told Jeremiah.

But that is why the church must first be filled with the Spirit of Jesus Christ and know the Word of God very well, because it is very dangerous to place the power of God in the hands of an immature and carnal person, because then.... That is why God does not give many people his power and his grace: because we cannot handle it the way God wants us to.

The day there is a mature church with the proper, balanced character of Jesus, then I believe the Lord will give the church more power and more authority, because then the church will know how to handle the power of God in a balanced and precise way. An appropriate intervention.

Imagine an ophthalmologist who performs eye surgery: you go to the clinic, and suddenly he pulls out an electric saw and switches it on to operate on your eye. You are going to flee; you will leave the gown, leave everything behind, and run out of that office. Right? Because it is not the right instrument. Now, if he comes with a little pair of tweezers or something simple, you say, “Well, we can work better that way.”

And it is the same with the Christian: there will be times when he will need a Freddy Krueger-style saw, and sometimes—I have not seen the movie, just in case; I have only heard about him. Someone told me about it.—But sometimes he will need a very simple laser beam, a little piece of cotton just to touch the eye so that he can heal the person.

There must be balance in life, brothers and sisters. You have to know when the Lord wants you to speak clearly, firmly, and uprightly, and to confront; and you have to know when the Lord wants you to use, as it says, the subtlety of the dove or the subtlety of the serpent, because there are also times when we must imitate the serpent in its shrewdness to bring people to the knowledge of God.

The Apostle Paul said that with the Greek he became as though he were Greek, with the slave he became as though he were a slave, and with the free person as though he were free, although he was also a slave of Jesus Christ. In this way I can bring everyone to the knowledge of God. But that same Apostle Paul also sometimes spoke in such tremendously blunt and confrontational ways that one is scandalized. If he were not the Apostle Paul, one would say, “This man needs to be saved and come to know Jesus Christ.” Because at that moment he was in God’s mode of confrontation and truth.

Balance, brothers and sisters. God’s balance is required in life for a person to be a completely just man or woman, precise in their interventions, because otherwise....

Imagine this with children in the home. A father says, “I have the right because I am the father; I bring the food into the house, so they have to do exactly what I say.” And they are always there struggling with the children, and the devil gets into the home, and there is never any peace. Sometimes we parents have to lower our guard, be quiet for a while, wait, and commit our cause to the Lord until he works in that child’s heart. Because if we begin to struggle, the child will become more rebellious, harder; the devil will get deeper into his heart; we will shut down communication; there will be no peace in the home; and everything will continually be either a cold war or a hot war, one of the two.

If, in a marriage, neither of the two keeps quiet and each one keeps insisting, “My rights, my rights; you did this to me, and you’re going to pay for it.” And all the time, one and then the other—the man saying, “You have to respect me,” and the woman saying, “You abuse me,” and so on—there will never be peace. At some point, the man will have to give in; at other times, the woman will have to give in. At some point, you will have to wait until he has eaten before telling him things, because when he has not eaten, he turns into a monster, so wait for the right moment, ma’am. Be wise in your understanding. And you, sir, let her buy those shoes and pray to the Lord that the economy improves. And then tell her that you want to buy a sports car and that you already put down the deposit a couple of weeks ago.

We have to... brothers and sisters, we have to know when to be one way or the other in life. We have to have balance, knowing when to confront and when to remain silent and wait for God’s timing. That does not diminish you in any way. On the contrary, brothers and sisters, that is the spirit of Jesus Christ.

God has been doing that with humanity throughout all of history. God could have destroyed humanity thousands and thousands of years ago, but He has not done so. He is waiting, the Bible says, to see whether the greatest possible number will repent.

The Lord could turn all of us into robots who do exactly what He wants, but He knows that if He does that, He distorts the image of God in us, so He has to try to draw us in little by little. How does God work in our lives to bring us into the image of Christ? By enclosing us with His hand, little by little, just as when a herd of cattle is being driven: the cowboys ride their horses to different places, guiding it little by little until it enters the corral.

And that is what we have to do. We have to have a pastoral heart. The mature Christian has to be pastoral, asking the Lord to give us a pastoral heart so that we can discern the condition of the person with whom we are dealing, or of the culture with which we are dealing, in order to maintain balance.

Some say that the shepherd—the psalmist David says, “Your rod and Your staff will comfort me.” The shepherd had two instruments in his armor, in his repertoire of resources for leading the sheep: he had the rod and he had the staff. And I do not know which of the two, but I think the rod was simply for when a sheep became a little rebellious: it would get a good whack so that it would learn, right? Or I think it was used mainly to defend against lions and bears; the rod was an instrument of aggression and defense against wild beasts.

And sometimes, in your pastoral role or in our pastoral roles, we are going to have to confront people; we are going to have to tell them the truth, because if the truth is not spoken to them, there will be no healing. In marriages, in homes, in society, in the church—and pastors sometimes have to be firm, brothers and sisters. The Lord was the firmest person I know and the person of greatest conviction. So the rod is necessary in life.

A father sometimes needs the rod. Sometimes children have to be corrected. Forgive me, social workers, if there are any here, but sometimes authority has to be exercised, and children, I believe, need to have a holy fear of their parents. I do not believe young people respect a father who does everything—“wah, wah, wah,” as we say—who does everything the child wants. Sometimes you have to discipline the children and tell them, “No, you sit there,” and if the child gets up, you sit the child down again, and if the child gets up once more, you sit the child down again until the child learns who the boss is.

