Meandering Monday - Keep on Loving - Martin Wiles

Welcome to Meandering Monday, where we take a trip back to an earlier post and enjoy it again.

Our great desire is that you will keep on loving others as long as life lasts, in order to make certain that what you hope for will come true. Hebrews 6:11 NLT

I’m the first to admit, I’m not perfect. Never have been.

And I’m sure there have been many times during my life when acquaintances, friends, family, and co-workers have found me difficult to love. Yet, despite what I know about myself, I still frequently find it hard to love others unqualitatively.

Such as the church treasurer who got mad because the ruling body decided they would audit the books annually. He took this as an affront to his credibility, and I was the one he chose to direct his toward. Or the woman who blatantly accused my wife of trying to take over things in the church…activities no one else was doing. And the deacon who wanted to “think” about allowing me to go bi-vocational even though the church couldn’t pay me enough to live on. And how can I forget the man who challenged my decision to have a toilet at the church repaired without first voting on it at a church business meeting? All people who were difficult to love.

Whoever wrote this letter wanted these believers to keep on loving those difficult-to-love people. In fact, their love would fulfill all God’s commands and keep them from becoming spiritually dull and indifferent.

Just after loving God with our entire hearts and beings—according to Jesus—comes loving our neighbors as we do ourselves. The above are just a few examples of neighbors who were difficult to love. All of us can give our personal examples. But then again, loving them only when they’re easy to love doesn’t take much effort—or love—and doesn’t even define love.

Unconditional is a better term and the type of love we need to show. This is the way God loves us when we disobey him, affront him, neglect him, try to manipulate him, or totally disregard him.

Whom do you need to show love to?

Prayer: God of all love, teach us to love others unconditionally as You do us. 

Tweetable: Whom do you need to keep on loving? 

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Confronting Enemy Behavior - Martin Wiles

Series: The Road to Humility

But I say, love your enemies! Pray for those who persecute you! Matthew 5:44 NLT

I thought he was my friend.

Fred headed the committee who recommended me as pastor for the church. I soon discovered he and I differed in our philosophies.

My visiting habits didn’t please him. In his mind, I should have visited every relative of every church member whether that person was a church member or not. I didn’t think I had time. My decision-making procedure often offended him too. No matter how small the matter, Fred thought it should come before the church at a business meeting for a vote.

The longer I stayed, the more Fred and I clashed. Although his rebukes came in a gentle way, I could feel the tension growing between us. I began dreading each Sunday and Wednesday, wondering what he’d fuss about next. When I told the board I needed a second job because we couldn’t live off what the church paid, he objected before anyone else had a chance. When he rotated off the deacon board, I breathed a sigh of relief. But things didn’t change.

Once a week, I prayed for church members. Praying for Fred taxed me. I knew I needed to—he was, after all, a brother in Christ—but knowing this didn’t make it any easier. Our relationship never improved, but on the Sunday I resigned Fred cried. Shortly after I left the church, he had a heart attack and died while shaving in front of his bathroom mirror.

Fred wasn’t the worst enemy I could have had, but our relationship reminded me enemies aren’t always non-believers. Jesus’ command to pray for them rubs against the grain of our human nature, but doing so has benefits.

Praying for our enemies changes us. My prayers for Fred didn’t change him. It did change how I viewed him. And when I heard of his death, I grieved.

When we pray for our non-believing enemies, God reminds us they don’t really hate us as a person but what we stand for. The light of Jesus Christ offends the darkness of sin.

Loving and praying for our enemies—rather than seeking revenge against them or ostracizing them—also parrots Jesus’ behavior. He prayed for those crucifying Him.

Ask God to give you the strength to pray for those who oppose you. Doing so will change how you see them.

Tweetable: Are you confronting enemy behavior? 

Prayer: Father, help us see others with eyes of love, even when they oppose us.

Tell us about a time when you confronted enemy behavior. 

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Throwback Tuesday - Loving My Enemies - Martin Wiles

Loving My Enemies

Shortly after meeting, he became my best friend, but within five years he was my sworn enemy.

*Charles was an older gentleman I once knew. We hit it off immediately. I was the type of pastor he liked. But as time progressed, I noticed his attitude toward me cooling. I was making decisions he didn’t appreciate and suggesting the church move in directions he was uncomfortable with. The nail that sealed the coffin on our friendship was when the board made a decision he thought was directed at his integrity in a position he held. He thought I was the initiator even though I tried to convince him otherwise. Our friendship was over. He berated me in private and ignored me in public. And even though I attempted apologies, he refused them. Read more...

Tweetable: Are you loving your enemies?

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Forgiving an Enemy - Martin Wiles

But if you refuse to forgive others, your Father will not forgive your sins. Matthew 6:15 NLT

Eighty-nine of his relatives died at the hands of the Nazis.

Simon Wiesenthal was a young Polish prisoner of the Nazis in 1944. He had watched them kill his grandmother and had looked on as they forced his mother onto a freight car crammed with elderly Jewish women. 

One day, as his prison detail was cleaning up at a German hospital, a nurse approached him and asked if he was a Jew, then motioned for him to follow her. She led him to a musty room where a solitary SS soldier fresh from the Russian front lay covered in bandages. The soldier wanted to make a deathbed confession to a Jew.

The man told of how he and his troops had stumbled upon booby traps that killed thirty of their soldiers. As an act of revenge, they had rounded up three hundred Jews, herded them into a three-story house, doused it with gasoline, and then fired grenades at it. The soldiers then surrounded the house and shot anyone who tried to escape.

Now this young man wanted Wiesenthal to forgive him. But Wiesenthal couldn’t—or wouldn’t. He writes, “At last I made up my mind, and without a word I left the room.” (The Sunflower)

No one ever said forgiveness was easy, but Jesus says His forgiveness of our sins depends on our willingness to forgive others. To put it another way, forgiving others demonstrates we’ve experienced God’s forgiveness.

Regardless of what others do to us, forgiveness is never justified. That’s a hard statement to swallow, especially if you belong to a race that another race tried to exterminate. Of if you were one who actually experienced it firsthand. But the truth remains. 

Nothing anyone could ever do to us is more devastating than what we’ve done to God through our sins.

God is holy and cannot look on sin, yet we are sinners. Out of love, He chose to allow His Son to become one of us and to pay our sin debt. A picture of forgiveness at its best. What He’s done for us He expects us to channel to others. And through the power of His Spirit—and only by that power—we can.

When called upon to forgive, our choice is the same as Wiesenthal’s: forgive or walk away. Don’t walk away. 

Forgive and experience the joy of its freeing power.

Tweetable: Whom do you need to forgive?

Prayer: Father, as You have forgiven us—and continue to do so—enable us to forgive those who hurt us. 

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