Most Christians understand that Jesus loves them individually. When we wrongly think that He loves us because we are good people then we assume that He can’t possibly love those who aren’t “good people.” But He doesn’t love us because we are good, but because He is good. We think we are easy to love if we’re good people, but God loves every last one of us, to the point of dying for us, even for the ones who put the nails in His wrist.
As Christians, we strive to be more Christ-like, therefore we should strive to love everyone like He does, even those who are not easy to love. Jesus tells us in Matthew 5:44 to love our enemies. “Enemy” is a pretty strong word, but for me, today, it’s those people that irritate me and that aren’t easy for me to love. But I am still called to love them, even in their sin, because they were made in the image of God just like I was. I Peter 2:17 says, “Show proper respect to everyone..” because every single human being bears the image of God.
Whether you are a strong supporter of Hillary, Trump, or don’t care for either, I’m sure you would consider one, the other, or both, someone that isn’t exactly easy for you to love or respect. If you’re one of those people that have strong negative feelings about one candidate then I’m sure it’s hard to swallow that Jesus loves him or her as much as He loves you. (It hurt me too, don’t worry.)
“Love your enemies.” It sounds so easy, we think “oh, I do that,” but do we really? We yell and throw our hands up at the person who cut us off in traffic, think of our roommates as horribly disgusting human beings because they left a dirty dish in the sink for a little bit longer than we would like and call our professors awful names because they didn’t give us the grade we think we deserved.
I’m not saying that you have to agree with every decision and thing they stand for, that’s actually not love. It wouldn’t be loving of my parents to support every bad decision I made when they knew it wouldn’t be in my best interest. I support one candidate over the others because of what I think would be the best for our country. So understand that you don’t have to agree with anything they stand for to give them the respect they deserve because they are an authority figure placed by God.
When we get it through our hard heads that Jesus loves us all, even those we don’t like, it should make us think twice before completely bashing and tearing apart someone on your social media. The world we live in is filled with hate, so I challenge and encourage you to do more things and say more things in love.
