Love is the greatest emotion we have. True love is not selfish; it is self sacrificing. We just celebrated Valentine’s Day which is a day where we pay extra attention to the loves in our life. Spending time with those we love is easy to do, but spending time and energy on those we don’t know or who are hostile towards us is a lot harder.
There is a difference in loving our enemies and loving what they do. We should love the 9-11 terrorists because they are God’s children, but we don’t have to love all the evil they committed. We can love those who were responsible for Covid-19 spreading in the world without loving the actions that resulted in where we are today. We can even love a man like Hitler and still feel sorry for how he decided to live his life.
Thankfully, God loves those who persecute Him. We would all be in trouble if He discarded those who turned away from Him or attacked Him in one way or another. We are all guilty of sin and the only reason we have a chance to get into Heaven is through God’s forgiveness and love for us.
Loving our enemies and those who aren’t close to us, requires a change in our thought process. We need to be able to look upon everyone as a child of God. When we use others and treat them like objects, we are stripping them of their God given identity and dignity. There are some people who are very hard to love and respect because of their actions they take. Other people seem to invite us to take advantage of them. We need to be the bigger person and treat everyone with respect despite whether or not they want it. Jesus sums it up by saying, “…love one another as I have loved you.”
