Maybe the most difficult commandment from God is for us to love our enemies and those who do not love us in return. It takes real courage to love those who love. The Golden Rule requires Christian courage. We all need love. None of can survive without love. When we can figure this out, then we can have mercy on others.
Transcript:
My brothers and sisters, the Lord has given us a very difficult commandment today, a commandment of love. A commandment that the entire world knows as the golden rule, as you would have others do to you, so you do to them. And as soon as Christ said these words, He immediately challenged us to love. He says, “But if you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them.” And He went on if you do good, if you lend, He says, “But you love your enemies, do good and lend hoping for nothing in return and your reward will be great in heaven.”
This has got to be, in my estimation, the single most difficult commandment from God. It is so easy to love those who love us. It is so easy to exchange favors from our friends, but it takes real courage to love those who hate us. It takes Christian courage to treat others as Christ would treat them. The gospel goes on. He says that Christ loves even the disobedient, even the unthankful as He is kind to the unthankful and to the evil. And then He says, “Therefore, be merciful just as your father also is merciful.” God loves us even when we don’t love Him.
God loves us even when we disobey Him and disrespect Him and even when we turn our backs on Him. This is the challenge of Christian Love. This my brothers and sisters, is why the entire world calls it the golden rule. Because if we can accomplish this one thing, we will have accomplished everything. So the question is, how do we love those who hate us? It begins with recognizing that all of us need love. Not a single one of us can go through life alone and being estranged and being cast off. Not a single one of us can survive without love. And as soon as we can recognize that about ourselves, then maybe we can have mercy on other people.
I want to do an experiment, but you don’t have to raise your hands, I promise. If we think for a moment that God knows everything that is going on in our lives, all of our pain, all of our struggles, all of our anxieties, we can accept that right? God knows everything we’re struggling with. We know maybe 95% of what we’re struggling with. God even knows more about us than we know. Can we accept that for a moment? And now think about this. If you look at other people in the world, not including your closest friends and family, the average person on the street or the person across the aisle in the church. If God knows 100% about what we’re struggling with and we know 95% of what we’re struggling with, how much do you think they know about your struggle in life? How much of your pain and your suffering and your struggling and your anxiety, do the total strangers know? 1%, 2%, maybe less?
Now you ready for this? If you want to love them, remember you know that little about them too. You don’t know what others are struggling with. We don’t know their anxiety. We don’t know their pain, we don’t know their suffering, and yet God loves us in our pain and in our suffering and in our anxiety, then we can be merciful. Because it says however you want them to do to you. So do we want others to hold against us? Something they don’t even know we’re struggling with? Of course not. So why do we do it to others?
Why do we presume the worst in all people? There’s a great Greek expression.Καλή Λογισμοί. I learned it many years ago. best translates to good reasonings. We, my brothers and sisters must learn to have good reasonings about other people. We have to learn to give people the benefit of the doubt. as we say, because we don’t know their struggle. This is what it means to love and to be merciful as God loves and as He’s merciful.
It’s not easy. And I will tell you by my own admission, I fall flat on my face all the time. But guess what? God lifts me up and he gives me another chance. It doesn’t matter how many times we fall, God always gives us another chance. We are the ones that don’t give a third, a fourth or a fifth chance. This is why this particular commandment from God I believe is the most difficult. And if we can figure this one out, if we can figure out how to have the courage to love, then truly we will be the disciples of Christ. Truly they will know Him through us as He has called us to do. Glory to God.
