Jesus said: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you…” (Matthew 5:44)

Do you have enemies? Perhaps you do, perhaps you don’t. 

If you don’t, perhaps you still have people who you feel are somehow “against” you. They always seem to say the wrong thing at the right time. They foil your plans, put you down, or otherwise try to throw you off course.

In The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes: “The only way to overcome our enemy is by loving him.”*

Imagine a wagon being pulled by powerful horses. The driver is the devil. That wagon, and those four wagon wheels, have a lot of momentum. That’s like evil and hatred. You can’t stop the wagon by doing what the wagon does. You need to do something different to get it to stop.

Love is like a big metal bar that is thrust through the spokes of the wheel. It jars the wagon to a stop and upsets the momentum. In a world that obsesses over muscle, bluster and volume, we can wrongly assume that love is weak and that hate is strong. Although hate can certainly be strong, it’s not the greatest power there is.

Love is an atomic force that jams the Devil’s wheels.

Paul says that our struggle is not against flesh and blood (Ephesians 6:12). In other words, our primary battle is not against people, but against the dark and demonic powers that are behind the hateful or angry decisions and actions that people make. 

So, what’s to be done? We put on the armour of God (Ephesians 6:10-20). We cast off the works of darkness and put on the armour of light (Romans 13:12). And we love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us (Matthew 5:44).

Hate certainly has muscle. But it’s not the currency of Christ. Love is an atomic force that jams the Devil’s wheels.

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Notes:

-Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1959), 147.
-Bible quotes are from the ESV.