Bible Text: Matthew 5:43-45 | Speaker: Dr. Harold J. Sala | Series: Guidelines For Living | You have heard that it was said, “Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. Matthew 5:43-45

Your enemies tell far more about you than do your friends. How so? Your enemies reveal what you really stand for, while your friends reveal who wants to be on your side, which may be politically motivated. Enemies are for keeps; friends are often for the moment. A person cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies, but you can be sure that when you really stand for something, your adversaries will be quick to surface.

And how should you deal with enemies? “Never keep faith with the enemy,” is the popular wisdom that has endured since the Garden of Eden. Yet Jesus broke with accepted practices, saying things that seemed difficult if not impossible to do. Jesus said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matthew 5:43-45). And Paul, in the same spirit, wrote, “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head” (Romans 12:20).

In a world that practices “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” more than doing good and loving your enemies, is it possible to do what Christ said we should do? Only if you are secure in knowing that you are God’s child and that He is the one to whom you are accountable.

Deitrich Bonhoeffer died, a prisoner of the Gestapo, in World War 2. In the spring of 1943 he was arrested because he had helped a group of Jews escape to Switzerland. Then on April 9, 1945, he was hanged by the Nazi regime for his participation in the small Protestant resistance movement.

Bonhoeffer had every right to hate his captors, yet in his book written in prison, A Testament to Freedom, he wrote, “Christ made peace with all our enemies, too, on the cross. Let us bear witness to this peace to all.” This meant he could hate the evil which put him in prison and took the lives of thousands of innocent people without hating those who perpetrated these evil deeds.

During times of war and national disasters it becomes quite respectable or even fashionable to wave the flag and be patriots, and while there is nothing wrong with this, it becomes very easy to mask your hatred in the guise of patriotism. As Bonhoeffer asserted, Jesus Christ died for the sins of the enemy as well as your sins.

The reality is that every enemy is a mother’s son or daughter, that he or she has emotions, feelings, aspirations, and hopes for the future, just as do you. Flannery O’Connor was right when he said, “It is hard to make your adversaries real people unless you recognize yourself in them–in which case, if you don’t watch out, they cease to be adversaries.” (Christianity Today, January 7, 2002, p. 62).

Others may consider you to be their enemy, but unless you hate them, they cannot be your enemy, and they cannot stop you from praying for them, from pitying them, and from thinking of them as estranged members of the family. The enemy is not only someone who stands between you and God, whom you must circumvent. At times it is our enemies who bring us to our knees in repentance and humility, knowing that with sin resident in our lives, we have no right to throw the first stone.

Remember, it is in the cross of Christ, where we kneel, that we lose our identities as enemies and become reconciled as brothers, forgiven and reunited.

Resource reading: 2 Corinthians 5