Love your enemies. What does this mean? How is it to be applied?

Jesus told us to love our enemies. What does this mean? How is it to be applied? How do you define ‘enemy’? Should we let our enemies live with us? Should we let enemies be part of our church communities? How does blessed are you when you are persecuted for righteousness sake (a paraphrase of Matthew 5:10) relate to all this?

In this sermon, Keith Ford explains how churches misapply the love your enemies principle and how this causes grave injustice to victims of abuse.

Keith sets out why an enemy cannot be a Christian. He argues that if an enemy calls himself a Christian, he ought to be put out of the church.

The sermon distinguishes between persecution for righteousness sake which is done by those outside Christ who want to stifle and crush the gospel message, and enemy behaviour which is done by those who simply want to be disrespectful and cruel to others for their own selfish reasons.

Keith Ford is the Senior Pastor at Noranda Church of Christ in Perth, Western Australia. He is an ex-pat American who came to Australia in the early 1980’s as an American sailor and came back three years later to marry the West Aussie girl (Michelle) he met on that visit. Keith and Michelle have 2 adult sons with careers of their own. In the early 1990’s Keith received a degree in Mathematics and Computing Science and worked in the electronic and software industries in Perth until 2012 when he took on his first full time ministry as a teaching and preaching minister.

In the last two years, Keith has completed both a Masters in Theological Studies (MTS) at Morling College’s Vose campus, as well as publishing a book entitled Bitter Fruit: Dysfunction and Abuse in the Local Church published through Wipf & Stock.

Keith is on Twitter. He tweets some good things. For example: the dangers of sentimentalism churches; how sentimentalists minimise abuse and resist giving justice to victims; what real repentance involves; how shallow, pseudo repentance fails to make reparation to the victim who was injured. Sometimes I re-tweet his tweets.

I am currently reading Bitter Fruit. Keith kindly sent me a gift copy, in gratitude for my definition of abuse which he used in his book.

I have added Keith’s sermon to our page Can someone be an abuser and be a Christian?