Learning to Love when it's Hard To
Here’s a little poem written by an anonymous church member…
Last Sunday the sermon was sluggish,
‘Twas hard my attention to keep.
The topic was poorly chosen;
The pastor put me to sleep.
Monday I was blue with sheer boredom.
Tuesday I was carnal by choice.
But Wednesday, my conscience was wakened
By the sound of the Lord’s still small voice.
Prayer meeting left me uplifted,
Devotion lingering long.
Thursday my heart was responding;
Friday, God’s calling was strong.
I came to total repentance
The following Saturday.
I yielded in full surrender
As my all on the altar I lay.
That Sunday, the sermon was perfect;
Superb and quite at its peak.
Amazing how greatly the pastor
Improved in the space of a week!
It takes as much of the Spirit’s ministry to listen to a sermon as it does to preach one!
I’d like to tell you a true story about a Pennsylvania pastor named Peter. He lived about 200 years ago not far from here, in Ephrata, just the other side of Reading. His name was Peter Miller.
Pastor Miller was a fine pastor. Everyone in the community loved and respected him. Everybody, that is, except one man. That man, for some unknown reason, absolutely hated Pastor Miller, and all that he stood for. He took every opportunity to heap insults and abuse on the Pastor Miller and his church.
The Revolutionary War had just ended and it was discovered that that unpleasant man was not only a hater of the church. Evidently, he had been spying for the British and passing information to them. He was arrested, convicted of treason, and sentenced to death.
The trial was conducted in Philadelphia. No sooner did Pastor Miller receive word of it than he set out on foot to visit General Washington to intercede for the man’s life. Pastor Miller arrived in Philadelphia a couple of days later, having walked the sixty miles from Ephrata. When he asked General Washington to spare the man’s life, the General told him “I’m sorry, but I simply cannot grant your request for your friend.”
“Friend!” Miller cried. “This man is not my friend! Sir, he’s the worst enemy I have in the world.”
Washington was amazed. “You have walked sixty miles to see me in order to spare the life of your enemy? That, in my judgment, puts the matter in a different light. I will grant him a pardon for your sake.” The General then sat down at his desk, and signed a decree of pardon and gave it to Pastor Miller.
The Pastor then practically ran the fifteen miles to a place outside Philadelphia where the man was being held. The man’s execution had been scheduled to take place that afternoon, and Pastor Miller wasn’t sure he’d make it in time.
He arrived just as the man was being led to the scaffold. When the man saw Pastor Miller hurrying toward him, he remarked sarcastically, “Look! Here comes old Peter Miller. He has run all the way from Ephrata to gratify his revenge by seeing me hung today.”
But scarcely had he said these words when Pastor Miller pushed his way to the front of the crowd and handed the officer in charge the pardon from General Washington that saved the man’s life.
Peter Miller was a living example of the kind of love we want to talk about today. He was a man who loved not only his friends, but his enemies too. He was a shining example of what it means to be a true follower of Christ.
If you had to single out one thing which identifies a follower of Christ as different from everyone else in the world, it would have to be this. A true Christian is someone who loves his enemy.
The amount of love you have for the people in your life who are hard to love is a reliable barometer of how close you are walking with God.
Jesus dealt with this issue in the Sermon on the Mount. In fact, this is the sixth time he draws a contrast between the false righteousness taught by the Pharisees, and the true righteousness of the child of God. Let’s look at those verses again…
Matthew 5:43 “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 sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
In this passage, Jesus tells us three things about loving your enemy:
1. Loving your enemy proclaims that your righteousness is of God
2. Loving your enemy proves that you are related to God
3. Loving your enemy produces rewards from God
1. Loving your enemy proclaims that your righteousness is of God
Jesus begins by saying, “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ Now it does say in the OT—in Lev.19:18—that we should love our neighbor. But nowhere doe the OT say “Hate your enemy”. So where did the people get that idea?
Well, like everything else, it came from the popular teaching of the rabbis and the Pharisees. They didn’t come out and boldly say “Hate your enemy” to be sure, but they certainly implied that that’s what you could do!
You see, they spent a lot of time trying to figure out an answer to the question “Who is your neighbor?” They tried to define neighbor so precisely that they left the impression that if someone didn’t quite fit their definition of neighbor, then you weren’t obligated to love him!
This is precisely the issue in Luke 10…
Luke 10:25-29 On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
“What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?”
