Read the transcript from today's video devotional.
I've got a question for you. Does your love have limits? I'll be the first one to answer that, and the answer is yes. If I'm not careful, my love will often have limits. What I mean by that is it's really easy for me to love the people that I like. It's easy for me to love the people that love me. I love my wife and I know she loves me. She's the one person that I always want to go home to at the end of the day. The one person I'm always excited to spend time with. I love my kids. They're so much fun. They care about me. They think about me, and I want to care about and think about them too. All of my friends, they're such wonderful people. How could I not love them?
But when I notice my love has limits are the times that I'm not intentionally looking at all of the people around me and how God might be calling me to love them. This is what the Bible would call loving our enemies. That's honestly a hard concept for me to accept sometimes. The people who love me are the ones that deserve my love. The people who are mean to me—do they really deserve my love? Let's dig into what Jesus has to say in the Sermon on the Mount about loving our enemies.
Our Verse of the Day comes from Matthew chapter 5, verse 44. Jesus says, "'But I say, love your enemies! Pray for those who persecute you!'"
Loving the Hardest People
I have been really convicted, especially over the last couple of years, to consider how I'm loving people—not just the people closest to me, but the people that are the hardest to love. Because this is a really good indicator of if we're maturing in our love and in our relationship with God. If you're struggling to love your enemies, I want to pose to you a question that I often ask myself that helps me in this. It's simply this: When did God start loving you? Was it while you were His friend, or was it while you were His enemy?
The Apostle Paul says in Romans chapter 5, verse 10 that Christ died for our sins when we were the enemies of God. That honestly really hits my heart hard. To think that I wasn't just a stranger to God, but in the ways that I lived for myself, and the ways that I ignored Him, and the ways that I hurt people for my own gain—all these things made me an enemy of God, and yet He chose to love me in the most extreme way possible by giving up His only Son so that I could have a relationship with Him.
God's Love in Action
God cares so deeply for us. When we read this call to go and love our enemies, it should remind us that God's not calling us to do something that He hasn't already done Himself. He's not calling you to go do something to someone else that He hasn't already done to you. He loved you when you were His enemy, and so you loving your enemies is actually you going to love people that God already loves—that God really wants to find a saving faith in Him, that God really wants to draw near and soften their hearts, that God really wants to be set on a path of holiness and righteousness.
This is the power of loving our enemies. I can look back and think of all the people that I hurt because instead of loving my enemies, I put up walls of self-defense. Instead of loving my enemies, I turned a cold shoulder on them. Instead of loving my enemies, I would put up a facade and then just be a jerk to them behind their backs. But that's not what God is calling us to do. He calls us to pray for these people. He calls us to extend kindness and compassion—not because He doesn't want to do the work, but because He wants to do that work through you.
Enemies as Opportunities
He wants to build bridges for people to find their way back to His tender and loving heart. This is a wonderful opportunity that God has given to every single one of us. So, I want to encourage you as you go out to love your enemies—make this one little mind shift. Stop calling them your enemies and start looking at them as people who are an opportunity, a powerful opportunity to see the Kingdom grow.
Now, these people might still consider you their enemy, but remember that our enemy isn't flesh and blood. We have a spiritual enemy. He wants to deceive us and convince us that the real battle we face is with people. God says, no, that's not the battle. The battle's already been won on the cross. Now His gift of salvation is extended to all. All people who are enemies of God can be drawn near. Go and love your enemies as opportunities to see hearts won to Jesus Christ.