6 Principles to Help You Love Other People, Even Difficult Ones
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Jesus said the greatest command is to love God, but the second greatest command is to love people. I will admit that sometimes loving people seems like a much bigger challenge than loving God. Yet we are commanded throughout the Bible to love people. So to help you, I want to share six principles that will help you do this.
One caveat: If you are married, then this principle will apply differently. The main difference is you have made a commitment to your spouse to be with them until death do you part. That covenant requires you to work out any potential differences you and your spouse may have.
The world has a misguided view of love. It often defines love as acceptance. According to the world, the evidence you love the person is you love their behavior, their lifestyle, and everything about them. That is not true. Love means you love the person. It does not require you to love their behavior. God loved us while we were sinners, but he did not and does not love the sins we commit.
There may be people in your life who are engaged in sinful lifestyles you don’t approve of. That does not give you permission to be self-righteous and judgmental. But, we must continue to love the person the same way God still loves sinners today. The challenge we have is separating the behavior from the person. We often tie them together and we often see their sin and define them by their sin.
This is why God’s love is so different. He looks at our sinful condition and sees our need. Sometimes as Christians we can be quick to judge and when that happens, we lose our compassion. All we see is their sin and we don’t see their need to be set free from that sin.
When Jesus walked the earth, he had this habit of sitting and eating with sinners. Never once did he accept their sinful lifestyle, condone their sin, or engage in it. However, he knew that they were lost without him, so he had to attempt to reach them. After all, that is why he came.
Let’s make sure we are loving sinners and recognizing that loving the sinner does not mean we must love and accept their sin. As we love them, the hope is they would experience the love of God and recognize he wants to call them out of their sin and into a new life in Christ.
Tax collectors were among the worst sinners at that time, and people hated them. Yet we find Jesus in Levi’s home with other tax collectors and disreputable sinners sitting down and having a meal. Here is how the Pharisees responded.
If there was social media back then, I am sure this image of Jesus eating with sinners would have gone viral. A Pharisee would have posted this with a caption, Jesus eats with scum or Jesus seen with devious tax collectors and other horrible sinners.
Jesus knew he would get backlash from the religious leaders, yet he did it anyway. That’s because love takes courage. If you are going to love like Jesus, you will need some courage too. Loving people, especially sinners and those we self-righteously deem as unworthy of our love, is about building bridges. When you seek to do this, sometimes the ones who won’t like the bridge you are trying to build are those in the church. But build them anyway because we have a responsibility to reach those who are lost with the gospel and to go after sheep who may have wandered away. This is going to take courage, but remember if we don’t do it, nobody else will.
As you go forward and you choose to love people I will leave you with one thought that sums up why we need to be people who love others.
Photo credit: ©Getty Images/carles miro
