Love of the World Today
Part Two: When Love Has to Go Further Than Feeling
“Bear with one another [regardless of any fault], and forgive each other readily and freely, as the Lord has forgiven you; so you also must forgive. Beyond all these things put on and wrap yourselves in [unselfish] love, which is the perfect bond of unity [for everything is bound together in agreement when each one seeks the best for others].” Colossians 3 verses 13 to 14 (AMP)
In Part One, we laid the foundation. We established that love is not primarily a feeling but a decision, that it is not something you manufacture from within yourself but something you receive from God and channel outward to the people around you. We looked at what love is, where it comes from, and what it is supposed to look like in the closest relationships of your life. But Part One gave you the easier version. It spoke of love when the conditions are relatively manageable, when the person you are called to love is present, available, and at least broadly well-intentioned towards you.
Part Two is for the harder cases:
It is for the marriage where something has broken, and the warmth has not yet returned. It is for the family relationship that carries decades of unresolved pain. It is for the friendship that ended badly, the colleague who made your working life a misery, the person who wronged you in a way you did not deserve, and has never acknowledged it. It is for the situation where the idea of love feels not merely difficult but genuinely impossible. Because here is the truth that every serious follower of Christ eventually has to face: God does not call us to love only the people who are easy to love. He calls us to love the way He loves. And the way He loves does not change based on whether the person in front of Him deserves it.
The real test of love is not how you treat the people who treat you well. It is how you treat the ones who do not.
THE MOMENT THAT STOPPED THE WORLD
On the 2nd of October 2019, in a Dallas courtroom, a young man named Brandt Jean stood up to deliver a victim impact statement. He was eighteen years old. His older brother, Botham Jean, a twenty-six-year-old accountant originally from the Caribbean island of St Lucia, had been shot dead in his own apartment on the 6th of September 2018 by a former Dallas police officer named Amber Guyger. She had come off a fourteen-hour shift, entered what she believed to be her own flat, and shot the man she found inside. Botham Jean was sitting on his sofa, eating ice cream. He died at the scene. He had done nothing wrong. The trial had been long and painful. Guyger was convicted of murder. The Jean family had sat through every day of the proceedings. Brandt had watched. He had waited. He had, by his own honest admission in later interviews, spent a period of that year consumed by a rage that made him think about revenge. The anger, he said, was real and it was total.
Then came the day of the victim impact statements. One by one, family members took the stand. When Brandt Jean's turn came, he looked across the courtroom at Amber Guyger and said something that nobody in that room or watching on television was prepared for. He told her he did not hate her. He told her he loved her as a person. He told her he did not want her to go to jail. He said he wanted the best for her, and that he knew that was exactly what his brother Botham would have wanted for her, too. He told her that if she was truly sorry, he would forgive her. And then, in a moment that reduced the courtroom to silence and then to tears, he turned to the judge and asked: I do not know if this is possible, but can I hug her, please?
The judge said yes. Brandt Jean stepped down from the witness stand, walked across the courtroom floor, and held the woman who had killed his brother for nearly a full minute. The footage went around the world within hours. Legal professionals with decades of experience said they had never seen anything like it. The district attorney called it an extraordinary act of healing. Journalists, commentators, and millions of ordinary people who watched the clip sat with a question they could not quite put into words: Where does a person find the capacity to do that? Brandt Jean answered that question himself. In interviews after the trial he explained his faith openly and without embarrassment. He said he was able to forgive Guyger because of what he believed about God's own forgiveness. He said: I know that every time I ask God for forgiveness, He forgives me. So who am I to not forgive someone who asks?
He also said something that stayed with many people long after the footage faded from the news cycle. He said: This is what you have to do to set yourself free.
Forgiveness was not what Brandt Jean gave Amber Guyger. It was what he gave himself, through the grace of God.
He had not planned to say what he said. He told reporters afterwards that he was surprised by his own words, because they did not line up with how he had been feeling. He had worked through the anger gradually across that year, he explained, until he understood that keeping it inside him was destroying him rather than affecting her. He made the decision, quietly, before he took the stand, to release it. Notice what Brandt Jean's story reveals about the nature of love. He did not forgive Guyger because the feeling had arrived and made it easy. He forgave her as an act of will, a deliberate decision made from faith rather than from emotion, and the freedom he described afterwards was the fruit of that decision. The feeling followed the choice. It did not precede it. This is exactly what the Bible describes. Forgiveness is not something you wait to feel. It is something you choose to do, and God meets you in the choosing.
WHAT THE BIBLE ACTUALLY SAYS ABOUT FORGIVENESS
“Then Peter came to him and asked, 'Lord, how often should I forgive someone who sins against me? Seven times?' 'No, not seven times,' Jesus replied, 'but seventy times seven!'” Matthew 18 verses 21 to 22 (NLT)
Peter's question to Jesus was, in its way, quite generous by the standards of his day. The rabbis of his time generally taught that forgiving someone three times was sufficient. Peter was offering to double that and add one. He must have thought he was being admirably gracious. Jesus replied with a number that was never meant to be calculated. Seventy times seven is not 490 occasions, after which you are finally free to stop. It is Jesus' way of saying: remove the limit entirely. Stop counting. Forgiveness in the kingdom of God is not a finite resource you dole out in measured portions until the supply runs dry. It is a posture, a way of being, a decision you make not once but continuously, sometimes about the same person, sometimes about the same wound. This is confronting. Most of us are quietly keeping count. We may not admit it, but we know exactly how many times this particular person has done this particular thing to us, and we have a private number at which we intend to stop. Jesus is dismantling that entire framework.
