Mar 9 I Don't Want To!

Mar 9

I Don’t Want To

Mt 5:44 But I say unto you, Love your enemies

Here in Matthew chapter five we have the words that Jesus taught during the Sermon on the Mount. The chapter starts with those wonderful verses of the Beatitudes. Blessed are the meek, blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are the merciful, etc. This portion of scripture is wonderful to read. Try to picture Christ teaching on the mountain as the multitude gathers to hear Him speak these wonderful words.  The promises we hear are comforting and reassuring.  But then we come to verse 44!

          Love your enemies?  Why? How? They don’t deserve any love. The only kind of love I want to show them is what I would love to do to them. Maybe we can just skip this verse?  Maybe it was translated badly. Did Christ really mean we should love the people we would prefer to hate?

          Let’s look at the whole verse to see exactly what it is saying.

Mt 5:44 But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;  

If you are using an NIV, Jehovah Witness Bible, New American Standard, or a Living Bible you will find the verse reads as follows.

Mt 5:44  But I say to you, Love your enemies and

 pray for those who persecute you,

I am using the King James and did not want to confuse you if you are using a translation based on a different Greek text than the King James was. In Studies in the Sermon on the Mount Martin Loyd-Jones mentions the difference in translations on pg 299 and wrote “I think it is best to take the teaching in the Authorized Version.” (King James)

      The reason Christ mentions loving your enemies was to combat the teaching of the Pharisees. They taught that all Jews were your neighbor and all non-Jews were your enemy. Non-Jews were gentile “dogs”. It was your right and your duty to hate them.  Now why would the Pharisees teach such a thing? There is no place in the Old Testament that says love your neighbor and hate your enemies. That teaching is simply not in the Old Testament. That was why in verse 43 Christ reminded his listeners that “it has been said”.

Mt 5:43 ¶ "You have heard that it was said,

'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.'

 When we were first married it irritated my wife and I that the back row or two of pews were filled with teen age kids who passed notes, giggled, and in general did not pay any attention to the service. That feeling of irritation grew to hot displeasure as week after week they continued with the same immature behavior.  My wife and I had no use for those awful kids. We grew to feel anger, and strong dislike for them.

          One Sunday we had a visiting missionary who worked in a very difficult field. He explained how he had grown to love the very people most would have been repulsed by. He closed the service with a haunting question “Who are the unlovely to you?”  My wife and I could easily agree that the unloveliest  people were those kids in the back rows. The Holy Spirit worked in our hearts and long story short we reluctantly became the youth leaders in our church. We learned to love those kids and it became 4 fantastic wonderful years until a new job required us to leave the area. Now nearly 50 years later we still hear from them and enjoy great memories together.

         I have not explained how you can love your enemies. Perhaps another time. But I can tell you from personal experience that it is possible to love those you find to be “unlovely”.   The Bible asks if you only love people who love you, how are you any different from anyone else. That is what happens all over, people love one another.  But Christians can love people who do not love them.

       The devotional thought for you to meditate on is “Who are the unlovely to you?”  And what will you do to change that?     

   Mt 5:46 For if ye love them which love you, what

reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same?