Love Will Conquer All. How Or Why Should We Love Our Enemies?

“Please join me in my prayer.” Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of our hearts, be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength, and our redeemer. Amen. (Ps. 19:14).

Introduction.

You must admit, those were some very powerful bible readings this morning from the apostle John. … John the disciple who wrote with more value, more richness and more power than any other author of the bible … and it is therefore no coincidence that John is, or was, described as the “disciple that Jesus loved”, because John new the power of love, and more importantly, John knew how to use the power of love.

From our gospel reading this morning, Jesus said, “As the Father loved me, so have I loved you: continue in my love. … This is my commandment, that ye love one another, as I have loved you”. … This is a commandment and not a suggestion, which is fair enough … but when we add his words from the sermon on the mount, where he says, “Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you. Bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you”, … then it becomes a bit of a problem, and very difficult to understand … and so, we struggle to apply it in, or to, our daily lives.

Hippy movement in California in the 60s.

Now when I first heard these verses, (or these teachings), I was still at school, away back in the late 1960’s, and being told to “love other people”, all I could think of was … that hippy movement in California, with the flower people going around telling everyone they loved them, and its will be no surprise to you that my attitude at the time said, “I’m no daeing that … am fae Mybole, and we’re hard”, and do you know what, we were, and this teaching was totally lost on me for many years.

Man has a free will.

Ok, the flower power movement was a wishy-washy kind of love, but you can’t help thinking, that if many more people said they love each other a bit more, then the world would be a better place … but that is not going to happen, why … because most people of today have my same old attitude from years gone by; they see love as a weak and pathetic emotion, something that should be hidden, and only acknowledged quietly to one’s self, otherwise people will think they are soft, and will walk all over them, (let along apologise for something they have done wrong, but that’s another story).

God has given man a free will, and God cannot, or will not, interfere with man’s (or woman’s) free will. … I have even heard it said, that God can do anything, “NO HE CAN’T, DO ANYTHING”. … God cannot or will not, interfere with our own free will. He leaves that open to us, he leaves us to get on with things so to speak; he leaves us to make our own beds, from which we have to lie. … We are here in this earth to learn, to develop, and to grow, (preferrable in love). We have that option … we are not androids or automatons that can be easily programmed, we need to consciously choose love as an option … and this is quite difficult in our modern day, with our modern day problems and attitudes, where its so easy to say “I want this … and I want that … and how come he got that”, but that is free will … which is commonly exercised without regard to anyone else.

Nasty People

Now fortunately, I find most people to be mainly considerate, they have certain standards, but as we know, there are many who do not … and these people from time to time do annoy us, they get right under our skin so to speak, and worse, make us do things we would rather not do. … And you all know what I am talking about here … we may not show it … but sometimes we get so angry that we cannot contain our anger, we cannot settle, our inner peace is so disturbed …. that we make rash decisions, and we do things that we feel we must do …. In order to contain that rage within us … normally decisions that we later wished we hadn’t taken.

Jesus for example

Let us look at an extreme example of this, in our gospel reading this morning, Jesus is about to be led away, unjustly convicted and unlawfully condemned to die on a cross … and this was one of his last chances to talk with his disciples, and here he was, still teaching them, giving them advice and direction for their future after his death … and what is he telling them to do? … “To love one another”, in fact that is all he is talking about … love.