“For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” Matthew 6 verses 14 to 15 (NKJV)
These are among the most searching words Jesus ever spoke. He links our experience of being forgiven by God to our willingness to forgive others. This is not a transaction, as though God is measuring whether we have done enough forgiving to qualify for His mercy. It is a deeper truth about what unforgiveness does to a human soul. A person who refuses to forgive cannot properly receive forgiveness, not because God is withholding it, but because the closed fist that holds the offence cannot simultaneously be open to receive the grace. Brandt Jean understood this instinctively. He said in one interview that he did not want to spend the rest of his life hating Amber Guyger. He could see, clearly and ahead of time, that the bitterness would cost him far more than it would ever cost her. He chose to release it not as an act of weakness but as an act of spiritual intelligence. He chose his own freedom.
Unforgiveness does not punish the person who wronged you. It imprisons you. It keeps you permanently chained to the moment of the wound, replaying it, re-experiencing it, preventing the healing God intends for you. Forgiveness does not erase what happened or pretend the pain was not real. It simply releases you from the obligation to carry it indefinitely into a future that belongs to God.
Unforgiveness is drinking poison and waiting for the other person to get sick.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FORGIVENESS AND RECONCILIATION
“Never pay back evil with more evil. Do things in such a way that everyone can see you are honourable. Do all that you can to live in peace with everyone.” Romans 12: 17 - 18 (NLT)
One of the most important distinctions in this entire conversation about love is the one between forgiveness and reconciliation. They are not the same thing, and confusing them has caused a great deal of unnecessary suffering. Forgiveness is something you do alone, with God, in your own heart. It does not require the other person to be present, to acknowledge the wrong, or to have changed. You can forgive someone who has never apologised. You can forgive someone who has died. You can forgive someone who, if given the opportunity, would do the same thing again. Forgiveness is the internal release of the debt. It is the choice to stop requiring payment for what was done to you.
Reconciliation is different. Reconciliation is the restoration of the relationship, and it does require two people. It requires genuine acknowledgement and remorse from the person who caused the harm. Paul says do all that you can to live in peace with everyone. Notice what that phrase contains: do all that you can. It implies there are situations in which, no matter what you do on your side, full peace cannot be restored, because the other person is unwilling, unchanged, or because safety does not permit it. You are not required to return to a relationship that is actively harmful to you. You are not required to pretend that trust has been rebuilt when it has not. What forgiveness does require is that you release the person from your internal court, that you stop rehearsing the verdict daily, and that you choose not to let what they did to you write the rest of your story.
In Brandt Jean's case, Amber Guyger had expressed genuine remorse in court, saying she hated herself every single day and never wanted to take an innocent life. That created the conditions for both forgiveness and a moment of genuine reconciliation, which the courtroom hug represented. But Brandt Jean was also clear that forgiveness did not mean an absence of consequences. The jury had still returned a murder verdict. His family still wanted justice acknowledged. Forgiveness and accountability are not opposites. They can, and in a healthy understanding of love, they must coexist.
You can forgive without reconciling. But you cannot love fully without forgiving.
LOVE IN THE WORKPLACE: THE PEOPLE YOU DID NOT CHOOSE
“Therefore, whenever we have the opportunity, we should do good to everyone, especially to those in the family of faith.” Galatians 6: 10 (NLT)
You chose your friends. You chose your spouse. You did not choose the people you work with. They arrived in your professional life by a combination of circumstances, organisational decisions, and the ordinary randomness of how careers develop. And yet God's call to love does not pause at the threshold of the office building. The workplace is one of the most consistently challenging environments for love precisely because the relationships carry so much weight. A difficult colleague affects your daily experience, your peace of mind, and sometimes your livelihood. A manager who treats you unfairly can corrode your confidence across months and years. A competitive team culture can make the simple acts of generosity and honesty feel professionally dangerous.
And yet this is exactly where love is most visible, because it is most unexpected. Nobody is surprised when people are kind to their friends. They are genuinely surprised when someone is consistently generous to a colleague who has made their working life difficult. They notice when a person gives credit rather than takes it, speaks well of someone in their absence rather than using the opportunity to advance their own position, or responds to a tense conversation with composure that has no obvious human explanation.
