Love Your Enemies

By Cyndi King

Do you remember any of the bullies from growing up? Where I’m from, they were all named Bubba or Junior. I’ve discovered here in Cincinnati that they’re called Brian.

I came in the office one Monday morning recently and Brian Tome left a dead bird in a zip-lock bag in my clear plastic in-box that hangs by my office door. The next day, I was out in the street trying to find a flattened rat to give to him.

Brian jokingly told me Friday night that he had specially chosen this topic for me. Love your enemies. Love your enemies? What do I know about that? What an easy message I've been given. Love. Hate. Friend. Enemy. You pick. Anyone with a brain can get that one right, let’s go home. Then I had several people ask me what my topic was. When told, no less than five people started laughing. Laughing. Not laughing like they thought — "Poor you, what would you know about it?" More like - "Bahahaha, you’ll need two weekends." With friends like that, who needs enemies?

Many different enemies exist. My biggest one — cellulite on my … okay, I can tell by the looks on some of your faces that you aren’t ready to go there. Some of you might say Uncle Sam is your biggest enemy. Or it could be the driver who cut you off, the nasty gossip at the office, or Gil Hopkins when you don’t sign up to help with the facility.

I didn’t think I had any enemies until I started reading more about the meaning of what Jesus was teaching.

What is counter-cultural about this? Sounds nice and buttoned up. If someone wants my cloak and tunic, frankly I have more in the closet at home. I’m such a wimp that if someone strikes me on my cheek, I’m going to run home crying.

I had to take a good look at why loving your enemies was such a huge thing to Jesus. So I started thinking about what an enemy is. Let’s look at it from the perspective of this definition: "An enemy is the person we get mad at when they take our control away from us."

Oh I can really get mad then. I’m supposed to love the person who stands in my way, or doesn’t do what I want them to do?

How do you react to the person who doesn’t let you get your way? I started this message thinking that it would be a piece of cake. Now I know better. I’ve found that I do pretty well with the little things. It’s the big things that get me. I have a friend who survived a rape several years ago. When she talks about it now, she has the most forgiving spirit about what happened to her. I’m glad she does, because I don’t. I have some friends who have been unfairly sued about a situation with their house. My friends have a good spirit about it. But I’m really ticked at these people that I don’t know who are putting my friends through this. My heart has been very convicted this week.

So is that what Jesus was teaching about here? Giving up control? Not getting our way? Let’s take a look at what was going on in the culture during the time that Jesus was talking about loving our enemies.

We have to understand what the norm of the day was. In the Old Testament (which are the books of the Bible written before Jesus came to Earth) there is a book called Exodus. In Exodus, the leader, Moses, is teaching the Israelites how to live their lives properly. We have to remember that Jesus came to offer us a reunited relationship with God. People did bad things, and without Jesus, God had to rule in a very just manner. Giving justice and giving grace are two different things. We see all kinds of rules in the Bible:

Exodus 21:7
If a man sells his daughter as a servant….(NIV)

 

God is giving laws regarding what to do if a man sells his daughter as a servant. We look at that statement and are confused. We have to realize that the behavior of selling daughters was going on at the time. God was trying to protect the daughter. He gave some good laws that would help her be protected.

Another law we see is this:

I doubt that if that rule was still in effect, none of us would be here. We have all been teenagers! These rules are harsh. As we go further we find:

At the time Jesus began teaching, these rules were still the norm. We think entertainment is WWF SmackDown. In that day entertainment was an eye gouging in the town square. Come one, come all. Gives us a new meaning for the expression "better than a poke in the eye."

Now, counter to all of this, here came Jesus. And He said to turn the other cheek.

Also, the custom during this time was that it was better to have an eye put out than to be slapped in the face. Being slapped in the face was the absolute height of wrongdoing. You think being cut off in traffic produces road rage? Think big. It’s like your boss saying to you, "You bite!" in front of all of your peers. Or your best friend calling you the "biggest loser I’ve ever known."

Turn the other cheek? To us that would be like having our eye gouged out and offering up the other one.

I heard a story about an ex-boxer who became a preacher and started a church in the inner city. One day a couple of gang thugs came up and told him that they were going to fight the boxing preacher. And if the preacher was still standing at the end, then he could start his church. Otherwise he needed to pack up and leave. So the thug hauled off and knocked the daylights out of the preacher. The preacher slowly got back up off the ground and showed the thug the other side of his face. The thug punched the preacher, and down he went again. As the preacher was standing back up, he rolled up his sleeves. He looked at the thug and said, "That’s as far as my instruction manual went on the topic."

Turn the other cheek. Love your enemies. What was Jesus talking about?

What about this business of giving up your tunic? To put it in perspective a part of surviving during that time was to "layer up." That is also what all you northerners told me to do when I moved to Ohio. I grew up in LA, Lower Alabama that is, and in Ohio layers are how people survive the cold. In Jesus’ time men wore their shirt or "cloak" and then put a "tunic" over it. Think of the pictures you’ve seen of Jesus. He always looked like He had a blanket on. Well He did. At night, your tunic served as your blanket against the cold. Without it you froze. The law said that a man could be sued for his cloak, but not his tunic.

Okay, so he could sell his daughter as a slave, but couldn’t be sued for his cloak - go figure, girls. But if a man lost his tunic, he could die. For Jesus to teach that part of loving enemies was to turn the other cheek, and to give your cloak as well - that was radical. Around here, we’d say counter-cultural.

At this point, we’re all thinking "Well, that worked back then, but what does it have to do with me today?" I asked myself that same question. I think I turn the other cheek pretty well. I think I do a pretty good job of forgiving. I give away to the needy. I am not evil. I love my enemies, most of the time.

