But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.
~ Jesus Christ, Matthew 5:44,45, NRSV
Jesus’ admonition to “Love your enemies,” is not a directive to love the evil in another person, but to love them with such a pure love, that the divine Love you express toward them, dissolves and disarms the evil.
Jesus never approved of evil. He healed it. He loved it out of others with his clear understanding of the omnipotence and omnipresence of Love that existed under God’s reign.
The “real enemy” is never a person, but the evil motives behind the person’s evil acts. Lust for power, greed, selfishness, hatred, envy, jealousy, are the enemies that need to be eliminated. Tanks, missiles, and bullets will never reach these enemies. Truth and Love are their destroyers!
For world peace, each of us have a role to play. It’s incumbent upon all sincere seekers of peace that humanity’s consciousness be filled with the love of God that wipes out lust for power, position, and territory. The love of God can reach into places of the human consciousness with grand results that human effort may never achieve.
Evan this is just perfect and so helpful as I finalise my readings for Wednesday’s testimony meeting. You set it out so clearly about de-personalising evil. Thank you so much!
Thank you. I needed that simplicity of truth.
Thank you Evan for this very important message. It is so important for us to separate evil from man, and to see man only as God’s own reflection of infinite goodness. We must forgive and see everyone in authority as reflecting the Divine government of peace and harmony for all His children. This helps to bring to light the spiritual reality right where the awful material picture seems to be. God made us to dwell in peace together – in harmony with each other – that is according to His Law. We must be careful not to believe what the material senses are putting out, however real they seem to be and however upsetting. They are mesmeric beliefs – the illusions of error, not reality. Evil has no power to destroy God’s wonderful creation, it is just suggestion which would attempt to separate us from God’s goodness and loving ever-presence, IT CAN’T. God, Divine Love, holds the ONLY power that exists.
I recently discovered an article by DeWitt John which states: “As the emanation of Life, Truth, and Love, man is no more at the mercy of physical violence than is the sunshine. His safety rests on the fact that he lives “in the secret place of the most High”
We must pray and forgive in order to let in the light of Truth and Love and “get out of God’s way” and let him show us His government in operation.
Thank you Evan of this clarity about evil. There really can not be evil, as in a person. But rather evil suggestions about that person. And that is all from Animal Magnatism.
Thank you Evan.
For as long as I can remember I have prayed for peace.
As a little girl, the thought of my older brothers being drafted brought me sadness. It grew to the thought of any humans killing other humans felt senseless and certainly not a part of God’s plan.
Educated knowledge then taught us the need for war which also felt unsettling.
I felt powerless.
Christian Science and those who truly understand it and take the time to share their thoughts have given me a sense of hope in that there are ways for little individual me to do my part.
I no longer feel helpless.
I am grateful.
Amen! And thank you!
A FULL SUIT OF ARMOR , GOD GIVEN
“Clad in the panoply of Love, human hatred cannot reach you.” MBE
I have always taken it to mean that I was safe in Love/God from people hating me
Seeing it today, I saw it saying, human hatred cannot reach our thinking
We can’t hate other countries, politicians, so-called dictators, neighbors,Family, more
We can’t have hatred aimed at us, and we can’t
aim hatred at others
Melissa Baker
This came to me Sunday in church I had
never seen the double meaning.
Melissa,
This is a great thought! Thanks for sharing it!
Evan,
Thanks as always for your clear messages!
Love,
Joanne
Thank you so much for sharing Melissa!
This is a wonderfully perceptive interpretation of such a well known citation!
Thank you Evan for another inspired Spiritview.
As Saint Augustine said: “Hate the sin, but love the sinner”.
Thanks you Evan for the tireless work you put into this blog – providing us crumbs of comfort from Christ’s table every day.
Love your enemies or you will not lose them.
Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896, Mary Baker Eddy, p. 210:32
Sorry to be back. I have never been
taken into hating. When listening in
church it seemed to be a statement
to not have “hatred” in thought, then
we can recognize it as not being able
to be in our experience, or in anyone’s.
Someone said aloud once to someone suffering from another’s sin, “To just love the Hell right out of them!”
Divine Love will always overcome stubborn human will which naturally dissolves hatred and malice everywhere in everyone.
Thank you Evan for placing our feet onto the straight and narrow once again.
“To just love the Hell out of them!”. That is such a powerful thought and directive. Thank you.
But if someone is being abused in any way she or he must separate themselves from the situation, person or place. I have learnt this after repeatedly returning to a family situation out of love and forgiveness, – only to be abused again. I have finally learnt that I can love and forgive from afar.
YES !!!!!!
i HEARD THIS YEARS AGO.
LOVE THE HELL OUT OF HIM..
THANKS FOR ALL OF GOD;S CHILDREN
IT IS ALL OF US EVERYWHERE..