“Love never gives up. Love cares more for others than for self. Love doesn't want what it doesn't have. Love doesn't strut, doesn't have a swelled head, doesn't force itself on others, isn't always me first.” 1 Corinthians 13 verses 4 to 5 (The Message)
These are not abstract virtues. They are daily workplace choices. They are the decisions you make in the meeting when you could claim someone else's idea as your own and choose not to. They are the restraints you exercise when a colleague has irritated you, and you could make your feelings known publicly, but choose instead to address it privately and with respect. None of this means being passive in the face of injustice, or allowing harmful behaviour to continue unchallenged. Bearing with one another, as Paul describes in Colossians 3, does not mean absorbing mistreatment in silence. It means engaging with difficulty in a way that is shaped by genuine concern for the other person's good, rather than by the desire to retaliate or protect your own position at all costs. The person who brings this quality of love into a workplace is a person of rare and striking influence. You may never be asked directly why you are different. But people are watching. They always are.
LOVE FOR THE PEOPLE WHO ARE FURTHEST AWAY
“But to you who are willing to listen, I say, love your enemies! Do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who hurt you.” Luke 6: 27 to 28 (NLT)
If the instruction to love difficult colleagues is challenging, the instruction to love enemies is in another category entirely. Jesus is not speaking here about people who mildly irritate you or compete with you professionally. He is speaking about people who actively hate you, who curse you, who deliberately work against your well-being. And He says: love them. Do good to them. Pray for them. This is the place where every human strategy for love reaches the end of itself. Natural love, love that depends on what it receives in return, simply cannot go this far. You cannot talk yourself into loving someone who hates you. You cannot manufacture goodwill towards someone who has deliberately harmed you. The only love that can reach this far is a love that does not originate in you, a love that flows through you from a source that has no bottom.
When Brandt Jean stood in that courtroom and said I love you as a person to the woman who had killed his brother, he was not speaking from a place of comfort. He was drawing on something that came from outside himself, something he later identified clearly as his faith in a God who forgives extravagantly and calls His people to do the same. That is the only source strong enough for love of that magnitude. Praying for the person who has wronged you is one of the most transformative spiritual disciplines there is, not because the prayer necessarily changes them immediately, but because it is almost impossible to pray consistently for someone and remain in a posture of hardness towards them. Something begins to shift. The grip of the wound loosens. The person begins to look less like a permanent enemy and more like a flawed human being in need of the same grace you yourself have received.
You cannot consistently pray for someone and stay hard towards them. Prayer is where God does His best work on both of you.
THE LOVE THAT HOLDS A MARRIAGE TOGETHER
“Many waters cannot quench love, nor can rivers drown it. If a man tried to buy love with all his wealth, his offer would be utterly scorned.” Song of Solomon 8 verse 7 (New Living Translation)
Marriage is the relationship where love is most tested because it is the relationship where there is nowhere to hide. Every other relationship in your life allows some management of distance. You can leave the workplace, end a phone call, or create space between visits. In marriage, especially in its most intimate seasons, you are present to one another in a way that is comprehensive and continual. Every version of you is visible: the morning version, the tired version, the version that appears under pressure, and the version that surfaces when you are frightened or grieving. This is why the love described in 1 Corinthians 13 is so particularly relevant to marriage. It is patient when it has been tried. It is kind when kindness costs something. It does not keep records of wrongs, which is perhaps the most revolutionary instruction in the entire passage, because the human mind keeps records instinctively, cataloguing and returning to old injuries in ways that slowly poison the present with the toxins of the past.
Many marriages do not end because of dramatic failures. They erode because of accumulated small withdrawals, a slowly growing distance between two people who stopped choosing to move towards each other. Love in marriage is not a feeling that sustains itself automatically. It is a series of choices made over years, sometimes decades, to keep turning towards the person you committed to, even when the turning costs something. The same principle that enabled Brandt Jean to step off a witness stand and walk across a courtroom floor is available in every marriage. The distance may be smaller, the injury may be less dramatic, but the mechanism is identical. You make a deliberate move. You choose the person in front of you over the comfort of staying where you are. And God, who is love, meets you in the movement.
The strongest marriages are not the ones that never face hardship. They are the ones where two people keep choosing each other through it.
TODAY'S ACTION PLAN
Part Two has asked more of you than Part One. It has moved from the foundations of love into the places where love genuinely costs something. Before you read Part Three, here are three things that matter most to put into practice today.
1. Name the person you have been avoiding forgiving.
Not to excuse what they did. Not to pretend it did not matter. Simply to acknowledge, honestly before God, that you are carrying something that is costing you far more than it is costing them. Tell Him you cannot do this without His help. Then make Brandt Jean's logic your own: God forgives me every time I ask. Who am I to withhold that same gift from someone else?
2. Pray specifically and by name for one person who has wronged you.
Not a vague prayer for their general well-being. A genuine prayer that asks God to bless them, to work in their life, to give them what they truly need. This will feel uncomfortable the first time. Do it anyway. Return to it tomorrow. Notice what begins to happen inside you across the course of a week.
3. Make one deliberate move towards someone you have been distant from.
In your marriage, your family, or your workplace. Not a grand gesture, a small one. A message. A question asked with genuine interest. A moment of full and undivided attention. Brandt Jean walked across the courtroom floor. Your version of that walk may be far shorter. But it is the same decision, and God honours it just the same.