"Love your enemies"- Jesus.

 

"You have heard it said , 'You shall love your nieghbor and hate your enemy, But, I say to you, love your enemies, do good to those who use you and to pray for those who persecute you so that you may be sons of Your Father who is in heaven...for if you love those who love you, what reward do you have?"

  About 80% of my time meeting with people as a pastor's wife and as a life coach in my church is striving together to come up with a healthy understanding of how to obey the command of Jesus in this passage of Matthew 5. They are coming to me mostly because they don't know what to do and when we read that scripture together there is always a visceral reaction.  I feel it with them as it feels wrong and weighty (nearly impossible). Especially if you have been the victim of egregious sin and evil at the hands of another. 

The conflict is obvious. If we love God, we are to obey His commands and there is no arguing with the command by Jesus here. 

But how do we love, forgive and pursue an evil person (evil not by our own definition of this word, but what the Word defines as evil) and fulfill the law of Christ without further allowing abuse and toxic behaviours in our own life? This is always the next question and it is a good one that makes room for deep and rich gospel orthodoxy and orthopraxy. 

This command is a challenge in our world for so many obvious reasons; each relationship has so many different complexities that it can be so hard to just apply this verse to every relationship in the same way and hope that it works.Truthfully, it can look different for people.  It takes time in the Word, processing with others, and most essential is listening to what the Spirt teaches how to obey scripture. To actively listen to Him and to drown out the teaching of the world that will swing like a pendulum between passive acceptance and becoming unloving and evil ourselves. 

In his book, "Bold Love"*,  Dan Allender lays out a definition for forgiveness, anchored in the gospel story as this: 

"Forgiveness is a continuing process of hungering for restoration and beauty, revoking revenge and offering good gifts". 

He goes on to explain that forgiveness is a non-negotiable for the believer, but that reconciliation cannot happen until there is repentance-done with clarity and with conviction.  Repentance (an admittance of sin) will manifest as:

1. A willingness to admit the sin done to you

2. A willingness to not violate healthy boundaries in the future

3. A negotiated agreement about what the relationship will look like going forward (both in heart and behaviour)

He explains that giving "good gifts" to our enemy is not defined as allowing the abuse or the sin to continue (this isn't love) and that abiding change can not occur if the problems in the relationship are superficially swept under the carpet as evil will never stop unless it's held accountable and faced with righteousness.  We see this from passages that help us see the Spirit's job to correct and to convict us (John 18:8).

 Evil doesn't believe it is evil as we are prone to believe that we are actually good (Ephesians 4:18). Our hearts are darkened and bent to believe ourselves as good and to justify our own sinful patterns and behaviors.  Good gifts are "wounds from a friend"(Proverbs 27:6) that come from a desire to restore and bring back beauty to the evil person's heart, to illuminate and give the good gift of sight where there is blindness (Psalm 19:12-13) and to offer a "competing passion"* that gives the evil person a taste of what the soul was mean to enjoy. While we know that change cannot occur without the work of the Spirit, we must recognize our role and the part we play in seeing change in their heart occur. The ultimate good gift we offer in forgiveness is the desire for the evil person to experience beauty through the gospel and the hope of heaven (ulimate beauty restored). We can love someone best by hating the evil in that that keeps them from this beauty and wanting them to experience it themselves while keeping in check my own motives. I can't want the relationship restored for my own benefit, my own vindication, convenience or pleasure (though there will be benefits)-our desire must be singularly what is for the good of the soul of the evil person; to be brought back to beauty.  

So, if Jesus said that we are to good to those who do evil to us-how do we do this?

 Good gifts can be loving confrontation (Ephesians 4:15), setting parameters or boundaries. and to hold the tension of warmth and strength when those boundaries are violated. When evil is caught in the act, a good gift is to confidently and calmly (even if you are shaking) restate the parameters or acceptable human response and then warn them on the consequences of the violation (our relationship will look like this...I will leave this room...I will no longer talk with you if you are unable to speak to me in a respectful way...I won't be able to see you or talk with you about this...). Relationships can not thrive and flourish without a clear consequence when evil is done. It is neither loving or safe to cover over evil. When there has been a violation, the most loving thing you can do is to speak it. Reconciliation can happen immediacy if there is a commitment to being mutually  open to deal with sin. Without that commitment, the same destructive patterns with repeat itself over and over and over again causing more destruction and more pain for all. 

