If you could do one thing that would cinch your reward in Heaven, boost your reputation on earth, honor God, please Jesus, liberate the Spirit, infuriate the devil, puzzle your enemies, edify your church, encourage hurting believers, silence the church’s critics, draw outsiders to Jesus, and dissolve any anger inside your heart, wouldn’t you do it?

Then, love your enemies. That will accomplish all this and more.

On Facebook last week, I asked for the greatest love story you know. The ones we received–maybe 15 in all–told almost entirely of romance. There were some good ones, and we ran several in the earlier segment on this theme. More will follow.

However, I’m of the strong conviction that the best, the strongest, the most potent love stories have little or nothing to do with romance.

There are at least four levels of strong, good love, which increase in effectiveness and winsomeness as they intensify.

First level: You love someone who loves you back. This is the way all love should operate, we think. Sweethearts fall in love and marry and all is well. Grandparents love the kid and the child thinks the world of them. Best friends are BFF.

Second level: You love someone who does not know you exist. The person ignores you completely. Half the songs on the country music hit parade are fueled by this kind of pain.

Third level: You love someone who is unable to return your love. This variety is far stronger and infinitely more admirable. A parent cares for a handicapped child, a husband nurses a comatose wife, an adult looks after a parent with Alzheimers. Day after day, year after year, the love flows one way only.

Fourth level: You love someone who throws it back in your face. This is what Jesus had in mind when He said, “Love your enemy” (Luke 6:27). This is the finest example of Godly love, Christlike love, to be found.

This fourth level–loving your enemy–receives my vote for the strongest, most powerful, most admirable love known to humans.

But I say to you who hear, Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you, and give to those who try to take from you. (paraphrase of Luke 6:27ff.)

Someone protests, “Love them? I don’t like them! If you saw how they treated me, you would understand why I wish they would drop off the edge of the earth!”

The good news is the Lord does not ask us to like them. Some of them He doesn’t like either. “Like” has nothing to do with love.

In this passage, the Lord–who knows all too well the limitations of His disciples; Psalm 103 tells us “He Himself knows our frame, that we are but dust”–defines both enemies and the love we are to show them.

Enemies. These are the people who hate you, curse you, mistreat you, and try to get what belongs to you, according to Jesus.

When we invited Facebook friends to send stories of this kind of love, the responses were far fewer. One friend sent three stories with this preface: My husband and I have both had to deal with people who are hard to love, but I’m not sure that qualifies as an enemy.

I assured her that we do not want to set up an enemies list, which is reminiscent of Richard Nixon’s White House of the early 1970s. No disciple of Jesus Christ wants to waste time or energy in that kind of enterprise. It’s completely pointless and misguided.

However, let’s admit that based on the four traits Jesus mentioned, some people make themselves our enemies. That is, they may hate us or curse us or mistreat us or try to take what is ours. While we may hesitate to call them our enemies, that’s missing the point.

The point is simply: “This is how we are to treat people who are hostile toward us.”

Love. Jesus defined this remarkable kind of love by four actions He wants to see His disciples demonstrate toward their enemies: do good deeds to them, bless them with our words, pray to the Father on their behalf, and give gifts to them.

Clearly, God’s people need to move “love” from the category of “emotion” and put it where it rightfully belongs: “action.” Biblically, love is something you do. How we feel toward the person matters little so long as we do loving things toward them.

Today, as I write, ESPN’s morning talk show guys, Mike Greenberg and Mike Golic (“Mike and Mike in the Morning”), were discussing whether former Green Bay Packer quarterback Brett Favre should have sent congratulations to the present quarterback Aaron Rodgers, for winning the Super Bowl. Evidently, Favre did not do so, and there seems to be no love lost between the two football celebs. The talk revolved around whether sending a nice note of congratulations–what we might call a “blessing”–would have been hypocritical. One said, “If your heart’s not in it, you shouldn’t do it.”

And that raises a question for us: Is a blessing invalidated if one’s heart just isn’t in it? Do we have to “feel” love in order to send love?

The simple truth is that after we do loving things toward people we dislike–even when our hearts are not in it but we are doing this from a sense of obedience to God–we often end up liking them. This is backward to what we would have expected and preferred. Something in us insists that we must like them first and only then do our kind deeds matter.

That removes the faith factor from it, however. Our Lord is honored and pleased when His people do things, not from feeling or emotion, but from the sheer fact that he commanded it and we know it’s the right thing to do.

When we do the acts of love first the emotions will frequently follow.

However, whether they do or not, it is the action Jesus is calling for. That will require faith. But without faith, it is impossible to please God. (Hebrews 11:6)

When we do this–when we act in love toward the person who hates us, curses us, mistreats us, and/or works against us–a number of positive and powerful things result.

