Loving Our Enemies Facts for 3-8 Year Olds

Categories: Sermon on the Mount

• After being filled up by the beatitudes, the disciples are given “commands.”
• Jesus tells us: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.”
• How are we going to love our enemies, or people who aren’t so nice to us?
• As we pray, we allow God’s love to fill us up until we are able to feel God’s love for them.
• We don’t have to love mean, evil, unkind deeds, must love the doer, the person.
• We are to do this so that we may “become children of our Father in heaven.”
• Now we are already God’s children. Now, we just need to act like God’s children and love.
• God is so great and loving that He “causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” God sends rain upon everyone, no matter what they do.
• As His children, we are commanded to do the same: we are to love everyone.
• Last, but not least, Jesus tells us: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
• As we live the beatitudes and keep the commands, we will be perfect.
• “Perfect” doesn’t mean faultless or superhuman.
• In its simplest form, “perfect” means “nothing that is needed has been left out.”
• God is perfect, complete, mature, having unconditional love for everyone.
• The promise for us is to become like that, to love unconditionally, to become mature. It is a commitment to the protection of others.
• The New English Bible translates this as “goodness, just as the heavenly Father is all good.”
• When Luke writes this statement in his gospel, he says, “Be merciful as your Father is merciful.”
• So in this context, perfect is a big word that means we are to be merciful and good.
• The Sermon takes us back to the beatitudes to get filled up by God so we can love everybody, even those who aren’t kind to us.