4 Keys to Growing Spiritual RootsSample

Key 3: Love Your Enemies

Jesus taught a lot about loving your enemies. In multiple Scripture passages, He tells us to not only love our enemies, but also to bless, pray for, and do good to those who hate us, mistreat us, and even persecute us.

Loving your enemies can definitely be a challenge ... but that’s exactly why it helps us grow spiritual roots.

When you purposely decide to obey God and lift up even the smallest prayer for your enemies—even if your prayer is as simple as saying, "Bless them, God!"—your action builds your spiritual muscles. In that moment, you are deciding to master your flesh and force it to submit to God's Holy Spirit in you.

And every time you pray for your enemies ...

Every time you do something nice for someone who mistreated you ...

Every time you choose to believe the best of someone (which, according to 1 Corinthians 13:5, is a required part of love) ...

... you become stronger in the Lord. Those roots go down deeper, making you more stable and more fruitful in the Kingdom.

In Matthew 5:43-48, Jesus even told us that the process of loving our enemies, blessing those who curse us, et cetera actually makes us more like God. He even went so far as to say that doing these things will make us perfect.

How does loving our enemies change our character and help us grow spiritual roots?

Consider these things:

• Loving our enemies is something we can only do with the Holy Spirit’s help.
• Loving our enemies requires us to see people the way God sees them.
• It requires us to bring our thoughts into alignment with the heart of God for a person.

And when we decide to love our enemies—praying and blessing those who spitefully use us, curse us, and even persecute us—we can then pray in sympathy with God’s heart: “Father, help that person to change so that Jesus will no longer be wounded by their actions.”

Loving your enemies and praying for them will make your spiritual roots go deep. The very act of loving those who hate you forces your flesh, your heart, and your soul to conform to the image of Christ.