Jesus mentions the first two things in the Luke 6:27-36 passage. The rest we deduce from all of Scripture and from knowing how God works and how people behave.

1) We are promised a reward in Heaven.

If someone say we should not work for rewards, we reply that everything we do involves the promise of a reward of one kind or other. We work for the reward of a paycheck, we eat for the reward of good health and energy, we exercise for the reward of health, and so forth.

2) Our reputation goes through the roof. (This is the point of being calls sons of the Most High. It’s a Hebrew expression meaning this is how we will be known.) A follower of Jesus who goes out of his way to demonstrate graciousness to someone who is bitterly opposing him quickly draws the undivided attention of spectators. He becomes the talk of the town in a hurry.

3) The Father is honored. God is thrilled that some of His children actually are practicing His Word.

4) Jesus is pleased. We are living as He lived. We are practicing what He preached. If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them. (John 13:17)

5) The Holy Spirit is liberated to do whatever it is He has planned to do.

It is a fact of life on this planet that the Spirit works through God’s people. But when we refuse to live by faith, to obey the prompting of the Lord, people in need do not receive our ministry or our witness. Quench not the Spirit. (I Thessalonians 5:19)

6) The devil is infuriated. This is not going according to plan. He was counting on you and me acting like the sinful creatures he knows us to be. Instead, we came out of the chute with love a-blazing. Not what he had anticipated.

7) The enemy is puzzled. He expected us to retaliate and return what he had given us. He was even planning his next dose of hostility. Instead we shower him/her with kindness. He has no idea how to respond. He has just received the most powerful Christian witness on the planet.

8) Other believers, also victims of mistreatment from ungodly people, see our behavior and are encouraged to act in love toward their tormentors. Beloved, do not think it strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened to you. (I Peter 4:12) …knowing that the same sufferings are experienced by your brotherhood in the world. (I Peter 5:9)

9) The world outside watches and is amazed. Something unusual is afoot here. People do not normally act this way.

10) Unsaved people considering Christ see our behavior and want what we have found. After an unusual display of love-at-work in the interior life of the Jerusalem church, the word of God spread, and the number of disciples multiplied greatly in Jerusalem, and a great many priests were obedient to the faith.(Acts 6:7)

11) The critics of Christianity are stunned into silence. They delight in highlighting our hypocrisies and calling attention to those occasions when our behavior does not line up with the Lord’s teaching. Suddenly, they receive a powerful example of Christlikeness, one that cannot be dismissed as right-wing fanaticism or religious extremism. …that every mouth may be stopped. (Romans 3:19)

12) And–this is a biggie–the anger within us over the bad treatment we received from the enemy dissolves and disappears.

QUESTION: WHERE WOULD ONE GO ABOUT FINDING INSTANCES OF THIS KIND OF SUPERIOR LOVE?

Three answers, the first two of which are well-known to every believer.

a) God’s love for you and me falls into this category.

Three texts speak this loudly and clearly….

When we were still without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly. For scarcely for a righteous man will one die; yet perhaps for a good man someone would even dare to die. But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (Romans 5:6-8)

We had made ourselves God’s enemies, the Apostle Paul declares, when we were reconciled to God (see Rom. 5:10).

Herein is love, not that we loved God (this could scarcely be called love!), but that God loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins (I John 4:10).

Which puts into perspective I John 3:1–

Behold, what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us that we should be called the children of God!

The believers–forgiven sinners all!–who have not stood in awe of God’s remarkable love have not been paying attention. Something inside us wants to believe God was only doing the reasonable thing in loving creatures so remarkable and lovable as ourselves. But the more of our own unworthiness we see, the more we will value what He did for us.

When the woman anointed Jesus’ feet with her ointment and her tears, some were offended because they were well-acquainted with her previous life. But Jesus pointed out that this woman loved much because she had been forgiven much. (See Luke 7:47)

That God would love such puny, pitiful, rebellious earthlings as you and me speaks volumes about Himself. The Creator God is the ultimate example of loving one’s enemies.

b) Christ’s death on Calvary was an unanswerable display of love for one’s enemies. As the lifeblood drained from His body, our Lord looked into the ravenous faces of the bloodthirsty crowd encircling the cross and prayed, “Father, forgive them. They do not know what they do.” (Luke 23:34)

The Apostle Peter put it like this: Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that you should follow in His steps….who, when He was reviled, did not revile in return; when He suffered, He did not threaten, but committed Himself to Him who judges righteously…. ( Peter 2:21ff.)

c) The third instance is one all too seldom seen but which carries incredible drawing power for the Kingdom of God: a believer who is cruelly treated does the unexpected and loves his enemy.

