Praying for your enemies keeps them from getting inside of you, so you don’t become like them.
Enemies
Greg Laurie
Unbelievers are not the enemy—they are people for whom Christ died. We need to remember we were each one of them once.
Jack Frost
Have you received the difficult people whom God has placed in your life as an instrument of blessing? If you do not value, honor, and respect them, then you may be treating them like a curse, thus inheriting a curse! When we receive them as a blessing to help us find out what we are full of, then God can take every negative relationship and use it to bring us into spiritual maturity.
Francis A. Schaeffer
The Lord calls us to love all people, including those who are enemies of the gospel and those who blaspheme. This may not be comfortable, and it may not be easy, but this is the gospel of Christ, for He loved His enemies so much that He died to save us.
Dan Ham
When Jesus said to love your enemies and bless those who curse you and do good to those who hate you and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you, what kind of person or political group or politician did he exempt?
Ed Stetzer
April 14, 2020
Tribalism conforms to the pattern of this world and does not fight for the basic truth that should unite all Christians. …secondary issues have conflated the spiritual and the natural in a way that weakens our witness and embroils us in deep conflict that distracts from and distorts the gospel of Jesus. Unflinching devotion to a tribe not only pushes us to fight against issues that are not connected to the gospel and don’t advance the mission of God, but it also affects how we view others who disagree with us. They become opponents we have to beat rather than lost people made in the image of God whom we are to love and extend God’s grace to. Our true fight is not against those who are hurting in the world; it is against the sinful and demonic forces of darkness.
(Christians in the Age of Outrage)
Gilbert Keith G. K. Chesterton
The Bible tells us to love our neighbours, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.
Elizabeth Fabiani
When we choose to forgive the victory is attainable. When bad things happen, good CAN come out of it! Romans 8:28 declares it is so! My life declares it is so and I am not alone in that statement. So many people have looked evil in the face and said, “I will find good in this.” Sometimes the evil and bad things are changed or converted or whatever and sometimes it is us that is changed. But ALL things work for good and can bring about change for the good.
Margot Starbuck
The one Jesus calls us to love is the one who is other than we are. The reason Jesus’ words are so wildly relevant today, is because He was calling His first-century listeners to love the ones who were really hard to love. In Luke’s record of Jesus’ sermon, Jesus challenges His listeners to love those who hated them (Luke 6:27), those who cursed them (8:28), those who mistreated them (Luke 6:28), those who slapped them (Luke 6:29), those who stole from them (Luke 6:19), and those who asked something of them (Luke 6:30).
Pete Greig
One day you talk to God about people and the next you talk to people about God. This marriage of intimacy with active involvement in the mess of life makes sense of the literal word ‘intercession’. To ‘stand in the gap’ between God and his world must surely mean having a foot in both camps, not standing on God’s side and yelling at the other.