Love Your Enemies?

Luke 6:27 But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you, 

Nobody said that Christianity would be easy.  Nobody said that Christianity would be fun....and our passage today is proof positive of those sentiments.

Some may have an impression of Christians that we are different in the way that we think and react to common human stimuli. Christians have the same kind of human reactions as anyone else.  We feel pain, we tend to shy away from conflict, and enemies are a source of great discomfort and discouragement.  Does anyone really enjoy their enemies?  I think not.

The real difference with Christians than from most other people is our response to these kinds of stimuli.  While others may want to and try to hide from enemy confrontation, and others may even try to retaliate, Christians are instructed to respond much differently...LOVE!

Remember now that Love, in a spiritual sense, is quite a bit different than the way that the world thinks about it.  Love in the Bible, is less about warm and fuzzy emotions and more about intellect and action.  Notice these two verses.

James 4:4 Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God. 

John 3:16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. 

There are thought processes, choices, behaviors and lifestyles that we can choose as humans that can cause us to be enemies with God.  But even with that being true, he gave his only son as a sacrifice for all in the world to have the opportunity to be saved.  Why did he do that?  Because of his LOVE for us.  

Do we really think that God has a positively warm and fuzzy emotional feeling toward every human on earth regardless how defiled and degenerate that they are?  Certainly NOT!  However he still loves all of us.  In fact, he loves us so much that he made the ultimate sacrifice.

That is the pattern for us loving our enemies as well.  We are not instructed to have a positively warm and fuzzy emotional feeling towards our enemies.  But we are to love them.  That means instead of retaliating against them, we should seek to do good for them.  Unfortunately, we should not even shy away from them, but engage them in a positive and beneficial manner.

It won’t be easy.  It won’t be fun.  But it is behaving in a godly manner.  May we all strive to love our enemies as God loved us when we were enemies with him!