Love Your Enemies
"You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.'
But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you,
that you may be children of your heavenly Father,
for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good,
and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.
For if you love those who love you, what recompense will you have?
Do not the tax collectors do the same?
And if you greet your brothers only, what is unusual about that?
Do not the pagans do the same?
So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect" (Mt 5:43-48).
Repressed anger is anger
In our modern culture, many Christians are afraid to identify their enemies. They therefore do not apply Jesus' teaching to these broken relationships.
This is one of the worst sins of "Church ladies" and "pious babies." They wrongly imagine that it is "not nice" to call people enemies and convince themselves that they have no ill-will toward others. They wrongly suppose that if they called anyone an enemy, they would be committing a sin against the law of love.
Silent rage is rage.
Cold anger is anger.
Passive aggression is aggression.
Forgiveness does not mean condoning sin. It means identifying evil done by others and deliberately forgiving the evildoers in spite of what their sins deserve.
We cannot obey Jesus' command to love our enemies unless we are willing to recognize who our enemies are.
In our day, we especially need to apply Jesus law of love to our worst enemies: the antichrists who abused children, the antichrists in the modern media, and the antichrists who are murdering Christians around the world.