When People Are Tough to Love

Love God, Love Others

We are just a bunch of broken, messed up, imperfect people who love to come together to serve and worship a perfect God. And that perfect God has a plan and purpose for your life.

Let's start with Matthew 22:34. Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together, and one of them, an expert in the law, tested him with a question—never a good idea to try to test Jesus.

"Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the law?" Jesus replied, quoting Deuteronomy 6:5: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment." And quoting Leviticus 19:18: "And the second is like it. Love your neighbor as yourself."

All the law and the prophets—everything in the entire Old Testament—hangs on these two commandments. Jesus makes it very simple: love God and love others.

Here's my question for us today: which one of those two is easier for you? Is it easier to love a perfect God who stepped out of heaven to lay down his life so you could go free? Or is it easier to love a bunch of broken, imperfect people who are going to let you down sometimes? For me, it's so much easier to love a perfect God than it is to love imperfect people—especially when people are tough to love.　Anyone can love somebody they're already in love with. But Jesus calls us to love everybody, including those who are tough to love.

To close this series, I want to preach a message called When People Are Tough to Love.

A Bible Full of Tough-to-Love People

If you're newer to the Bible, the first two pages are beautiful—Adam and Eve living in perfect unity with the Creator, creation, and each other. There would be no need for a relationship series in Genesis 1 and 2. But everything falls apart in Genesis 3. By the end of that chapter, Adam and Eve go from naked and unashamed to running, hiding, and sewing fig leaves to cover up. When God asks what happened, Adam says,