Loving your enemies is no easy task.
It calls for setting aside your emotions.
It calls for bowing before the Lord Most High and doing what He asks of you.
To obey His word,
even though you have many accusations that you know are valid.
Some people are so annoying, and they do things intentionally,
and they can make our lives so miserable.
The struggle is real.
It’s no easy task to not let your love grow cold,
to lay our cause before the Lord and to encourage Him to punish them,
and to give them their stripes.
To be glad when we see them suffer.
The struggle continues.
The only One who has the ability to love in spite of the circumstances
and show compassion and forgiveness is God.
That kind of love does not come naturally to our flesh.
That means, laying our righteousness, our petitions of the evil done to us,
and forgetting about the offenses, and even more, He wants us to love them.
They are not loveable. These people are not even likeable.
We never even wanted to be around them.
Sometimes we avoid them, but somehow, they still end up in our faces.
They are a most atrocious type of being.
Forgiving their faults.
Their faults are easy to find.
We don’t even have to try.
They are there, blaring, giving us grief.
When we just want to go along and mind our own business,
trying to do our best and then these wretched souls have to mess with us.
They are putrid.
To offer warm kindness?
That is impossible.
But it has to happen. It has to be.
We have been unlikeable, unlovable before.
Jesus loved us in our iniquity.
He looked past our frailties and weaknesses, even our sin and was good to us.
So we ought to be to others.
There is no excuse not to.
No matter how many excuses we try to give, excuses hold no water.
They will not stand.
God commands us to love our enemies, no matter what they do.
I fear the enemies will get worse as we grow closer to the End of Time.
The enemies will get meaner and more difficult to forgive.
Let’s practice now, exercise our senses to be humble before the Lord
and allow Him to pour His love into us that we may extend His compassion, because it surely is not our own.
Let Him reign in each situation and put flesh in its place.
While they are not worthy, Jesus is worthy and it is for Him we do what He asks.
If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar:
for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen,
how can he love God whom he hath not seen? 1 John 4:20
Scriptural References:
And He said, The things which are impossible with men are possible with God.
Luke 18:27
And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold.
Matthew 24:12
Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth,
and let not thine heart be glad when he stumbleth:
Lest the Lord see it, and it displease him, and He turn away His wrath from him.
Proverbs 24:17-18
But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you,
do good to them that hate you,
and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;
Matthew 5:44
For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye?
do not even the publicans the same?
Matthew 5:46
And He said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee:
for My strength is made perfect in weakness.
Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities,
that the power of Christ may rest upon me.
Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities,
in persecutions, in distresses for Christ’s sake:
for when I am weak, then am I strong.
2 Corinthians 12:9-10