One of the transitions that I have experienced moving to Arizona is that I get frustrated when going to a restaurant and asking for a sweet tea. It took me a couple weeks to realize that when I say sweet tea, the waiter/waitress understands that to mean tea with sweetener. I have to tell you sweet tea and tea with sweetener are NOT the same thing. Stirring in a couple of sugar packets into a glass of ice tea is not and never will be the same thing as sweet tea. I really feel sorry for all of those people who think they are drinking sweet tea, but have never experienced the true, fulfilling, and energizing taste of sweet tea. They don’t know what they are missing.
Read Matthew 19:16-22. Here is a story of a guy who longs to be loved and accepted by God, has worked hard at doing everything he is supposed to do, and still feels like he is missing something. He doesn’t settle for struggling through life, he seeks Jesus out and then builds up the courage to ask Jesus a great question, “what am I missing?” I think we can experience this same thing when we try to love our enemies. We can go through great steps of not talking bad about them, not holding a grudge, and being nice to them, but we still may feel like something is missing. Just trying harder will not get us to the point of loving our enemies, we may need to ask a better question. What if my struggle to love my enemies starts with my experience of love? The old saying, “You can’t give what you don’t have,” is really true when it comes to loving our enemies. We can’t love our enemies unless we have allowed the power of God’s love to infiltrate every area of our lives. John Piper puts it this way, “Our only hope for loving our enemy is to be a new creation in Christ. And our only hope for being a new creation in Christ is to be reconciled to God through the death of his Son.”
For Today: Are you finding it easy to love people in some situations and finding it difficult to not get irritated with them in others? Make a list of areas in your life that you have not let Jesus love you. It might be those places you are embarrassed or ashamed about, choices that you have made that make you feel disqualified to be free in, or simply places that you want to have sole control over. Ask Jesus to forgive you for not letting Him love you in those areas, let go of control, and invite God to love you in a deeper way. Experience the Truth of Matthew 11:28-30 today.