Loving Those Who Hate You: The Mark of a True Christian

"But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you" -Matthew 5:44 NKJV

It sounds like an absurd claim to make, considering that non-Christians generally love people too, but godly love is what separates Christians from the rest of the world. The way that Christians are commanded to love is almost counterintuitive and illogical. Think about it. Let’s say as you’re minding your business and reading this, someone looks over your shoulder and sees that you’re reading a Christian blog and purposely throws water on your computer and cusses you out because he hates Christians. Every single bone in your body is going to tell you to hit him into next week, but Jesus says that you should actually bless and pray for that person.

Can you imagine, in that scenario, getting up and instead of retaliating, you pay for that person’s lunch and then pray for him? An onlooker would think there was something wrong with you! But that's how Jesus wants us to treat those who hate us, and to prove that He meant it, He set the perfect example. As He was hanging, nailed hands and feet to a cross, stripped, humiliated, beaten, and disfigured beyond recognition, Jesus Himself was praying for the very people who were doing that to Him! I don’t mean that He went to see a therapist, worked through the trauma of a crucifixion (and talk about trauma!), and healed physically and emotionally, and then went back to forgive them. No! He was actively being beaten and crucified when He prayed that God would not hold the sins of His enemies against them because they didn’t know what they were doing. It’s almost as if He allowed Himself to go through the worst possible pain to let us know that there’s nothing we cannot forgive and no enemy that we cannot love.

Matthew 5:44 says, “But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you,” and then it goes on to say, “so you can be sons of your Father in heaven.” God could choose only to be good to those who accept Him, but He doesn’t do that. He allows the sun to shine on all of us. We all get to breathe His air, even when some use that same breath to speak against Him.

In the same way, we are to love those who hate us, no matter how despicable we may think they are. It’s not about them. It’s about who we are as children of God. Godly love, especially loving those who curse and persecute us, is the mark of a true believer in Christ. Think about it: if we only loved those who love us and were kind only to those who are kind to us, in what way are we different from the rest of the world? Don’t they only love the people who love them? How will our light shine in the darkness if we act just like them?

Read Matthew 5:43-48