When was the last time you had an experience where you wanted to never see someone again? Your blood boiled over, and you felt like yelling, screaming, swearing, or the like? A fight burst out with another person and fury flooded your mind? When was the last time you were agonizingly angry at someone?
Paul has good news: “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12)."
What is significant about Paul’s first statement? We do not fight against flesh and blood! This means people are not the problem! Even when rage fumes out of your ears toward someone, we need to remember that people are not the problem.We fight against demonic
forces. People are just the tools that they attempt to use to divide, destroy, and diminish relationships.
forces. People are just the tools that they attempt to use to divide, destroy, and diminish relationships.
Rather than pinpoint anger onto someone else, we need to recognize that the devil wants us to be in fights and fractured relationships. He wants friendships to end and people to not support one another. The devil wants issues to divide congregations and little things to be magnified as if they were major. The devil desires us to write off people and punish them by pushing them away. This is the devil’s plan. God’s plan is for us to live according to the truth: love covers a multitude of sins.
When we choose to love rather than fight, we war against our flesh and the devil’s plan. We go against our nature to choose what glorifies God. We act in the image that He intended for us, because we act as Jesus would. We need to choose to love the people regardless of what they do, how they speak, and how they affect us. We can choose to arise to the call to love, even when we don’t feel like. That’s when we operate according to God’s strength, for when we least feel like loving, God can show up and love through us if we allow Him.
How serious is the devil about dividing us and ruining relationships? Very. He has organized his fellow fallen angels into war-ready ranks like soldiers. He has given specific missions of attack to bring people down. The devil desperately desires to get people warring against people. But God wants us to join ranks with one another and take a stand against the demonic forces. God wants us to choose unity and count the cost.
It might seem unbearable to love the unlovable, but Jesus did. Jesus loves the very people who sent Him to the cross, both you and me. He loves us to the point of death and willingly died for us out of the context of pure love. How strong is our love? Does it last only when it is being served and puffed up by others? Is it willing to endure a little annoyance from time to time? Or do we persevere and longsuffer in our love on behalf of Jesus for those who don’t know Him yet or don’t know Him well? Love is what transforms. We can choose love.
Maybe today is the day to call up an old friend that you had a falling out with. Maybe today is the day to apologize for that statement. Maybe today is the day to reach out to a neighbor or familiar cashier. Maybe it’s the day to buy the person behind you their lunch. Today is the day to choose love like never before.