He answered: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”
“You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”
But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
Here was a man who was an expert in the Jewish law, and he’s trying to split hairs over the question “who is my neighbor.” You see where his focus is? He’s trying to see how he can get out of loving certain people. He’s trying to see how many people he can put into a category called “non-neighbor”—and those are the people he doesn’t have to love!
Unfortunately, the Jews in Jesus’ day had put a lot of people into that category. Of course the Romans were considered “non-neighbors”. So the Jews didn’t have to love them. In fact, any Gentile was considered to be a “non-neighbor”. The Jews were so concerned about their own religious purity that they didn’t want to have anything to do with the Gentiles, let alone love them.
The Pharisees would cross the street to avoid even the shadow of a Gentile, or a tax collector, or a sinner from falling on them. That was how they practiced their righteousness. But Jesus comes along and says “Far from hating, or avoiding, or even simply ignoring those people whom you don’t like (and who don’t like you) - I want you to love them.
That is the requirement of true righteousness. There’s nobody that you can place in the category of people you don’t have to love. Not even the people who do you wrong. You cannot be right in the sight of God if you’re not loving those people. Why not? Because…
2. Loving your enemy proves that you are related to God
Jesus says in verse 44— Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven.
My son Pete plays basketball and I try to make it to every game, along with all the other parents. There are about a dozen boys on the team, and I don’t know all their names yet. And I certainly don’t know all of their parents.
But it’s fun to sit in the stands and try to figure out which boy belongs to which parent. Some of them are dead giveaways. They look so much like their parents, or their mannerisms are so much alike, that you don’t even have to be introduced and you can tell who belongs to whom.
That’s the way it’s supposed to work with a Christian. A Christian should look so much like his heavenly father that there’s no question who he belongs to. He’s a dead ringer—he’s a chip off the old block. And nowhere should this be more true than in this whole matter of loving your enemy.
What does God look like? Well, we don’t know what he looks like in a physical sense, of course. But we do know what He is like in terms of His character. We know that God is love.
How do we know that? Because he loved us. But why did he love us? Did he love us because we loved him? No. Did he love us because we were loveable? No. He loved us while we were yet sinners. He loved us while we were in rebellion against him, shaking our little fists in his face. He loved us while we were unlovable.
He sent His only Son here to die for us even though we were His enemies. Jesus laid down his life to turn his enemies into his friends. That’s the kind of love our Father has for us—a costly love, a self-sacrificing love.
And it’s when we exhibit that kind of love in our lives toward those who are against us that we prove that we’re related to him. Like Father, like son. Like Father, like daughter.
Jesus said “Anyone can love his friends. Don’t pat yourself on the back for doing that. Even the tax collectors can do that.” There’s nothing extraordinary about loving the people you already like.
Let’s not be overly impressed with ourselves when we come to church and have wonderful fellowship with our little circle of friends in the body of Christ. Let’s not congratulate ourselves on how spiritual that must make us. That kind of love isn’t so special.
But how would we react if, for example, a group of neighbor kids spray-painted obscene graffiti all over that nice white brick wall at the front of our church? Or stole the hubcaps off our cars while we were in a worship service? Or played loud rock music while we were trying to have our quiet time?
It’s what we do with our enemies—the people outside of Christ who get under our skin, and on our nerves, the people who irritate us, and bother us, and do things that hurt us—that’s what shows whether we really know God.
Jesus says in this passage that our treatment of others cannot be based on the way they treat us. That’s not love. That’s retribution. That’s playing tit for tat. And we learned how God feels about that last week.
From everything I’ve read, I believe that President Abraham Lincoln was a man who knew the Lord. There’s a story about something that happened to him just at the end of the Civil War, and just shortly before he was assassinated.
He met with a group of hot-headed Southerners who had come to Washington to protest the unfair treatment they were getting at the hands of their Northern conquerors. These rebels came to the White House with the intent of really giving the President a piece of their mind. But the President’s gentle and friendly manner soon disarmed them and they left with a new respect for the man.
The next day, a congressman from one of the northern states approached Mr. Lincoln and rebuked him for having been so cordial to the Southerners. He suggested that instead of befriending them, the President should have had them shot for being the ungrateful rebels they were. But President Lincoln just smiled and said “Sir, I am in the process of destroying my enemies by making them my friends?”
