Love for Enemies
43 "You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' 44 But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. 46 If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? 47 And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? 48 Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
Matthew 7:12
Do Unto Others
12 So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.
In Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, He tells us to love our enemies...And if anyone understood the difficulty of this, it would be Jesus, because He is the One speaking about it...Maybe because we are much like our enemies, that He said this...We both sin, have a sinful nature, and we might be able to learn from what bothers us about those we do not like...Can we be sure of what we do not like about our enemy if we really do not know him or what defines him?....Are we defining him with something we heard about him or something they once said or maybe we do not like their politics or religion?...We can better see that our own faults are do not define us...
How can we love our enemies, each and everyone of them?...Who loves all their enemies and prays for them?...If we can love ourselves with all our faults and flaws, can we not try to love our enemies with there’s...Yet, we struggle with this, because we still have not even figured out how to love all the neighbors around us who are not our enemies...
Jesus wants us to do unto others (all others –including enemies) as what we would do to ourselves...This sums up many of the books of the Bible...When we love our enemies, that is one of the meanings of LOVE...The kind of LOVE God has...LOVE is more that an emotion, because we know that God is LOVE...God has a Complete LOVE, because He is Perfectly Complete...And God is more than just the emotion of LOVE...He is and has Complete Understanding...Jesus ends this teaching on loving one's enemies by saying be perfect as God is Perfect...And yet we (and Jesus) know that we as men are not perfect...
A question we might want to ask ourselves, if we believe in Jesus, is how would Jesus see the one or ones we have called and identified as our enemies?...What does He think of our enemies?...Does Jesus see them different from you and me in that respect?...If we can see the other person the Way Jesus sees him or her, maybe we can see them differently and not as enemies...Jesus LOVES everyone, and I am not sure He Personally calls or thinks of anyone as an enemy...