How do I love someone I don’t even like?

Love one another. This is what Jesus says to us in John chapter 13 as he’s in the upper room, gathered with his disciples, sharing a final meal with him. Jesus knows that the clock is ticking and that his time with his followers is about to come to an end. And so he spends the time, if you read through John 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17, giving final instructions, offering encouragement, speaking into the lives of those who have walked with him for the past three years.

And Jesus just drops this teaching in the middle of John 13 that he says is a new command, which is interesting because love one another is also in the Old Testament.

We took a look at all of these things in my message this last Sunday. You can go back and you can watch that message if you happen to miss it. But the question for us, and it’s one that we get often as pastors, is essentially something like, how do I love somebody that I don’t really love? You know what I mean?

How do I love someone that I don’t really like?

How do I invest in them? And this is a constant challenge for all of us because we are finite human beings. We all have people. All of us have people in our lives who are either perpetually difficult to love, difficult to continue to love, or just for a season. We find it challenging to be able to love.

And what we end up doing is we end up getting worn out and trying to continue to love one another, love one another, love one another, especially when the other person isn’t reciprocating or their attitude is not what it should be. And so what do we do in those situations? We know that Jesus says that we’re to love one another.

We know that Jesus said that we’re to love even those who hate us and to pray for our enemies and to pray for those who hurt us. So how do we do that?

And this is not all new information here. This is an ongoing challenge and ways that we can be able to process this together. But just here’s some initial thoughts that I would share today about that question of how do I love someone that I don’t really like right now? One of the first questions, questions that we should ask ourselves is, how am I defining love?

How am I defining love?

Because if we are defining love based on feelings, our feelings are going to very often betray us and keep us from going forward and loving another person. But if we’re defining love the way that Jesus defines love as we see in John 13, we need to understand that the love of a Christian is different than the love of the world.

It is to be different because there’s something else going on. We have access to a different type of love as followers of Jesus. And so we have to ask ourselves, am I seeking to love this person?

Because I’m waiting for a feeling here and I’m just not feeling anything right now for this other person. We need to slow down and ask ourselves that question. Another question that we can ask ourselves is, where is my love coming from? Where’s my love coming from? We all have limited resources, and when we love somebody in our own strength and according to our own resources and wisdom, we’re eventually going to get burnt out.

But there’s something that Jesus says a couple chapters later in John chapter 15, and I just want to read a couple of those verses. In John 15:5, Jesus says, I am the vine and you are the branches. If you remain in me and I remain in you, then you will bear much fruit. Apart from me, you can do nothing.

And then a couple verses later, in verse nine of chapter 15 of John, as the Father has loved me, Jesus says, so have I loved you, now remain in my love.

And Jesus is using that to talk about the way that we are to live in daily dependence upon the Lord. In the same way that Jesus depended upon his heavenly Father when he was here on the earth, Jesus abided in his Father’s love. So we are therefore to abide in Jesus love. And what does abide mean? It basically means to remain, to stay, to stick closely to.

And so this is a moment by moment dependence upon God to fill us with his spirit and to give us the energy and resources that we need to keep loving, to not just love one time, but to keep loving even when we feel dry and worn out. We are the branches. Jesus is the vine. We find life from him. And apart from him, we don’t have the capacity to continue to love when our resources are depleted.

It’s a matter of simple economics. You can’t keep on giving something that you don’t have yourself. Eventually you’re going to run out. So we need to then be replenished. And that comes from abiding in the Lord, as Jesus talks about there.

Another question to ask ourselves is, what is it that is making this person so difficult to love? We have to understand that we often don’t have perfect perception, that our own insights, our own thinking, is not perfect. And so it is good for us to take a step back and gain heavenly perspective as to what is going on with this person and to gain God’s heart for this person and to understand that what may be upsetting us and frustrating about this person and making it difficult for us to love them

is often stuff that is on the surface. But they are often things underneath even that that can, if we are open to it, incline our hearts to more patience and to more compassion. For an individual to understand the bigger picture, as God always understands the bigger picture, we need to not rely on our own understanding, but to understand that God has the whole picture here and we need him to give us wisdom and discernment that can hopefully then develop even greater levels of patience.

And then lastly, a last question is, am I, Are you ever a difficult person to love? Yes, this person may be difficult to love. And so we may remind ourselves that Jesus died for the sins of that person. But Jesus also died for your sins, and he died for my sins. And each of us, if we’re to be honest with each other, are at times difficult to love or more difficult to love than at other times.

And so that can give us a greater measure of grace and love. All of these things point us back to the unmistakable truth that Jesus says love one another. And he doesn’t put conditions around it other than to say, as I have loved you, so you are to love one another. It doesn’t mean that the other person will always be grateful.

It doesn’t mean that the other person is always going to be loyal to you.

Because when Jesus washed the disciples feet in John 13, how many pairs of feet did he wash? He even washed Judas feet. He washed Peter’s feet. Even though knowing Peter would eventually deny him and that Judas would eventually betray him. Jesus love is not conditional for the kind of love that he’s calling us to give to one another.

We can’t do it on our own, but we can rely on him for that. Well, I hope that that’s helpful to you. I know that it is for me. And let’s just continue to spur each other on as the Bible says, to continue to love and to continue to persevere in loving the people that God places around us. Thanks so much for joining us today.