“Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you. Bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you...For if you love them which love you, what thank have ye? For sinners also love those that love them...Be merciful as your Father also is merciful.” Luke 6:27-28, 32, 36 (KJV)

Whew! That’s a tough one. Sometimes I have trouble loving the people who do love me, let alone those who don’t! How about you? So why does Jesus instruct us to love our enemies and those who have hurt us? One reason is because they need the love. People who hurt others have been hurt themselves. They are not well-loved. They need to experience God’s love and the compassion of others. Without it they will never change. They will continue to hurt more people just as they have hurt us. They will remain in bondage to hate and bitterness and strife. And we will remain there with them.

Love brings healing, for them and for us, but when we have trouble loving others, it’s not just an area we need to work on and strive to be better at, it’s a red-flag that we have not taken God’s mercy fully into our own hearts. I like the words that Jesus speaks here in the King James Version because there is an interesting word in the middle of His dialogue. “If you love them which love you, what thank have ye?“

The word ‘thank’ means ‘grace’. To love others that love us is nice, a natural thing, but it doesn’t reveal the grace of God in our lives. But to love those who don’t love us, that can only come from one source: hearts that fully recognize and accept God’s love. Full hearts. Thankful hearts. Forgiven hearts that live continually in His grace toward us first, and then can pass that forgiveness on to others.

Grace is not just something to receive, it is something that when received changes us. Later in His message Jesus says this: “The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart...out of the overflow of his heart his mouth speaks.” We can’t just determine we are going to love someone and do it. We can’t just decide we’re going to do good to others who have hurt us. Only when we fully take in God’s love for ourselves and ‘store it up’ will we have anything to ‘spill over’ onto others.

What grace have ye? God’s full measure of forgiveness and healing and goodness filling up your soul? Have you fully accepted His love for you? Jesus says that the way we love others will reveal the state of our own hearts. And hearts that live as His dearly loved children is what He wants for us more than anything.

‘And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge--that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.’ Ephesians 3:17-19