You Can’t Make Me Like You!

The upsurge in violence since the U.S. military left Iraq reminds me that our coerced peace was like a mother who says to her fighting children: “Tell each other you’re sorry and make up.” Of course forcing the Shiite and Sunni Muslims to reconcile after centuries of hatred was not realistic.  And as soon as the “adults” were gone, the Shiite Prime Minister accused his Sunni Vice President of treason and ordered him arrested.  The sectarian violence that followed resulted in 60 deaths throughout Baghdad.

If forcing someone to love you is a contradiction, how can God command us to “love one another?” Isn’t that coercion? Well it would be, if it were beyond our ability to do so. But when Christ takes up residence in our hearts, we become lovers by way of our new nature, "the Holy Spirit filling our hearts with His love" (Ro. 5:5). This is what sets us apart from the world. For born again believers, the command to love one another is not the "have to" of external compulsion but the "want to" of internal desire.

It occurs to me that perhaps we are not so different from our fellow citizens across the globe.  In light of worsening division between the secular culture and conservative Christians, we could be facing our own version of Sunni-Shiite hostility before long, in which case we need not only to love one another, we need to love our enemies.