But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in Heaven. He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and unrighteous. – Matthew 5:44-45
Each one of us is created by a holy and loving God. He has loved us, rejoiced in us, and relished our uniqueness. We are created with different viewpoints, different skills, and different talents. We are a marvelous tangle of colorful threads knit together for God’s holy purpose.
We all have also fallen short of His glory. We have sinned against Him. Without Him we are unredeemable, even by our good deeds and good intentions. We each have our faults, our sins, and our guilt. We are, by our own capabilities, failures.
But our identity is not in our failure. Our identity is not our sin. We conscribe our identity to the sins we commit and identify others by their apparent sin or apparent goodness. They are neither and neither are we. All humankind is flesh and soul, spiritual and carnal, conquerors and conquered and loved by God.
We hate those who have injured us; those who have caused us direct and deliberate harm. We condemn false apologies and despise the liar. We punish the criminal. We reject the sinner. But Christ did not and He called us to do as Himself.
There is no “other” in God’s creation. If we are all God’s handiwork, we cannot condemn what God has wrought. We cannot compartmentalize and cannot disdain one another as we have been and are the same as them. One man’s actions may have angered us. One woman’s thoughtlessness may have ignited our wrath. We demand an apology from them. We will impose our justice. We may blame them. We resolve never to forgive them and commit ourselves to building grudges.
However, as all have fallen short of the glory of God, all are also invited to return to His embrace. Our sin is not our identity and another’s sin does not make them an enemy. Rather, we are all children of God, whether righteous or unrighteous. It is the shed blood of Christ alone that reconciles us to God. It is not by what we have done well and it is not by what we have failed to do.
There is no “other” in God’s creation. We are all sinners. We are not capable of redeeming ourselves. Sin is the force that alienates us from God. But God longs that all should come to Him and we must do as Christ commands. We must pray for our enemies. For our enemies are not the children that God created. Rather, the enemy is the burden of sin that each person bears. Not the person themselves. We must pray for one another that all are released from the tether of sin by repentance and cleansed by the forgiveness of Christ. We must pray against sin. Not against the sinner.
Written by Janet Keefe
