Love Your Enemies

We all possess the desire for love..whether that of a friend or a romantic love

We all long to be loved and get along with everyone we coming into contact with.

Mother Theresa said, “The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.”

Loving those we are friends with is easy, but the hard part is loving those that are not nice to us.

Even Jesus understood that He was not asking us an easy task in Matthew 5. “Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, 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.”

Often when we have been hurt or ridiculed all we want to do is wish the worse on them

Are your prayers for others selfish or unselfish?

instead of praying for the best for them.

I’ve discovered that when I pray selfishly, “God help them like me, help us get along, get them out of my life” then things often grow worse between us.

But, when I pray unselfishly, “God bless {insert name}, you know their needs Lord, help them Lord” then I see a remarkable change not in our relationship {although sometimes} but in how we approach one another.

Sometimes the relationship has been restored and sometimes it hasn’t. Sometimes the person has been taken out of my life, and sometimes s/he hasn’t.

What if we lifted our enemies up in prayer?

Jesus went on to say that we will have times of trouble and times of harvest regardless of our faith. “That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.” {Matthew 5:45}

When Luke recorded this passage, he recorded a different part of what Jesus said. “But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil.”  {Luke 6}

A little bit of kindness can go a long ways

God will reward us for loving our enemies and treating them with kindness. We can seek God and extra ways in which we show kindness and love to a person. Every person and situation is different and we have to lean on the discernment God places in our heart.

In some situations, God may say prayer is enough. In other situations, He may whisper to our heart to take another step and offer a hand of kindness, take a loaf of bread or any other number of steps. It’s listening to that little voice of God and discerning what He would have us do next.

Remember, we never know what is going on in the life of a person to make them exhibit

How different would the world be if we all showed love to one another?

the behaviors we see. But, God does and we can pray for them because He sees the whole picture and things we cannot see or know.

“I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.” Is a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. He saw violence and hate to a magnitude that many of us can never understand. However, he chose to show His Kind of Love and stick with love and not hate.

How do you love your enemies?

Pictures courtesy of Pixabay

This song sums up exactly what Jesus was saying: