Love Your Enemies and the Freedom of Forgiveness

When Someone Who Hurt You Doesn't Deserve Forgiveness

Have you ever been hurt by someone, and felt completely justified in staying angry? Not a petty annoyance, but a real wrong that caused real pain. Part of you knows the grudge isn't helping, and part of you is certain they haven't earned your forgiveness.

This week, as our series Jesus the Revolutionary moves into some of His harder teachings where Jesus tells us to love our enemies. Not tolerate them. Love them. And before we write that off as impossible or naive, it's worth asking what He actually meant, because it turns out forgiveness is less about the other person than we think.

What Holding a Grudge Actually Costs You

Resentment promises to protect us. It feels like keeping the upper hand, like justice held in reserve. In reality it does the opposite.

Ade laid out what carrying unforgiveness does to us. Mentally, it keeps a wound open, feeding prolonged anger, bitterness and hostility, and many studies link it to depression and psychological distress. Physically, chronic resentment holds the body in a stress response, raised heart rate, raised blood pressure, stress hormones, and over time that's associated with a weakened immune system and poor sleep. Socially, it pulls us toward revenge and avoidance, and slowly makes us more defensive and cynical with everyone, not just the person who hurt us.

Mike, one of the hosts, has asked GPs about this over the years, and he's seen it in his own life too. When he's been hurt and gone over it again and again in his head, it affects his day, his sleep, his health. However big or small the offence, the grudge takes its toll.

What Jesus Meant by Love Your Enemies

Here's the passage, from Matthew 5:43-48 (NIV):

You have heard that it was said, "Love your neighbour and hate your enemy." 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 the unrighteous.

The picture of sun and rain matters. In the ancient world these were two of the most important gifts going, the difference between food growing and not. And they fall on everyone, the good and the not so good alike. God's goodness has no favourites.

It helps to know what Jesus' first hearers were living through. Judea was under Roman military occupation, and soldiers could legally force a Jew to drop whatever they were doing and carry their gear for miles, unpaid. There were freedom fighters, the Zealots, who treated killing Romans and refusing taxes as holy duty. Tax was collected by local Jews who took everything above Rome's cut as their own wage, backed by Roman force. They were hated, listed alongside thieves and barred from the temple. And anyone who wasn't a Jew, a Gentile, was considered unclean and largely despised. The Dead Sea Scrolls even carry the line, "love the sons of light, hate the sons of darkness."

So when the culture read "love your neighbour", it meant love your fellow Jew. Into that, Jesus says love your enemies. It was a genuinely radical thing to say.

It was also a world built on reciprocation. A greeting earned a greeting, a favour earned a favour. Jesus asks for something that breaks the whole system, what Ade called a pure gift mentality. Give without expecting the return. As Jesus puts it, even the tax collectors love the people who love them back. Loving people who don't love you back is a different thing altogether, and Ade was honest that we need God's help to do it.

Why Loving Your Enemies Is an Action, Not a Feeling

In English we hear "love" and think romance. Greek had more precise words. Eros is romantic love. Philia is the deep loyalty of friendship. The word Jesus uses here is agape, an unconditional, selfless love that seeks the best for another person, whether we feel warmly toward them or not.

That changes everything about the command. Jesus isn't asking us to feel fond of someone who hurt us. He's asking us to act for their good, in a way that doesn't come naturally. And He pairs it with something interesting, pray for those who persecute you. It's very hard to genuinely pray for someone's good while nursing a grudge against them. The act of praying slowly forces us to see them less as a monster and more as a flawed, broken human being. Which, Ade noted, is probably part of why God asks us to do it. It changes our heart as much as anything.

Forgiveness and Reconciliation Aren't the Same Thing

This is where a lot of us get stuck, so it's worth being clear.

Forgiveness takes one person. You can choose, in your own heart, to release the debt someone owes you, whatever they do next. Reconciliation takes two, and it needs real change from the other person. It's often the goal, but it isn't always safe or even possible.

Jesus commands forgiveness. He does not command reconciliation. As Ade put it later, loving your enemies does not mean being a doormat. Some people will keep harming you no matter what you do. You can forgive someone and still put firm boundaries in place, step back from a toxic situation, and treat them with professional respect rather than trying to please them. Forgiveness sets you free on the inside. It doesn't oblige you to walk back into harm.

How a Grudge Turns You Into the Person Who Hurt You

Ade talked about something called the mirroring effect. Repay hate with hate, violence with violence, and your enemy ends up dictating your behaviour. Little by little, you start acting like the very person whose behaviour you can't stand. The thing you hate in them takes root in you.

Forgiveness is what breaks that chain. Refusing to pay back negative with negative stops the cycle dead. It's one person deciding not to pass the hurt along.

That's why Jesus ties all this to family resemblance. In that culture, a son was expected to act like his father. For us, loving the way God loves becomes the proof that we belong to Him. Forgiveness stops the cycle of harm for harm, restores relationships, and brings inner peace.