But it says that the shepherd also had the staff. The staff was a rod shaped exactly like a cane, with a wider, longer head, and that staff allowed the shepherd to pull out a little sheep when it was stuck in a crevice or in a chasm. It was long and he could protect the sheep, pull it out, take it into his arms, and carry it where it needed to go. That is the protective part, the loving part of the shepherd.

And I believe that we need the rod and the staff in our lives. We have to walk with both and ask the Lord, “Lord, give me wisdom to know when to use one and when to use the other,” knowing that both are instruments of power, but of different kinds of power. And the word of the Lord tells us that many, many times.

Look at what the Lord Jesus Christ says in Luke, chapter 6—a marvelous passage, one of the most exalted passages in all of Scripture. This is the passage that even Hindus, Buddhists—everyone—recognize as the symbol of the exalted nature of the Gospel, of Christianity.

Luke 6:27. It says, “...But I say to you who hear: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you...” How hard that is, brothers and sisters! I myself, who preach it, need to apply it to myself and learn how to do it, I will tell you the truth. But I know one thing: I cannot get around it. I can admit that I have not fully attained it, but I know that I cannot change it. That is the goal to which the word of God calls me. As long as I live, I have to acknowledge its legitimacy and ask the Lord, “Give me grace to attain it, and forgive me because I am not attaining it.” But I am not going to change the calling. Jesus’ sublime calling is to love our enemies and do good to those who hate us.

It says, “...Bless those who curse you, and pray for those who slander you. To the one who strikes you on one cheek, offer the other also...”

How difficult that is! Whew. I would like to speed past that at a hundred miles an hour.

“...And from the one who takes away your cloak, do not withhold your tunic either. Give to everyone who asks you, and from the one who takes what is yours, do not demand it back. And just as you want people to do to you, do the same to them as well.”

When you are in error, confused, and stubbornly clinging to something that is wrong, wouldn’t you like someone to come along who was patient with you and enlightened you with patience, love, mercy, and tolerance, and sat down with you and taught you the truth? Wouldn’t you like that? And to have that person patiently guide you toward the truth. I believe that is what I would want them to do with me.

So the Lord says: as you want others to do to you, do the same to them as well. We have to take time and be patient with those who are confused by the devil, those who are stubbornly committed to evil. We have to ask the Lord, “Father, put plenty of polish on my skin so that insults and other things slide right off me, and so that I can love my enemies and be patient with them even as I speak Your truth to them and resist them in what they want to do to destroy themselves and destroy others.”

“...For if you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. But love your enemies—verse 35—and do good, and lend, expecting nothing from them; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, because He is kind to the ungrateful and evil. Therefore be merciful, just as your Father also is merciful.”

That is the word of the Lord for us, brothers and sisters. That is the attitude for which we have to ask the Lord: “Father, help me attain that; help me live that. In my flesh it is not possible; in my character it is not possible. But it is what You ask of me, and it is what, with Your help, I will do until my final breath, until the final moment of my life. I will try to attain that goal of overcoming evil with good.”

So, brothers and sisters, that is the balance. I ask the musicians to come up here. Now... I want to leave you with that. There is a lot more that could be said. I had other texts that I wanted to share with you, but I believe this is what the Lord wants. Simply that balance—let us leave it there. There is no need to belabor it any further this morning. A call to balance is the Holy Spirit’s call to our lives.

Father, help me to be like Jesus. Help me to be like Jesus—that is all. That sums up this whole sermon, this discourse, this... Help me to be like Jesus.

The Lord confronted people; He was clear and precise in His judgments, as when He told His own disciples, “You do not know what spirit you belong to. Right now you are under the devil’s dominion for wanting to do that.” That is what He told them.

But at the very same time, He was showing mercy; at that very moment, He was showing mercy toward the Samaritans. Notice that this is the balance I see in Jesus.

He told the adulterous woman, “Go and sin no more. Neither do I condemn you.” He did not condemn her, but He also told her not to sin anymore. What you are doing is wrong; therefore, stop doing it. Yet at the same moment, He was showing her mercy and forgiving her, perhaps because He understood that this woman was a victim of circumstances, or of abuse by men, or of a deforming past, or whatever it may have been.

As for the Samaritan woman, she had had five husbands, and the other man she now had was not even her husband either—an adulteress, a promiscuous woman. And the Lord sat down with her, spoke to her, ministered to her, and made her the first evangelist of her people.

How merciful the Lord is, isn’t He? We have to have the same balanced attitude in life. I ask the Lord, “Father, help me to be a man of mercy and truth. That is all. Help me to be like Christ. We want to be a church like Christ. We want to have marriages that exemplify the supremely high character of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Let us ask the Lord to put His Spirit in us. Let us stand for a moment.

Let us ask the Lord to make Lion of Judah a church of mercy and love, and to help us communicate to the world that balance of Jesus through our lives. He knows how He will do it. We cannot do it, but He definitely knows how He can do it.

Father, we ask for that balanced Spirit of Jesus Christ—a balanced spirit, Lord, a spirit that manifests Your grace and Your mercy, as well as Your truth and Your justice, Lord. We want to be like Jesus. Teach us Your way, Lord. Pour out Your grace upon this people.

Father, we declare that spirit of peace over the homes of our church, Lord, and of this community. Lord, we declare toward the unbelievers and the needy this morning the attitude of mercy, love, patience, and forgiveness that You have shown toward us, Father.

Come, Lord Jesus. Thank You for Your word, which confronts us, Lord. Thank You for Your word, which calls us, O God, to a balanced attitude like that of our Lord Jesus Christ.

We worship You, Lord. We bless You this morning, Father. Thank You, Jesus. Thank You, Lord.