Then a mentor of mine challenged me — "Cyndi, do you know that you and everyone you know has the propensity to be a Hitler inside of them?"

I thought, "You have to be kidding. Not me. My friends may have laughed at me when they discovered my message topic. But that is because I stand up for what the Bible says is right, and there are people who get mad about that. Because of those circumstances I become their enemy. It’s not my doing."

She said, "Yes, but by making a few different choices, you too could be a leader of evil. Until you realize that, you are dangerous."

"No, not me," I responded.

"Yes, you," she said.

You know, Hitler didn’t do it alone. I think here of what Brian Tome said a few weeks ago. Like it or not, Hitler was a great leader. He didn’t single-handedly kill six million Jews and five million non-Jews. He led the Nazi exterminators to kill off half of all Jews in Europe and one-third of all the Jews on the planet during the Holocaust. And she’s telling me I could be like him?

This made me curious. How did Hitler get there? Did he wake up one day and decide to be the vilest person we can think of? What choices did he make to cause him to hate faceless, nameless, Jewish people that badly? What other leaders that came before him influenced him with their choices? What choices do you make now that influence others for evil? What are the little things that we do that we don’t think influence other people? How does an enemy get started in our spirit and spiral to that level of hatred?

Let’s go back in history to the fifteenth century. Niccolo Machiavelli wrote a book called The Prince. He taught that:

This can be said in other ways: kill or be killed; take the power; eat your young; only the strong survive.

In the mid 1600’s Machiavelli influenced Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes decided he’d add on a bit of his own thoughts to Machiavelli’s ideas. He taught the Philosophy of Pleasure. He subscribed to the idea that good is what we like, and evil is what we don’t like. No moral standard, just if it feels good, do it.

In the mid 1800s Hobbes influenced Fredrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche took it a step further. He believed that the weak and inferior of the world should be obliterated. Are you beginning to see the downward spiral here? It’s not like Machiavelli started at a high level to begin with, but it ultimately led Nietzsche to attack the ethics of love taught by Christ in the Sermon on the Mount. Nietzsche believed that if mankind sought to show responsibility toward the poor and weak, then the losers would be in control. If the losers were in control then madness would reign. Only the strong should survive.

Now I will answer the question in your minds right now: "Where in the world is she going with this?"

Here’s my point: Guess who Hitler studied? Nietzche. Hitler even wrote his own version of Neitzche’s material that Hitler called Mein Kampf. Hitler personally presented a copy of Nietzche’s works to none other than Benito Mussolini.

What root of hatred lies in your hearts? Do you think that Machiavelli would have believed that he would influence two of the most horrendous leaders in history and the subsequent extermination of millions?

Adolf Hitler, on the last day of his life in a Berlin bunker in 1945, dictated these words:

Victor Frankl was a famous psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz. He is quoted as saying:

I can’t prove it, but I am ninety-nine percent sure that as a psychiatrist, Frankl would’ve been well studied in Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Nietzche. Hitler and Frankl: two different men. One chose a path of hatred, one chose a path of love.

Which one do we want to be? It’s one choice after another. I think that’s what it comes down to today. I’ve been told that when a group of people listen to a speaker, the audience will only retain five to ten percent of the material. I’m sure that you all are going to retain ninety to ninety-nine percent, but I am going to boil this down for us. I want you to remember one word: Choices.

We make a series of choices, even when we say, "I am not going to make a choice." That is still a choice. What we have before us is the ability to make choices that say, "I am going to follow a higher call."

Luke 6:31is the Scripture that says:

The world also refers to that phrase as the "Golden Rule." They are the same phrase. But there is a difference between the two, even though the words are the same. The difference is in the interpretation. The world interprets it to mean, "If it feels good to me, I should do it."

Luke 6:31 is actually about deciding that I am going to follow that higher call. I am going to follow Jesus Christ’s teachings that say to love others. I am going to do more here with my choices. I am going to sacrifice myself in order to love the people around me. I am not going to follow through on the philosophy of kill or be killed; only the best survive; better you than me; don’t get mad, get even. It’s not going to be about always being right.

Each one of us has choices to make. What choices are you going to make? Let’s take a minute, and I will offer up some practical ideas from the Bible about how exactly to start to love your enemy. The first thing you can do is to:

Feed your enemy.

I read a story the other day about a kid getting bullied at school. In my house, my parents would’ve said to just ignore it - a modern day version of turn the other cheek. In the story, the little boy had just heard this Bible verse from the book of Romans.

Romans 12:20
"If your enemy is hungry, feed him…" (NIV)

The next day the bully started again. The little boy responded by handed him a bag full of jellybeans. The woman writing the story said, "It is two years later, and they are now inseparable best friends." That action changed the whole course of things.

I have a challenge for you. Is there somebody you could have lunch with who fits into this category? You don’t have to talk about anything heavy. It might just be good to go grab a bite.

Pray for your enemy.

Another recommendation that we see is in Matthew.

I would challenge you to try something else. If you pray for a person that you consider to be your enemy for thirty days, see if you begin to care about that person. It is impossible to pray for someone and not begin to care about him or her. God loves all of us. He sees the good in even the most rotten one of us.

Will you spend time with God praying for good things for the person? Even if you don’t believe in God, just try it. Maybe you will see God begin to move in a way that will make you want to believe in Him.

I’ve talked to today about why Jesus’ teaching is radical. We’ve looked at an extreme case of those who hated and persecuted their enemies. It’s a lot to think about. I’ll make it easy. If you walk out of here today with one thought, let it be this one: You make the choice.

The absence of a choice is still a choice. What choices are you making? Feeding your enemies, praying for them? Only you have the power to submit your life before God to His teachings and live a radical, wild, exhilarating life as a Christ follower. For me, I can choose to not go looking for a dead rat.