You Can’t ‘Love God’ And Hate Your Brother

Have you ever stopped to realize just how incredibly counter-cultural the Christian call to love really is?

Any clown can be nice to a stranger, and can do good to those who return the favor. But Christ calls us to so much more than that.

Jesus knew exactly what he was doing when he set up the hated Samaritans as the good guy in the parable, the Roman-collaborating tax collector as the honorable example of repentence, and praised the piety of a repentant prostitute or slut for her humble act of worship in the home of a scornful pharisee.

These were the people that decent God-fearing religious folk of Jesus’ day would cross the street just to avoid. Gentiles and apostates were considered every bit as morally unclean as a leper was medically and physically unclean.

But Jesus loves them. He made a point of reaching out to them.

And even after publicly ripping the Pharisees a new one, calling them culturally scandalous things like ‘whitewashed tombs full of dead men’s bones’, he STILL lamented for Jerusalem, when he said, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!”

John, like the other apostles was a little slow on the uptake. He was raised to see Samaritans as the corruption of everything good about being Jewish. As a disciple, he was eager to flex his spiritual authority by calling down fire from heaven to purge the world of such evil. Jesus had bigger plans. He was going to save them and turn them into (can you imagine?) family.

Years later, as an apostle, that same John writes to the Church about that Greatest of Commands Jesus gave us, and what it looks like to live out Christian love in the way Jesus himself taught us.

John isn’t pulling any punches. If ‘loving our enemy’ feels easy, we’re just not doing it right, and we’re probably leaving out that one person or group we assume he couldn’t possibly be calling us to love.

Oh surely he doesn’t mean Larry over there. Or that group of annoying people who have been picketing across the street from my work all week. Or that neighbor who throws his dog’s turds over my fence.

Yup.

Even him.

The PERFECT Gift For The Art Loving Warrior

Dear Fellow Warriors: My new book just dropped, GILES VOL. I: The Biblical Warrior Collection. It’s a full color coffee table compilation of my biblical paintings over the last 20yrs. As you know, I don’t depict the biblical men in this book as sweet bearded women but rough troublemakers who shook all of hell’s habitations. It’s a great gift for the male and female scrappy warriors on your Christmas list. Young kids will love it too. 70+ original paintings. 234 pages with the scriptural inspiration behind each painting. It’s a beautiful book.

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