If anyone in history understood the power of words, it was Jesus. He was the Word made flesh. In Matthew 5, He even instructs us to bless our enemies. I don’t know about you, but this command of love is sometimes tough for me to attempt, much less achieve. Don’t get me wrong, I know as well as you do that we don’t war with flesh and blood, but we do war with spiritual opposition that exploits other people’s hurts so that they will hurt other people.
Keeping the command to love my enemies isn’t hard simply because I hate them, it’s difficult due to the fact that I’m dealing with either the hurt or the loss and I need to vent my feelings. As a pastor, I meet people all the time that want to vent to me about their problems. There is nothing wrong with venting to others that have the power to assist hurting people, as long as you share your hurts and don’t allow vengeance to begin to seep out with it.
When Jesus came, it was to fulfill the law and to begin the day of grace. Grace, is where Jesus took our sin debt and shame and gave us His righteousness without us having to pay for one sin. Now that’s grace! Here’s the difficult part about grace. In Matthew 5, you’ll see that living under the law was difficult, but living under grace is almost impossible—UNLESS you first place your faith in Jesus, who paid your sin debt, to empower you to fulfill the LAW OF LOVE. The more we allow ourselves to receive grace, the more we will be able to extend grace.
It’s easy to trust the Lord when He allows you to have friends and loved ones surrounding you, but sometimes the Father will prepare a table before you in the presence of your enemies. Therefore, when we seek to get revenge or to inflict pain upon those we deem as “our enemies” (at the expense of not trusting the Father to get vengeance for us), then our hearts are not pleasing to God. God looks on the heart and determines whether or not you’re allowing Him to fight your battles. If we choose to operate by “the law’s standards,” then His grace isn’t needed. If we see what He has done for us while we were yet sinners and decide to give our battles, conflicts, and hurts over into His hands to set things right, then He will extend His grace to us in the presence of our enemies and restore what Satan, our primary enemy, has stolen from us through others.
The New Testament is all about faith and trust in the heavenly Father. If we will humble ourselves and trust Him, then it will go well with us. The result will be a heart and life that pleases the Father, and He will get vengeance on the heads of our enemies, and we will live in peace with God. —submitted by Asa, US
