Love Belongs to God
Blog post by Emma McCoy
5 minute read
Love is something hard to write about, hard to pin down, hard to put into words that we can understand. There’s all kinds of love, all kinds of intensities, all kinds of meanings. And people throughout time have done the best they could to understand.
The poet Kahil Gibran
wrote we are “to be wounded by [our] own understanding of love;/ and to bleed willfully and joyfully.”
English poet Alfred Lord Tennyson
said that…
“it is better to have loved and lost/ than to have never loved at all.”
The Bible
assures us that love never fails in 1 Corinthians:
“love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not self-seeking.”
Love can be friendly, all-consuming, familial, passionate, false, and covenantal.
So what kind of love is Jesus talking about when he says we need to love our enemies?
At the Common Table gathering last week, the message was about loving our enemies through the story of the Centurion’s servant. Not people we dislike, not people who annoy us, but our real-life, trying-to-kill-you, against-everything-you-stand-for enemies. Because Jesus’ friendships with unexpected people transform the way we love, even with (and especially with) the people we think are impossible to love.
But what does it mean to love? The small group question asked was this:
What are ways you lean on the Holy Spirit to help you do this impossible?
During the sharing time after the discussion, one group shared that they had gone a little off script and had talked more about love, what love is, and what makes someone unlovable (or impossible to love). The flow of the gathering kept going, but I was stuck on the idea of what makes someone “unlovable” to humans. God’s love is perfect, and patient and kind and unfailing, but ours is not.
So here are the two questions I was wrestling with the past week:
What does it mean to love our enemies?
What makes our enemies impossible to love?
The first question cannot be answered without the Holy Spirit. Blessing those who curse us isn’t exactly an intrinsic human trait that comes naturally to us. Praying for those who wrong us isn’t what we first reach for instead of anger. Loving our enemies means loving our enemies, and we don’t get to choose who disciples us. That said, I want to make it clear that this does not apply to situations of abuse or harm, and I’m not saying you should go back to or stay in, a place of damage. What I am saying is that God loves all of us: the racists, the oppressors, the lukewarm, the impatient, the despicable.
The centurion came to Jesus and asked for help and humbled himself. And Jesus responded. It was unexpected in every way, and completely transforms the way I love. No one is beyond reach, beyond faith, beyond love.
The second question…
“what makes our enemies impossible to love?”
…also cannot be answered without the Holy Spirit. Because for us, there are people who are beyond love because they are impossible to love. As one of the groups discussed at the Common Table gathering, some people are “unlovable” to us because of the way they behave, how they hurt others, or how they hurt us. At the top of the list are those who don’t accept responsibility, those who cause bodily and emotional harm, and those who don’t seem to care.
Hereditary Enemies by Samson Goetze
The Holy Spirit allows us to care when it seems hopeless.
Leaning on God gives strength where there is little compassion and where it isn’t deserved. Because none of us deserve God’s love, and there’s nothing we can do to earn it. Ephesians 2 puts it well: “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works so that no one can boast.”
Love is both patient and kind. It’s also brutal and difficult, and a choice that must be made over and over.
God loves everyone, even the unlovable. Even our enemies. And He calls us to do the same, knowing that it’s impossible. Because we need Him to do it, to transform us from the inside out and lead us in the direction He is walking in.
At Heading North this Sunday, we’re going to take a deep dive into how Jesus’ unexpected friendships transform the way we love. We’ll do this by exploring how the Holy Spirit works and moves within us to allow us to do things we can’t accomplish alone. The transformation of how we love isn’t something that we can do by just trying a little harder, it’s something we lean into with God.
Come join us this Sunday in fellowship for this discussion! As always, feel free to shoot us an email with any questions: info@springchurchbellingham.com
Corresponding Videos
