For the last year or so I have been somewhat narrow minded in my own faith. It’s been about my relationship with God. It’s been about me pursuing security, identity, and worthiness in my faith. I've been learning to live fearlessly and wholeheartedly trust in the Lord. I’m not saying these aren’t important values to pursue as a practicing Christian, but the truth is that Jesus simplifies our faith for us. He simply says we are to do three things: love God, love people, love difficult people. And to be honest I’m really really good at doing the first two of the list.
Loving God? Easy. How can I not when He is the one who created me, defines me, and loves me more than anyone else is ever capable of. Loving people? Loving my friends and family can be hard sometimes when you’ve been in the car with them for nine hours and now you’re stuck in traffic, but for the most part it’s not that hard to love them. They are the people that love and care about you, and in return it is easy to do the same.
It is even somewhat easy to love the polite strangers you encounter in your daily life. The friendly waitress serving you coffee isn’t hard to love as she serves you with joy. Even our classmates who we don’t really actually no but have never done anything to earn our dislike, they aren’t that hard to love. But then there's difficult people. And guess what? These people are HARD to love.
Who are the difficult people? It can range from everything to the kid who constantly kicks the back of your seat in class to the criminals behind bars, who we wonder if they even deserve our love. The root of the struggle in loving the difficult people in our world is that we justify to ourselves that they don’t deserve our love. We justify withholding our love from them because they haven’t “earned” it.
Guess what.
We didn’t earn Jesus’ love. The amount of “good” deeds we have done has no influence over how much God loves us. The tough pill to swallow is that Jesus loves you and me the same as he loves the murderer. It’s so easy to become self-righteous and list all the good things we’ve done that make us worthy of Jesus’ love over the man who committed a hate crime, but Jesus’ love can’t be earned with and strong good to bad deeds ratio. Luckily Jesus’ love doesn’t have to be earned! This is why we have grace, repentance, and forgiveness from our Father! He never expected us to be perfect and He knew we would fail. That’s why His love is unconditional- we can’t earn or lose it. We don’t have to earn Jesus’ love, so why should others have to earn ours?
Loving like Jesus looks a lot like unconditional love. It means humbling ourselves and realizing we can love even the “creeps” and “sinners” of society.
I want to make something crystal clear that loving like Jesus doesn’t mean we have to be naive to the fact that there are some really horrible people in the world. God gave us discernment to know where to place boundaries in our relationships with people. If it is physically or emotionally unsafe for you to be around someone, it’s ok to love from afar. I also know that we are humans and it is really hard to love the people that have deeply hurt us. Loving others, like forgiveness is not something we can give to everyone over night. For the really deep scars it takes prayer and submission to God and asking Him for His healing over the relationship. If our God can part the Red Sea, He can bring healing, love, and forgiveness, to any situation no matter how deeply painful. Also, loving others also does not equal giving your trust to them. Be smart about how you love others and know that we are all going to fail, but we must continuously work on loving the difficult people in our lives.
It is not easy to love the difficult people in this world. These people, whatever form they take in our lives, push our limits, test our patience, and hurt our hearts. Yet, Jesus calls us to love them. Jesus ran towards these people the world deemed unworthy. How can you show love to someone difficult today? You can love as simply as Jesus and remind them they are loved.
Loving difficult people may never be easy, but it is central to us growing closer to Christ. We will never be perfect at loving God, people, and especially difficult people, but God is with us as we try daily.
“And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.” - 1 Corinthians 13:13
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