A Gentle Answer by Scott Sauls

Author:Scott Sauls
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2020-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

LOVE YOUR ENEMIES, JUST AS YOU HAVE BEEN LOVED

This future hope to which Jesus directs us is just one of the reasons why we can endure hardship, criticism, and persecution. In addition to urging us to look ahead to the world that is to come, he also urges us to look back to the way he loved us and gave himself for us: “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8, emphasis mine).

While we were still sinners. While we were still opposed to him. While we were turning our backs on him. While we were mocking and maligning and mischaracterizing him. While we were persecuting him and blaming him and uttering all kinds of evil against him. That is precisely when Christ died for us.

Understanding the lengths to which Jesus went to reconcile himself to us can powerfully motivate us to endure opposition and respond to our opponents not with defensiveness and retaliatory anger, but instead with love. For the gentle answer of Jesus toward our violent and oppressive ways has turned our wrath away, and has drawn us in to love him, just as he has loved us.

In the biographical film Schindler’s List, Oscar Schindler, nemesis to Nazis and protector of Jewish refugees, says, “Power . . . is when we have every justification to kill, and we don’t.”17 This was precisely the stance that Jesus Christ assumed when he gave his life for us on the cross. Because we sinned against him, because we perpetrated violence and injury to both his Name and his Person, Jesus had every justification to kill us . . . and he didn’t.

It is because we have been treated with such kindness, such grace, such gentleness that we ought to be the most difficult people in the world to offend. Christ chose to turn God’s justifiable wrath away from us by absorbing that very wrath himself through substitution, sacrifice, and forgiveness. His is a radical forgiveness that was bought with persecution, blood, and martyrdom. It is Christ’s unmerited love for us that serves as the basis for not only becoming the best kinds of friends, but also the best kinds of enemies that the world will ever know.

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