Day 59 – Love your enemies
Study: Luke 6:27-36
“But I say to you who hear: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you,” Luke 6:23
This is a shockingly simple command to understand, yet one of the most difficult to obey. Jesus didn’t leave room for guesswork. He told us exactly what it looks like to love our enemies in practice: do good, bless them, and pray for those who spitefully use you.
Jesus never pretended that life in a fallen world would be free of opposition; He fully recognized that we will have enemies. The beauty of God’s Kingdom plan is that it addresses our real-world struggles head-on. Though enemies will come, we are called to respond in love—trusting that God will defend us and ultimately defeat our enemies in the best way possible: by transforming them into our brothers and sisters in Christ.
The love Jesus demands here is not a warm, fuzzy feeling deep in the heart. If we wait around for a feeling, we may never love them at all. Kingdom love is active—it is a choice to do good, entirely apart from how we might feel. Blessing those who curse us means making a conscious choice to speak well of those who speak ill of us.
As William Barclay so wisely noted, “We cannot love our enemies as we love our nearest and dearest. To do so would be unnatural, impossible, and even wrong. But we can see to it that, no matter what a man does to us, even if he insults, ill-treats, and injures us, we will seek nothing but his highest good.”
Pray with me: Lord Jesus, give me the supernatural strength to love those who hurt or oppose me. Guard my tongue from speaking ill of others and fill my heart with Your grace so I can seek their highest good and reflect Your love today. Amen. ©
Love, Iriza
