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Love Your Enemies—Undeserved Love
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Jesus offers us one of his most beautiful and challenging teachings—a call that strikes at the very heart of what it means to follow him and what Christianity is fundamentally about. Tonight, we're exploring what Jesus means when he teaches us to love our enemies.
In Matthew's account, Jesus is presenting a deeper, richer kind of goodness than what people were currently aiming for. He keeps saying, "You have heard it was said," and then he describes a higher standard. He's not abolishing the old teaching—he's elevating it.
Under the heading "Love Your Enemies," Jesus says:
You have heard that it was said, "Love your neighbor and hate your enemy." But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your father in Heaven.
The contrast is stark. The normal ethical idea was: love your neighbor, hate your enemy. But Jesus calls us to something far deeper—to love even those who harm us, to pray for those who persecute us.
Why does Jesus call us to this radical standard? He explains:
God causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.
The point isn't about earning acceptance as God's children—it's about family likeness. Jesus is saying: if you want to be like your father in Heaven, this is what he's like. You were made to resemble God. You were made to become his children and share his family likeness.
Then he challenges us directly:
If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Even the tax collectors do that. If you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Even pagans do that.
Jesus is nudging us, prodding us, challenging our sense of how kind and loving we really are. So much of what we do for others, we're actually doing for ourselves in some way. When you love those who love you back, there's no cost—it benefits you. When you show respect and warmth only to your own tribe, your in-group, the people who are like you—is that really impressive?
Consider how much respect and warmth and kindness we show to those we profoundly disagree with. Often our kindness to those who agree with us is just a way of being kind to ourselves. We're looking after our own and getting to feel like the good guys, while looking down on the "bad guys" over there.
Jesus says: if you only love your friends and your group, if you don't love your enemies, then really most of your kindness to others is just kindness to yourself. Real, radical kindness—the sort of love we were actually made for—is love for the ones you don't like. Love that is not earned or paid back. Love for those who have wronged us. Love that is undeserved.
Jesus slices through our self-righteousness here. He raises the bar of goodness way above us. It turns out we're not as loving and as kind as we like to think we are. But why does Jesus raise the bar to this costly, sacrificial, undeserved love? Why isn't loving those who love you good enough?
Because we were made to be like God. We were made to resemble the God who made us. We were made to become God's children and share his family likeness.
And God loves those who don't deserve it. God loves those who don't love him back. God loves his enemies.
You know that because the sun rose this morning. Jesus is not just evoking survival—he's evoking the beauty of life itself. Think of an exquisite sunrise or sunset. Think of the moment spring suddenly arrives. Think of the warmth of the sun on your back. Think of a favorite meal, a beautiful song, the laughter of good friends, mountains and music, the vast depths of space, the intricate biology of cells.
Everything good about your life is an undeserved gift from a kind God. Everything good about yourself is an undeserved gift from a kind God. We owe God everything we have and everything we are.
But Jesus doesn't just tell us this is what God is like—he shows us. At the end of his life, as he's being tortured and nailed to a cross, he practices what he preaches. He's not hurling insults. He's not calling down curses. In fact, he's praying for his executioners: "Father, forgive them, for they don't know what they're doing."
Jesus loves his enemies to the end.
Paul, one of the early leaders in the church, explained what Jesus's death meant:
God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us... while we were God's enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his son.
This is the crucial insight: we were God's enemies. We are not supposed to think of ourselves as the good guys looking down on everybody else. God is good, and compared to him, all the rest of us are the bad guys. We have wronged God. We don't deserve anything from him. Left to ourselves, all of us are God's enemies.
But God loves his enemies. He loved us so much that he came in the person of his son Jesus and died for us so that we could be forgiven completely and reconciled to him.
Paul insists that it's completely undeserved, completely unearned:
When the kindness and love of God our savior appeared, he saved us—not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy.
Jesus was God's kindness and love appearing in person. He came and loved us, saved us, reconciled us to God—not because we had done anything good or righteous to deserve it, but just because he is kind, he is generous, and he loves even his enemies.
So Jesus tells us that God loves those who don't deserve it every single day by giving us our lives, making the sun rise morning after morning, giving us the very breath in our lungs. But he does so much more than that. He willingly dies our death on the cross so that he can offer us not just a few more days of this life, but a new life—a life reconciled to him, a life of love with him.
This life starts now and goes on right through death and out the other side into a glorious, beautiful future. It will be full of all the joy and beauty that sunshine evokes, but completely, because we will be reconciled and right with God. He will be with us fully.
I want to speak for a moment to those here who would describe yourselves as not really religious. I think this is very relevant to you.
Many of us feel that if we just live our lives decently and try to be good people, that should be enough—even if there is a God. Our cultural instinct is to see religious neutrality, agnosticism, non-commitment as actually a virtue. It feels open-minded, tolerant, and fine.
But imagine if I said: "I don't really speak to my parents anymore. No, they didn't do anything wrong. They were really loving to me my whole childhood. They gave me everything I have. But I just don't think it's important to have a relationship with them. I just try to be a decent person."
You'd feel something is wrong with that, wouldn't you? Because even though I didn't choose my parents, I do have a responsibility to them. They gave me life. They gave me everything I have. They love me. It wouldn't be okay to not bother with them.
Jesus shows us it's a similar situation with God. God isn't some vague, distant force or abstract moral principle. God is personal and loving. He personally gives each of us sunlight and rain. He personally gives us every breath of air we take. He personally gives us every moment of beauty in our lives—whether it's a song, a sunset, a book, the view from the Hubble telescope, the Grand Canyon, or the intricate workings of physics and biology.
Every experience of love and beauty is a personal gift from God. It's not okay for us to just try to live a decent life and not bother much about God. We need to get to know him. We need to thank him. We need to love him back.
For those of us who do believe in God—whether Christian or of another faith—there is a big challenge here.
Jesus shows us that we cannot earn God's love and kindness. If we think God's system works like this: "I do my best to be good, and then I will deserve God's love," Jesus has bad news for us. God's standard of goodness is way, way higher than ours.
From God's perspective, real goodness means not just loving people like us or who like us. It means loving our enemies. It means being perfect in love like our heavenly father. None of us can reach that standard. I can't. You can't. No one in this room can. Not even Mother Teresa. No one can ever be loving enough to earn or deserve God's love.
So if we try to live in a system where we're trying to earn God's love, we are in big trouble. But we don't have to live in that system, because that is not what God is like at all.
Instead, we must admit that we don't deserve God's love. We must admit that we were his enemies, that we are sinners who constantly fail to love people as we should. And we must let God love us anyway.
We must see the sunrise every day and say: "God, I don't deserve this. Thank you." Most of all, we must see Jesus giving his life on the cross for us and say: "God, I don't deserve this. Thank you."
The Bible reminds us of this again and again, even though human religion so often forgets it and buries it: We don't have to try desperately to be loving enough for God. We have to admit that we're not, ask him to forgive us, and then ask him to change us.
The truth is that receiving this kind of love from God really does change us. The only thing that truly transforms a person deep down—making them the kind of person who loves even when they get nothing in return, who loves even their enemies—is if they've been loved like that themselves. Patiently, relentlessly loved like that for years and years.
Jesus invites every one of us—whether you're religious or not—into that kind of heart-transforming relationship with God. A relationship where we receive every day his unstoppable, unearned, lavished love, and we let it change us and grow us so that more and more we start to love like he does.
Jesus says: Love your enemies, because that is exactly how God has loved you.
