I say to you who hear, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.
Luke 6: 27, 28
 
First off, when Jesus was saying these things, He was speaking to Himself, for dealing with people who were expressing their hatred and fear of Him would be a regular part of the rest of His earthly life. Also, this is something that God has encountered from the early days of the history of people until this moment in time; we reject His love and follow our own ways, we pour our love out onto other gods of our own choosing, and we do many things and behave in ways that cause God’s heart to be filled with grief for our lost condition; yet, He still accepts us as His own beloved children and forgives us for all of the pain and sadness that we have caused Him. God never stops loving us, and He continually seeks to do what is best for us.
 
Jesus is asking those who know Him to make this attitude of grace, forgiveness, and blessing a central part of who we are and of how we function; yet, He knew that this is one of the hardest things that He could have asked of most of us. It is normal, reasonable, and highly intuitive to develop defenses against people who hold unloving attitudes toward us, and it is totally within human nature to defend ourselves from the physical and from the emotional attacks of others. Jesus is asking us to take a super natural approach to these relationships. He isn’t saying that we should trust these people, that we should follow them, or that we are wrong for feeling the pain that their sinful behaviors have caused us. Christ is saying that we need to let His Spirit change our heart responses to them.
 
The ability to love those who are unloving toward us, to seek the best for those who desire the worst for us, and to think in terms of what would ease the pain in the hearts of people who heap curses on ours is the mark of a person whose own heart has been transformed into one that is like Christ’s. This sort of transformation is hard work, and it is something that needs to be continually addressed; for, people will always attack others who love God, and self defense is a very basic instinct. Like all of the hard stuff that is involved in following Christ, we are not alone in this aspect of life, God continually deals with this issue of attitude toward people who think that they hate Him, and He wants to talk through our own attitudes with us; so, He instructs us to pray for the people who are hurting us. As we seek to love the people who are least loving toward us, we are opening our hearts to God’s most intimate and personal form of transformative change.