Of all the commands Jesus gave, few are as startling — or as difficult — as this one: love your enemies. It cuts against every natural instinct. When someone wrongs us, we want to retaliate, or at least to withhold our goodwill. But Jesus calls his followers to something the world finds almost incomprehensible: to actively love, bless, and pray for the very people who hurt us. “But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 5:44–45). This is not a suggestion for the spiritually advanced; it is a mark of what it means to belong to God. Here is what it means and how, by grace, it can be done.
What loving your enemies means — and doesn’t
First, we must understand the command rightly. Loving your enemies does not mean having warm feelings toward those who harm you, nor pretending that wrong is not wrong, nor exposing yourself recklessly to ongoing abuse. The love Jesus commands is not a sentiment but a decision — a settled choice to seek the good of another, whatever our feelings. Jesus spells it out in actions: “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you” (Luke 6:27–28).
Notice these are all things we do, not merely feel: do good, bless, pray. This is enormously freeing, because it means we can obey even when the feelings are not there. We may not be able to summon affection for someone who has wronged us, but we can choose to wish them well, to speak kindly of them, to help them if they are in need, and to pray for them. The feelings, in time, often follow the actions — but the command lays hold of the will first.
Do good, and refuse revenge
Loving an enemy shows itself most clearly in refusing revenge and returning good for evil. This runs so deeply against our nature that Scripture repeats it again and again. “Repay no one evil for evil... Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God... Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good” (Romans 12:17, 19, 21). The Christian breaks the cycle of retaliation not by weakness but by a higher strength — the strength to absorb a wrong rather than pass it on.
This is intensely practical. It can mean returning a soft answer for a harsh one, doing a kindness for someone who has slighted us, or simply refusing to nurse the grudge and plot the payback. Proverbs pictures it vividly: “If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat, and if he is thirsty, give him water to drink” (Proverbs 25:21). Even the older law commanded that a man help his enemy’s stray animal (Exodus 23:4–5). Loving your enemies is not passive; it actively seeks their good, and in doing so it disarms the power of evil.
Leave justice and vengeance to God
How can we let go of the desire for revenge? Only by entrusting justice to God. We are not called to overlook evil as though it did not matter, but to hand the matter to the one Judge who will set all things right. “Never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord’” (Romans 12:19). This is what makes enemy-love possible without becoming a denial of justice: we release our grip on the scales because we trust that God holds them.
This frees us from the corrosive burden of bitterness. Unforgiveness and the craving for revenge are heavy chains, and they harm the one who carries them more than the one they are aimed at. When we place the wrong in God’s hands, we are set free — free to love, free to move on, free from being ruled by what someone else did to us. Peter draws it together: “Do not repay evil for evil or reviling for reviling, but on the contrary, bless, for to this you were called, that you may obtain a blessing” (1 Peter 3:9).
The pattern is God himself — and the cross
Why should we love our enemies? Because that is exactly how God has loved us. Jesus grounds the command in the character of the Father, who “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matthew 5:45). God pours out kindness even on those who reject him. And supremely, he loved us while we were his enemies: “while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son” (Romans 5:10).
The cross is the ultimate picture of enemy-love. As they nailed him to it, Jesus prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). We are called to love our enemies because we were the enemies God loved, and because we follow a Saviour who prayed for his executioners. To love an enemy is to act like our Father and to walk in the footsteps of our Lord. Jesus even makes it a mark of true sonship — the family likeness of those who belong to God.
It is only possible by grace
Let us be honest: this command is beyond us in our own strength. Loving an enemy runs so hard against our nature that we cannot do it by willpower alone. It is a supernatural love, and it must be supplied by God. The very love we are told to give is first the love we have received — “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Romans 5:5). We love our enemies with a love that is not naturally our own but is given to us by the Spirit.
This means the way to grow in enemy-love is to keep going back to God for it — to pray for a heart softened toward those who have wronged us, to dwell on how much we ourselves have been forgiven, and to ask the Spirit to produce in us the love we cannot manufacture. Praying for an enemy is often the beginning: it is very hard to keep hating someone you are sincerely praying for, and God frequently uses that prayer to change our own hearts as much as anything else. Those who have suffered greatly and still forgiven — even in the darkest places of human cruelty — bear witness that this love, though impossible to us, is possible with God.
What enemy-love accomplishes
Loving an enemy is not a naïve or ineffective response; it is, in God’s hands, a powerful one. It breaks the endless cycle of retaliation that keeps hatred alive, absorbing an offence rather than passing it on. It guards our own hearts from the poison of bitterness, which harms the one who carries it far more than its object. And it bears a witness the world cannot ignore, for nothing so clearly marks a person as belonging to God as a love that reaches even to those who wrong them.
Scripture even hints that such love can be the very thing God uses to change an enemy’s heart. “If your enemy is hungry, feed him... for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head” (Romans 12:20) — an image not of revenge but of a kindness so unexpected it melts hostility and awakens shame and, sometimes, repentance. Many a hardened opponent has been won not by argument but by undeserved love. We are not promised that every enemy will be changed, but we are promised that the love itself is never wasted, for it is the love of God flowing through us into a world that desperately needs it.
Where to begin
So how do you begin to love an enemy? Start with prayer — pray for them by name, asking God to bless them and to change your own heart. Refuse revenge, and leave the justice to God. Look for a concrete good you can do, however small, and do it. Guard your tongue from repaying reviling with reviling. And keep looking to the cross, remembering that you too were once an enemy, loved and forgiven at infinite cost.
Jesus ends his teaching on this with a breathtaking call: “You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48) — perfect, in context, in this very matter of love that reaches even to enemies. We will not reach it fully in this life, but we are to press toward it, and every step is a growing likeness to God. To love your enemies is one of the clearest signs that the grace of God is real in you — a love the world cannot explain, because it comes from a Father the world does not know. Ask him for it, and begin.