Jesus later raises the bar even higher. "A new command I give you: love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another" (John 13:34). Not just as you love yourself, but as He loves you. And in Matthew 6:14-15 He makes the stakes plain, that if we forgive others, our Father forgives us, and if we won't, we hold something shut in ourselves too.

Where the Conversation Went

Is the damage from unforgiveness really that serious?

Mike and Sharon both said yes, from experience. Sharon described not realising she'd been holding unforgiveness toward someone until a friend asked, "are you angry?" She'd been seeing the person through a lens where everything they did looked bad. When she finally forgave them, nothing about them had changed, but suddenly she could see they were a good person after all. The grudge hadn't protected her. It had made her world smaller.

How do you get from stopping the resentment to actually praying for someone?

Talita named how hard that gap is to cross, and Sharon agreed there's a step we often skip. Before trying to love someone, we have to properly acknowledge how we feel, rather than squashing it down and papering over it. Sharon pointed to the book Forgive, Release and Be Free by Joff Day, which walks through exactly that process. Mike added a practical move, pause and name the debt first. What is it you feel you're owed? A damaged reputation? Real harm? Get honest about that, then bring it to God and ask for help.

Doesn't forgiving just feel like letting them win?

Ellis put it plainly, that he's quick to call out unfairness and finds it hard to let go, because it can feel like the other person wins. Mike understood that completely. Someone has to absorb the cost of a wrong, he said, and forgiveness means choosing to carry it yourself rather than demanding they pay. It's genuinely hard. The thing that makes it possible is remembering how much we've already been forgiven by God.

What if we're the one who caused the hurt?

WorthyLife shared that Matthew 5:23-24, leaving your gift at the altar to go and put things right first, is a life verse, because often it's them who needs to reconcile. Sharon noted how much easier it is to see what others have done to us than to notice when we've become the difficult one for someone else.

Does forgiving mean forgetting, and have you failed if you can't?

Alicia reflected that forgiveness doesn't mean you've failed if you can't forget or reconcile. Sharon's experience is that once she truly forgives, the memory doesn't vanish, but it stops living at the front of her mind. It gets filed away. She hasn't technically forgotten, but it no longer runs her thinking.

Corrie ten Boom and the hand she couldn't lift

Mike shared the story that sits underneath all of this. Corrie ten Boom survived Ravensbrück, where her sister died. Years later a man approached her after a church service with his hand out. She recognised him instantly as one of the cruellest guards from the camp. He'd since become a Christian, and he asked her directly, "will you forgive me?"

She froze. She knew she could not generate forgiveness in her own strength. So she prayed, "Jesus, help me," and made the willed choice to lift her hand and place it in his. The moment they touched, she felt God's love flood through her. She later wrote that forgiveness is not an emotion but an act of the will, enabled by God.

That's the whole point, Mike said. Left to ourselves, our ability to forgive the worst things can be close to zero. The strength comes from God, when we bring Him the pain and the size of the debt and ask Him to do what we can't.

Was there anything that didn't fit in the talk?

Ade pointed to Galatians 5:22-23, the fruit of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. The list doesn't include frustration, minor grievances or major ones. It makes a simple self-check. In the situation you're in right now, are your fruits the ones on that list, or something that isn't? If it's not there, and especially if it's negative, that's the thing to deal with.

How to Start Forgiving Someone This Week

Forgiveness isn't a feeling you wait for. It's a choice you make, with God's help. Here are a few honest starting points from the talk and the conversation.

1. Name the debt. Before anything else, get specific about what you actually feel you're owed. You can't release a debt you won't admit exists.
2. Let yourself feel it first. Don't jump straight to "I'm meant to love them." Acknowledge the hurt properly, so you're dealing with it rather than burying it.
3. Pray for the person, even reluctantly. You don't have to mean it perfectly. Mike only ever started praying for people because his wife did. Praying for someone slowly changes how you see them.
4. Ask God for what you don't have. Like Corrie, you can make the choice to lift your hand and ask Him for the strength you can't manufacture yourself.
5. Run the fruit check. When something's bothering you, ask whether what's rising in you is on Galatians' list, or not.

One Last Question

Ade closed with a challenge rather than a conclusion. Unconditional love is our proof of family resemblance to God. So take a look at yours this week and ask, honestly, is there room for improvement?

Most of us, if we're honest, would say yes. And that's okay, because this was never about forgiving in our own strength. It's about receiving the grace God has already poured on us, and letting it flow out to the people who are hardest to love.

If you're wrestling with forgiving someone, you don't have to do it alone. We'd love to have you in the conversation. Join us at crowd.church, and if you've got questions about faith, our Alpha Course runs online on Wednesday evenings, 7:30pm. No pressure, no wrong questions, just a safe place to explore.