GOD IS LOVE
GOD REIGNS UNOPPOSED!!!!!!!!!!!
I want to share again the experience that changed my life when I was 15 years old on vacation from boarding school in Chicago at Christmas time. A man grabbed me put a gun in my back and said do what I say or I’ll kill you. I looked around and saw no way anyone could help me. He began to pull me to an empty field when a voice in my consciousness said. ‘ You’re only hopeless to see the God in him”
I pulled back and as he looked at me looked at me I looked into his eyes sieeing only good.. He begin pulling me again and I pulled back again and looked in his eyes seeing only good again as I said gently “Leave me alone.”. He then gave me a push and said ” go on then.” What a wonderful life lesson this has been of “Divine love reaching into human consciousness!”
Sorry ” Your only HOPE is to see the God in him”
Wonderful demonstration of only seeing man as God’s reflection in the face of an evil mortal
man threatening. When we seem in dire danger, God is closest and protects us from harm.Thank you so much for sharing this, Marge.
That graphic brought such a smile this morning, where there Seems to be so much
anger and hatred like in the fellow on the left. But we have the green light to shine
and proceed forward in our thinking, despite what others may think or do to try to
stop us. Harmony is our and everyone’s Divine Right… to be at Peace with our own
thinking which will help to heal the world.
What in the human condition has hate ever healed? Thank you Evan for this so important message for all mankind to remember.
So helpful today. Many thanks for this message giving us direction and attitude for every day.
– It is our duty to see every individual as God does – spiritual, perfect, whole, harmonious & healthy. Refuse to accept that anybody can represent anything but God’s own likeness. It’s the right way to view the world.
– “No matter what evil Christ Jesus was presented with – oppression, sin, disease, death – he was undisturbed because he maintained a constant awareness of Truth’s omnipotence in destroying evil. The healing power of Truth is still powerful today. A simple prayer for something disturbing or bad news: “mentally affirm that Truth is omnipotent and active, and overturns error of every kind.” (Christie Hanzlik)
– “Instead of dwelling on what seems to need fixing, our thought can yield to the reality of God’s allness and our perfection as God’s spiritual idea. Our country & world is governed by divine Love – God – alone. A matter-based view of things is an illusion, not reality, and leaders, neighbors, etc. are made in God’s likeness. We don’t have to view life as an endless list of problems to be overcome. Instead, we have the opportunity to see the present perfection of God’s creation and rejoice in it.” (Carol Rounds)
http://www.christiansciencepgh.org/downloads/Articles/Got%20a%20fix-it%20list_%20Here’s%20help%20_%20Christian%20Science%20Sentinel.pdf
Thank you for this article J, so very clear, simple and full of Truth.
Dear Evan,- thank you once again for your message of conviction in the power of Truth to eradicate the evils that seem to prevail in these troubling times, and for your clarity in the need to separate inferior and false motivations from the real man. As you say, it is the motives of lust for power, greed, selfishness, hatred, envy, jealousy, (and may I ad fear) that are the enemies that divine Love destroys… Never a person or persons. These elements of mortal mind do not exist in the divine Mind, so they do not exist in the real man.
Let us all unite in compassionate and effective prayer. Let us seek the consciousness illumined by divine Love, where there are no self-driven, fearful motivations. Let us know with absolute certainty that divine Love is all presence and power, and that this Love wipes out of human consciousness all fear, hatred, aggression, malice, suffering and tears.
Thank you very much dear Evan for today’s SpiritView on loving and forgiving our – only socalled – enemies, because in Truth we have no enemies as God created no such mesmeric error like an enemy, rather He made everything and everybody very good!
Another suitable and simple truth thought came to me, that one idea cannot do harm to another idea of God. And all people are ideas of our loving Father-Mother Mind!
One cannot imagin how healing today’s SpiritView was for me. I struggled with wrong thoughts about a friend who said something to me that troubled me. Then I read this SV and afterwords the weekly lesson sermon and listened for the right understanding. During the afternoon I felt that the erroneous thoughts melted away and in turn loving thoughts about the situation filled my consciousness; and in the evening I had a loving, harmonious and fruitful conversation with this dear friend. Thank you Evan and thank you God!♡
Peace starts always with us loving our neighbor as ourselves. And LOVE is the victor and liberator! ♡
Am also grateful that I can read all the lovely and inspiring comments here!♡
Evan advises us to express pure Love that dissolves and disarms evil. Reminds me of what Mrs. Eddy said,“In patient obedience to a patient God, let us labor to dissolve with the universal solvent of Love the adamant of error,–self-will, self-justification, and self-love,–which wars against spirituality and is the law of sin and death.“ S&H p. 242
Also, I heard someone say earlier today that it’s impossible to create peace if you’ve never experienced it. We can pray to know that Peace is a natural, built-in quality of all of God’s creations, so we can all experience it.