This is the hardest command I know. Love my enemies?

Yet this truly is Jesus’ command for you and me. It gets to the heart of the good news of Jesus. It shows that God’s love in Christ undermines our ­naturally sinful and broken way of life.

An enemy is, by definition, someone we hate. Christ overthrows this by replacing our natural hatred with his supernatural love.

We cannot possess such love without Christ. I can’t; you can’t. On my own, I will keep on hating people who have hurt me, or whom I think are despicable. I do not have the capacity to love my enemies, but Christ does.

In Romans, Paul writes that “while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son” (Romans 5:10). This verse is a short summary of salvation in Christ. We were once the ene­mies of God, but Christ reconciled us to God so that now we are friends.

Christ reconciled an entire world-full of enemies to God. So he can surely handle the reconciliation needed between me and my enemies. But I will have to ask him for that super­natural love. It will take a prayer something like this: