Nobody argues their way into believing God loves them. They watch for it. They watch how you handle the one who keys your car, the co-worker who takes credit for your work, and the relative who votes different and won’t let you forget it at Thanksgiving. That’s the audience Scripture has in mind when it tells us to love our enemies – not some hypothetical crowd out there, but the actual unbelieving people standing right in front of us, most of them not looking for a sermon.
This isn’t a suggestion reserved for the spiritually advanced. It’s the ordinary Christian life. And it’s harder than it sounds.
Love Is the Only Apologetic Some People Will Ever Read
The clearest evidence of God’s love that most unbelievers will ever encounter isn’t a sermon or a debate – it’s a Christian who treats them well when they have no reason to expect it. People can dismiss an argument. They can’t as easily dismiss being forgiven by someone they wronged, or being served by someone they insulted. That kind of love doesn’t fit their categories. It makes them ask questions they weren’t planning to ask.
Jesus said as much to His disciples: “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35). He wasn’t only talking about love inside the church. The love that convinces a watching world starts there, but it doesn’t stay there – it spills out toward the people who least deserve it, because that’s exactly how God’s love reached us.
Scripture Never Treats This as Optional
Jesus doesn’t leave loving your enemies as extra credit for the especially devout – He commands it outright, and He ties it directly to what it means to belong to God.
But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. [Matthew 5:44-45]
This is not a strategy for winning people over, though it often does. The Bible grounds it in family resemblance – this is what it looks like to belong to a Father who is generous toward people who never thank Him for it. Paul takes the same instruction and gets specific about what it looks like in daily conflict.
Repay no one evil for evil, but give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all. If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord." To the contrary, "if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head." Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. [Romans 12:17-21]
Read that slowly and you’ll notice Paul isn’t asking us to pretend the wrong didn’t happen. He’s telling us to let God handle the settling of accounts and to spend our own energy on something better – feeding, giving, refusing to let someone else’s evil decide how we’re going to act.
What This Looks Like on an Ordinary Tuesday
Most of us aren’t going to face a firing squad for our lack of faith this week. We’re going to face something much smaller: the passive-aggressive email, the friend who mocks what we believe at a dinner party, the driver who cuts us off and then flips us off for good measure. Loving our enemies mostly happens in small, unglamorous moments like these, not in dramatic ones.
It looks like answering the coworker’s dig with an actual answer instead of a matching one. It looks like still showing up for the neighbor who badmouths you to the rest of the street. None of that feels heroic in the moment. It rarely does. But it’s the exact texture of love Jesus described, and it’s the kind that is noticed precisely because it’s so out of step with how everyone else operates.
I’ve had to stop and ask myself, more than once, whether I actually wanted the person who wronged me to see God’s love or whether I just wanted to be right. Those aren’t the same goal, and only one of them is the one Scripture assigns us.
Where This Kind of Love Actually Comes From
You can’t manufacture this love on willpower alone, and Scripture doesn’t ask you to try. It traces the love back to its source before it ever asks you to hand it out to someone else.
We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, "I love God," and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother. [1 John 4:19-21]
That’s the order that matters. God loved us while we were still His enemies. He didn’t wait for us to clean up first. So when we’re asked to love people who oppose us, we’re being asked to express a love we already have access to. We’re being asked to pass along a love that was already spent on us at a much higher cost than a rude remark or an unfair grudge.
You Don’t Have to Feel It to Start Doing It
Obedience here doesn’t wait for warm feelings to show up first – it starts with the choice to act, and the feelings often follow later, if they show up at all. You can pray for someone you can’t stand yet. You can hold your tongue before you’ve forgiven them in your heart. You can do the kind thing while your gut is still clenched. That’s not hypocrisy. That’s just what obedience looks like before it’s finished its work on you.
Here’s where people get tangled up: they think loving an enemy means feeling affection for them. It doesn’t. It means willing their good, refusing to repay their evil with more evil, and trusting God with the outcome. Do that consistently, over years, in the small moments nobody’s grading you on, and you’ll find you’ve become the only Bible some people around you were ever going to read – and what they read in you was God’s love, spelled out in ordinary ways.
Salvation – Eternal Life in Less Than 150 Words
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