The love of God is the only thing that will turn an enemy into a friend. It may be that the only way He can reach such a person with the message of the Gospel is through you. But you have to make up your mind to obey Christ’s command.
In verse 44, Jesus said “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you”. He knew that love and prayer feed on each other. The more you pray for someone, the more you’ll want to love that person. And the more you love that person, the more you’ll want to pray for him.
To return evil for good is demonic. To return good for good is merely human. But to return good for evil—that is divine.
When we love our enemies, we’re proving that we belong to God. We’re proving that we have that spark of divine life - His life - living in us.
3. Loving your enemy produces rewards from God
There are four ways to respond to your enemy—to a person who wrongs you or does something bad to you:
1. Retaliate. Get even with your enemy.
We talked about this last week. When you retaliate against someone, all you succeed in doing is escalating the conflict. Then he wants to get you back for what you did to him. It’s a vicious circle. And it begins to occupy more and more of your waking thoughts. And your bitterness toward the other person becomes more and more deeply rooted in your life. So getting even is not the answer.
2. Suppress the conflict with your enemy
Try to pretend that it never happened. When you suppress a conflict, you are actually denying, on the intellectual level, that anything bad has happened. But your emotions are screaming in your ear that something bad did happen between you and that other person.
And unless you deal with your feelings toward that person, they’ll submerge and spread and come up in other areas of your life, in the form of depression, guilt, and even thoughts of suicide. So suppressing conflict it is not the answer.
3. Try to rise above your enemy.
This is when you reach down inside yourself and say “I’m not going to let anything that person does affect me. I’m going to get on with my life; I’m going to maintain a positive attitude. If that person wants to be that way, well that’s too bad. I just feel sorry for him.”
But do you see where this leads? It leads to pride. The strategy you’re following is to place yourself above that person who is irritating you. You’re dealing with your enemy by looking down on him. And pretty soon, that becomes a habit. You begin looking down on everyone. So that’s not the answer, either.
4. Love and forgive your Enemy. Pray for him. Do good to him.
There once was a young man who joined the Army. He made no effort to hide the fact that he was a Christian. Every night before he turned in, this young recruit would kneel beside his bunk and pray.
The other guys in his squad began to mock him and make fun of him, but he didn’t become discouraged.
One day, his squad had to go on a day-long training march with full packs through the rain. When they finally got back to their barracks at the end of the day, the men were totally exhausted. They were griping and cursing about the ordeal they had just gone through. Their mood was ugly.
As the Christian knelt beside his bunk in prayer, one of the soldiers heaved his boots at him. Those boots were muddy and filthy from the day’s march and they hit the Christian guy right in the head as he prayed.
He didn’t say anything about it, he just kept praying. But the next morning, the soldier who threw the boots woke up to find his boots beside his bed, cleaned and polished, ready for inspection. That man was so impressed, that he asked the Christian for forgiveness and soon became a believer himself.
Loving your enemy may not only make him into your friend, but God’s friend as well. What a reward it will be to find, when we get home to heaven, that there are people there because of our testimony and faithfulness to Christ in this matter of loving our enemies.
Out in California, there’s a tree called the Shasta fir. It grows up in the Sierra Nevada mountains, where they get lots of snow. For the first few years of its life, this little fir tree gets buried under twenty feet or more of snow pack every winter. The weight of the snow bends the young tree into weird and twisted shapes.
But as it keeps growing, there comes a time when it reaches a height that puts it above the snow pack. Then, free from the weight of the snow, it grows straight as an arrow toward the heavens. A mature Shasta fir tree at the base is twisted and warped, but up above it is straight as can be.
When we learn to love our enemies, it’s as though we’re throwing off a spiritual weight that twists and warps our lives. As long as we’re under that weight, we can never grow straight and tall for the Savior.
If you want God’s reward of blessing on your life, you need to love your enemy.
When Jesus went to the cross, they laid him down on the ground and pounded nails into his wrists and his feet. Then they pulled that cross up until it thudded into a hole in the ground, pulling all his bones out of joint. As he hung there in agony, they mocked him and laughed at him.
What did our Lord do in response to this treatment? Did he curse them? Did he call down angels from on high to wipe them all out? No, he prayed “Father forgive them, for they don’t know what they’re doing.” He loved his enemies, and he prayed for them.
May we do the same for those who do wrong to us.