But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for He Himself is kind to ungrateful and evil men. (Luke 6:35 NASB)
This is the ninth verse in this section on loving your enemy, and there are more to come. You can see from the sheer bulk of words spent on this topic that Jesus meant business about it. When it comes to loving enemies, He was not kidding around. We have it to do.
The marvelous thing about the God-man Jesus is that He not only told us what to do, He explained how to do it, and then He showed us what doing it looked like. As a little bonus, in this verse He told us what we could expect when we obey.
There are three parts to this verse. The first is a summary of what we are to do. The second part is a promise for those who are obedient. The third part is the WHY of obedience.
We will consider the initial section first. As before, we are to love, do good, and lend. There's an added phrase, though, that is vital to our acts of loving. "Expecting nothing in return". Our tendency is to think that, if we love our enemies, it will bring about a transformation in them, and they will become dear friends. "Don't expect it," Jesus said. Don't expect anything at all. We can be hopeful that God will use our obedience to work in our situation, and He will, but we are not to be motivated by what we expect will happen. We are to obey without expectation.
Ponder that a bit. We will discuss the promise tomorrow, but for today, think about obeying Jesus "just because He said to do it". Our children don't like it much when that is our expectation, but it doesn't change the need for their obedience. It doesn't change the need for our obedience either.
Love your enemy. Don't argue. Just do it.
Pray today that we and our loved ones will have hearts willing to obey without complaints or arguing. Pray that we will " just do it".
-------
Link for last night's blog: http://leannahollis.blogspot.com/2014/04/counting-your-blessings-by-dr-christy.html
No comments:
Post a Comment