Love Your Enemies

But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven.

Matthew 5:44-45 (NKJV)

Before you can love an enemy, you have to know what an enemy actually is. An enemy is not someone you hate, because as followers of Jesus we are never allowed to hate. Hate is murder in seed form; a hater is already, in his heart, a murderer.

An enemy is simply someone who has not responded rightly to your love. Not someone you dislike. Not someone you hate. Someone who, when you reach out in love, throws it back or ignores it. That is all. And Jesus says, love them.

What love even means

To love is to make a decision not to judge, to lift a person above your rules and expectations and say to them, I will value you, I will care for you, I will treasure you. It is to give someone a judgment-free place, a place where it is okay for them not to be okay while they work on becoming okay.

The greatest gift you can give a person is a place where they can be naked and not ashamed, free to be who they really are without fear. Our Father has called us to build that kind of place for people. It is there, and only there, that anyone becomes truly intimate with us and grows into their fullest potential. But how do you build that place for someone who abuses it? Let me give you three kinds of enemy, and what love does with each.

When someone sets out to hurt you

The first kind is the person who simply hates you and means to harm you, using whatever power they have, professional, financial, political, even spiritual, to do you damage.

Do two things. First, pray for them the way Jesus prayed from the cross.

Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.

Luke 23:34 (NKJV)

Ask that God would not hold it against them, that they would come to see they have been forgiven in Christ. Pray for their forgiveness as earnestly as if you were the one who had sinned. Second, look for every opportunity to do good to them. When you hear they are unwell, send a word. On their birthday, send a greeting. Show them the same grace God showed you while you were still His enemy.

Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

Romans 12:21 (NKJV)

Do it without expecting anything back. This is your response to their behavior, not a transaction. The one thing you must never do is repay them in kind, hating because they hate, withholding a greeting because they withheld one.

When someone abuses your love

The second kind is the person who takes your love and begins to misbehave, abusing it, despising it, presuming on it. Jesus puts this person in a striking category: one of the most important in the kingdom, a vulnerable brother or sister you are about to lose.

So out of love, not irritation, you confront them. Not to fix them, not to change them, but to put it in their hands to name the problem, own it, and commit to resolving it. Because until a problem has an owner, it can never be solved. Confront your brother, Jesus says, and if he hears you, you have gained him.

Give it to them plainly and kindly, as a choice. I could stay close and comfortable with you while you lose your job, or you could take this seriously and I keep right on loving you. It is yours to decide. And if they still will not own it, then quietly move them into the first category. Keep agonizing in prayer for them, keep looking for ways to do good, and keep the offer open, without demanding a response.

When someone just cannot get along with you

The third is the hardest, because there is no villain. It is the person who, no matter what you do, just does not get along with you. A peer, a colleague, a fellow leader, sometimes a spouse. You do not hate them; they simply rub you the wrong way, and you them. It is the passive resistance, the lack of connection you cannot quite explain.

There were two women like this in Philippi, Euodia and Syntyche. These were not minor figures; they were Spirit-filled women Paul called his fellow laborers, women without whom that church might never have been planted. And they could not get along.

Paul's solution is not to decide who is right. It is for each of them to take on the mind of the Lord toward the other. If only one does it, you get compromise. But if both adopt the mind of Christ, you arrive at something beautiful, a unity you otherwise only find in the Trinity itself.

Let nothing be done through selfish ambition or conceit, but in lowliness of mind let each esteem others better than himself... Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus.

Philippians 2:3-5 (NKJV)

Put the other person ahead of yourself. That is the mind that set aside the privileges of deity, took the form of a servant, and went all the way to a cross. When two people carry that mind toward each other, the friction becomes fellowship.

Why bother loving an enemy?

Because hate only makes more hate. Returning hate for hate simply multiplies it, and here Jesus' teaching found some of its clearest modern voice in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who preached a sermon called “Loving Your Enemies.” His words are worth hearing exactly as he said them.

Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “Loving Your Enemies”

That is why Jesus says love your enemies: so that you can have dominion, take authority, and terminate the endless cycle of wickedness. Love is the only thing that breaks the chain.

There is a second reason. Hate is contrary to your nature. It distorts and it injures, injuring the one hated, but injuring the hater more. Hate will make you call good evil and evil good, call the beautiful ugly and the ugly beautiful. It blinds you. It even begins to touch your body, the stress, the weight it puts on you, all for what? You were not built to carry it. Trying to fake love only hurts you further, so be who you are. Like sin, hate does not so much send you to hell as bring hell into your life now.

And finally, love is simply the only way evil is ever actually defeated. God defeated evil through love. You do not fight evil with evil; you overwhelm it with good. When God told us to have dominion over the earth, He was telling us to love, for His kind of dominion is not what we imagine. When John turned to see the Lion of Judah who had prevailed, what he saw was a Lamb who had been slain. It is the kindness of God, not His severity, that leads people to change.

King told the story of Abraham Lincoln and Edwin Stanton to make exactly this point. Stanton had used every ounce of his energy to degrade Lincoln in public, mocking his name, ridiculing his appearance, humiliating him at every turn. When Lincoln became president and needed a Secretary of War, he chose Stanton, saying he had looked all across the country and this was the best man for the job. Had Lincoln returned hate for hate, both men would have gone to their graves as bitter enemies. Instead, love turned an enemy into a friend. Asked once how he could speak so kindly of people who despised him, Lincoln answered, do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?

When people respond wrongly

So learn how to respond when people respond wrongly to your love. If they hate you, love them anyway; pray for them, and look for good to do. If they take advantage of you, confront them in love, to win them back. And if they simply cannot get along with you, put them ahead of yourself and carry the mind of Christ toward them.

You will not do any of this by gritting your teeth. You will do it the way you first received it, because this is exactly how God loved you while you were still His enemy. Let that same love work in you, and for you, and through you. In Jesus' name.