When Jesus said, “Bless those who curse you and pray for this who mistreat you” (Luke 6:29), he gave us a challenge we will not be able to meet if we think that other people are in control of our emotions. What do I mean? Have you ever said, “He makes me mad?” When you said that, without intending to, you gave control of your emotions over to another person. You can’t bless anybody if you believe they are making you angry or sad.
The good news is that anger is a choice. Joy is a choice. Corrie Ten Boom and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, spent years in Nazi concentration camps. She survived Ravensbruck. He was hanged at Flossenburg just before World War II came to an end. They both chose not to give in to hate and curse their captors. They showed us that we are free to choose love in the midst of an atmosphere of hatred.
Henri Nouwen described our freedom to choose our perspective and our emotions. “Strange as it may sound,” he wrote, “we can choose joy. Two people can be part of the same event, but one may choose to live it quite differently than the other. One may choose to trust that what happened, painful as it may be, holds a promise. The other may choose despair and be destroyed by it. What makes us human is precisely this freedom of choice.”
Jesus is our clearest image of what God is like. Jesus is also our clearest image of what a human is meant to be. Because he knew that we have freedom of choice, he could teach us to bless those who curse us. Peter, who saw firsthand how Jesus responded to cursing said, “He is your example, and you must follow in his steps. . . . He did not retaliate when he was insulted, nor threaten revenge when he suffered” (1 Peter 2:21-23).
We can choose love over hate, joy over despair, and blessing over cursing.
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