And with that, we’re back to Luke 6:27ff again.

Is this the most powerful form of love in the world? Is this the variety of love that stuns critics, amazes its friends, exalts God to the highest Heaven, and makes outsiders want it? Is this the ultimate overcoming love?

Yes. It is all of that and more. When we think of one human loving another, what could be more winsome and more powerful than for a follower of Jesus Christ to display the same love-them-at-all-costs as He showed.

We have story after story of this kind of love.

–My friend Jim was unfairly ousted from a pastorate and then became the victim of slanderous stories of misbehavior. I counseled him not to send out the four-page letter defending himself which he had prepared. “The people who believe in you do not need this, and those who oppose you will not believe you.” But, he wanted to know, what was he to do with the hurt feelings and anger he was carrying in his breast?

I suggested he write the person who was spreading the lies. “Send him a love letter, Jim,” I said. “Wish him well, send affection to his family, and assure him of your prayers for him.”

Jim copied me with his letter in which he congratulated the man for his elevation to chairmanship of the deacons and sent his best wishes.

He told me later he received no response to his letter.

–Jeannette was a new believer who try as she might could not bring herself to love her mother. “She was not a nice person,” she said, “and mistreated me. She put me in various foster homes and abandoned me on several occasions. But now she’s old and sickly and wants us to be friends.”

Jeannette could not make herself love. She had prayed for God to give her a love for her mother. But to no avail.

We prayed over the phone asking God to grant her a love for her mother. At the end, I suggested that Jeannette bake a cake and take it to her mother.

The next day she called. “While I was baking the cake, I did not love her. This morning while driving across town to her house, I did not love her. I knocked at her door, and did not love her. But when my mother saw me there with the cake, she burst out crying and hugged me. When I hugged her back, I loved her.”

–I’ve told in other places of the neighbor who cursed me loudly and spectacularly because my trees were shedding in his yard. When I pointed out that the culprit was the small New Orleans yards, and that his own tree shedded in his neighbor’s yard and that everyone just raked our own yards, he cut down his tree. Thereafter, he had free reign to harass me about my trees. Some mornings I would walk out to get the paper and find a pile of leaves in my front door, gifts from my hostile neighbor.

Thereafter, my wife and I began raking his yard. If I didn’t have time to rake our yard, I would dump his leaves onto my own property. On one occasion, when I had raked both our yards and sacked them up and set on the side of the street, he slipped in and got the sacks and dumped their contents on the driveway in the rear of my house.

When I saw that, my anger went through the roof. It was a good thing he never came around at that moment because I would have done something rash.

The next morning, I raked the leaves and bagged them and set them on the curb for the trash men. Then I went out and bought a king cake and divided it with my neighbor. Not a word was ever said by either of us about his behavior.

–On another occasion, when an unhappy church member harassed me about a particular sermon and vowed, “I do not love you,” my wife made him a cake. However, since she did not know the man, on the accompanying note, she got his name wrong. The day after we had the cake delivered to his house, he came bringing it back, telling the church secretary to tell the pastor to learn his name.

With that cake sitting on my office table, I told the Lord,”We’re trying really hard to love this guy, and he’s making it tough!” About that time, I heard children playing above my head. We were in Vacation Bible School that week and the fourth grade class was meeting on the second floor.

We cut that cake into 30 pieces and served those children. The next day, the church member received notes from 30 fourth-graders thanking him for “that wonderful cake you brought by our class.”

It must have been a year later that this man approached me in the church’s kitchen. “Pastor,” he said, “I am so ashamed of my behavior. Would you forgive me?” We hugged, and every time we saw each other after that, we embraced.

–My favorite of all these tales is the way Mitsuo Fuchida, the lead pilot for the Japanese Imperial Fleet that bombed Pearl Harbor, was brought to Christ. His story is told elsewhere on this website. Since it’s rather lengthy, we’ll simply give the link. http://www.joemckeever.com/mt/archives/001491.html

In that story, an 18-year-old volunteer nurse and social worker overcame the hatred she bore toward the Japanese for beheading her missionary parents in order to show them the love of Christ. In so doing, she captured the hearts of many of the Japanese POWs in the hospital where she volunteered. One of them returned home to tell Fuchida her story. That drove him to read the Bible, and the Holy Spirit captured him. Through it all, not one human being had spoke to Fuchida about coming to Christ. It was the example of Margaret Covell back in the states that made the difference.

This is the most powerful love in all the world. It silences the enemy, exalts the Lord, and attracts the lost. It confounds critics, blesses other believers, and makes Jesus proud. It confirms our own faith, demonstrates the reality of Christ, and provides an unanswerable witness to its target.

Potent stuff, this love business.