We often avoid this approach to loving our enemy and would rather ghost them, seek revenge, slander or simply continue to allow the abuse to happen because we know there might be a bigger and wider evil done to us. This often manifests itself through gossip and misunderstandings. For some of us, the idea of being misrepresented or misunderstood is like cryptonite! We can't imagine our reputation being damaged so we manage the relationship to keep them happy or quiet. Another reason we often avoid loving and evil person this way is that we don't want to loose the relationship. The idea of being alone or lonely frightens us and we are so fearful of abandonment that we will put up with any of the evil abuse to keep from being alone.  Finally, a reason for avoidance of the pursuit of loving and evil person this was its that we are afraid of the doubt and the guilt that so naturally comes into our hearts. We feel evil ourselves and cruel and mean. This can often be driven further into our hearts from well-meaning family and friends who don't see the whole picture or know the depths of the evil. We feel guilty so we give in. 

The truth is that when we make the choice to give these good gifts to our enemy we will very likely face the natural consequence of being questioned by others and our own hearts. This is why we need the Word of God to inform us and not our feelings. 

I  encourage taking a long time before acting on anything and to have older, wiser godly counsel in your ear constantly. This kind of "good gift" to an evil person should never be done rashly or in a moment of anger or even after just a few interactions and it should  always be done  with the desire and the intent of having a fully beautiful restoration. We should also follow Jesus' command here to pray faithfully for this person that they would come back into our lives; much  like the prodigal son, and that we would always keep our hearts soft and open and desiring for our relationship to be restored. If this is hard for you, that is okay. It is a goal to reach for and a commant to obey that the Spirit will help us with if we are weak. He will pray too, which is just an added bonus.

When we get to this point in our conversation, many of the people I speak to will say to me that they are deeply afraid of what this evil person will do.  It's so much harder when it is a spouse, a parent, a child or a close friend. This just brings fear. It is here that we talk about the gospel, because it is SO good. Any evil that bounces back at us from giving the good gifts of boundaries or parameters will only gives us a greater opportunity to shine like lights in this dark world; to showcase what the gospel has done in us anchoring us. The gospel, when it takes root gives us our identity in Him. We get to prove that God has satisfied our need for approval from others and that He is enough. 

Most of the time when you love a person this way it's like shining a light in their eyes when they have already adjusted to the darkness. It is painful for them and when people are hurt they typically want to hurt you. This is where we are tempted to either cave or to seek vengeance. But, when we are inevitably treated cruelly, spoken of maliciousky to others, be misunderstood by our friends and family who perhaps don't agree with our approach we can choose to lean our full weight again God, our Rock and our Redeemer. We can remember the forgiveness that God has forgiven of us of all the atrocities of evil we have done to our Creator.  We can be living testimonies that God is enough, that sin ruins everything and that God is the restorer of all things beautiful through the sacrifice of His son. We can smile, we can weep and we can be reminded that we are not abandoned, we are kept. We are not forsaken, we are bought and we are not alone- He is always with us. We can be quiet and we can turn our hurt to Him. He will comfort and He will heal us. This is an opportunity to proclaim the gospel through our weakness and through the brokeness. He will one day make it all untrue and bring ultimate healing to every broken thing and every broken relationship. 

 God gives us as wayward, evil, prone- to- wander children the good gifts of his mercy and his justice.  He doesn't run away, he always pursues, He  always desires for us to return. He gives us the good gifts of removing the blinders so we can see our sin while telling us that we are loved and welcomed back when we turn from our evil ways and run in paths of righteousnesss. He gives us a clear path to repentance and reconcilation and he did all the work through his Son.  Jesus did that work of restoration, we do the work of repentance.

 Loving our enemies is the story and the song of the gospel-let's join the choir. 

25 Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another. 26 Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, 27 and give no opportunity to the devil. 28 Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need. 29 Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear. 30 And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. 31 Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. 32 Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you. Ephesians 4

*Allender, Dan. Bold Love. Wounded Heart Ministries.1992