"Love your neighbor as yourself." Hate the sin love the sinner. We hate the errors we commit, but we continue to love ourselves. We do terrible things we commit egregious errors. But isn’t this splitting hairs? How can one distinguish between the sin and the sinner? Yet we make this same distinction every day with ourselves. He expects us to hate the sin but to love the sinner. I’d like to give him God." To love your enemy is to give him God.īut does God expect us to love the sin and the evil people do? Of course not. The reply he received was truly inspired, "He’s already got the devil. "Give him the devil!" said someone to a friend who had suffered an injustice at the hands of a third party. Love is the only thing that can destroy his hostility. Love is what he craves more than anything else. So if, instead of hatred, you give him love, you will disarm him. He is hostile because he expects vilification and hatred from you. Specifically, they told us that a hostile person hates because he fears you will strike him so, to protect himself, he strikes first. So we thought, until psychology and psychiatry came along and taught us a few things about hostility and hostile people. To love your enemy is to let him step all over you. To love your enemy - some object - is to allow him to take advantage of you. Chesterton said once, "Love means to love that which is unlovable, or it is no virtue at all." Impractical?īut to love our enemies in a world like ours seems highly impractical. He sends His rain on the just and the unjust. Where there is love for one’s enemy, there also is God." That is the great test of whether we are in tune with God for that is what God Himself does. A great Russian Saint asked, "How do we know whether a person abides in God and is sincere in his Christian faith? There is no other way of ascertaining this than by examining the person’s life to see if he loves his enemies. The acid test of love is not whether we love our friends, but whether we love our enemies.
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