Responding to Enemies

flowerBut to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. ~Luke 6:27-28

What a challenging verse this is. It is so short yet packed full of direction from God. While reading this I felt like a failure. I hardly ever live up to the standards of this one little verse.

Four Truths from Luke 6:27-28

  1. We need to love our enemies.  It is so hard to love people that have wronged you. It is hard to put aside our worldly feelings to be God like. But God says we must love them.  The verse does not say love them if you want to, it plainly says “love your enemies.”  People have hurt me and it is hard to forgive them and love them, but I must. I am a work in progress concerning this aspect of the verse.
  2. We need to do good to those who hate us. I really am not aware of anyone that truly “hates” me. If you hate me please let me remain clueless of that fact. I cannot name one person that I would say I hate. I have several that I dislike and don’t like to be around but I would not call it hate.  God says we need to do good to those that we hate. I read this as saying, do good to those we dislike.” We must do good even if we know that nothing we do will ever be good enough for that person. We cannot control the response of others to us, but we can control our response toward others. Because at the end of time we will answer to God as to how we responded to those people who hated us or disliked us.
  3. We need to bless those who curse us.  I know that there are people who don’t like me and wish me ill will. Instead of wishing for bad things for them I pray that God will bless them and help them to become the person God wants them to be. It is so hard to pray blessings on someone that only hopes bad things will happen to you.
  4. We need to pray for those who mistreat us. I have one person in my life that mistreats me and does so every chance she gets. It is someone I work with. We just have a major personality conflict. I go out of my way to avoid her at all cost. However, when we do have to work together or be in the same room together I always try to ignore her or to be nice to her. Lately I have started to pray for her prior to our scheduled encounters. God says we should pray for those who mistreat us and that is exactly what I am going to do.  Praying for her helps me to remember to also pray for guidance and strength to respond to her in a loving Godly manner.

I am learning to respond to my “enemies” in a Godly way. They sure do not make it easy and sometimes I wonder if it is worth the effort. Then I remind myself doing what God has directed is always worth the effort.

 

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