All of us have that person we know, the person whom you try so hard to love, but it just seems impossible. And then we come up with excuses as to why we can’t love them. We say, but Father they don’t like me, they don’t accept me, they don’t think the way I do, they have got it all wrong, I want to help them see what is correct but they are not willing to listen to me… and this is why it’s so hard to love them.
I have felt this way many times and I have given excuses like this many times. But God has been showing me that we are called to love others without any conditions, even if they don’t like you, even if they don’t accept you, even if they don’t think like you do, even if they have got it all wrong, even if they don’t want to listen to what you have to say, and even if they don’t care about you at all, Christ still calls you to love them.
And I know, it is hard, many times I have cried my heart out to the Lord, because sometimes it hurts to love someone who does not love you back and sometimes it’s hard to do good to those who don’t like you, and sometimes you feel like running away from them and never look back sometimes it breaks your heart to love the unlikable and sometimes you pray, “Lord, anything else, I’ll go to the ends of the earth for you, but not stay with this person” but sometimes He tells you “my child, you are exactly where I want you to be, I don’t want you to go to the ends of the earth, I want you to love her, Love her the way I love you, because she needs that… because YOU need that”
Loving someone who does not love you back is exactly what Jesus did when He died on the cross for us, loving someone who rejects you and who does not want to listen to what you have to say is what Jesus did when he bore our sins and suffered on the cross. And he did that because He knew the power of love. And He calls us to love the people He has brought into our lives with the same love He showered us with.
“Having loved His own which were in the world, He loved them unto the end.” The revelation come home to me that God has loved me to the end of all my meanness and my sin, my self-seeking and my wrong motives; and now this is the corresponding revelation – that I have to love others as God has loved me. God will bring around us any number of people we cannot respect, and we have to exhibit the love of God to them as He has exhibited it to us.”
|Oswald Chambers – Our Brilliant Heritage|
|Oswald Chambers – Our Brilliant Heritage|
