“Loving Your Enemies” was a sermon written by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. while he was in jail for the Montgomery bus boycott. This is an excerpt from that most excellent sermon:
“To our most bitter opponents we say: ‘…Do to us what you will and we shall continue to love you. Throw us in jail and we shall still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you. Be assured that we shall wear you down by our capacity to suffer. We shall so appeal to your heart and your conscience that we will not only win freedom for ourselves, but we shall win you in the process.'”
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King rightly understood that the Sermon On The Mount is not “wishful thinking”; it is “kingdom living”. Jesus actually expects us to teach one another how to live like this.