When another car jerks in front of me on the highway without so much as a turn signal, I must confess: my first thought isn’t love. When someone else drops the ball and leaves me stuck with the mess, I feel very little love in that moment either. It provokes no controversy to say our world would be a better place if everyone could just love each other, but love’s much harder to conjure up in practice.

Irritation? Easy.

Disappointment? Sometimes.

Anger? Regrettably.

Love? Much less than I’d like.

In Matthew 5:43-45, Jesus calls us to foster a heart of love. He says to his disciples, “You have heard it said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.” As if fostering a heart of love isn’t hard enough as it is, now Jesus is telling us we have to love our enemies too? Yes…but that’s not all he says. He also tells us the secret to it.

It took me a while to see it. I would get so fixated on the first part that I’d read right over the last part. Why do we love our enemies? So we can be like God. In essence, Jesus is saying, “Like Father, like son.” As God’s spiritual children, we come to resemble our spiritual Father – and that means we love. God is the one who shows love to the good and the bad, the just and the unjust. Every good and perfect gift in all creation comes from God – and it comes to us whether we deserved it or not.

Love is hardest for me to muster up when I don’t think the other person deserves it. But the gospel tells me that, even when I didn’t deserve it, God showed his love for me. While I was God’s enemy, he sent his Son to die for me. This is the key! If you try to foster a heart of love because you think you’re supposed to, it won’t be convincing or sincere. But if you return often to the spring of the gospel and drink deeply of the love that God has shown you, it puts everything else in a new perspective. When we love hard-to-love people, we love them like God has loved us. You can’t give what you don’t have. But in Jesus, we have a surplus of love to share with the world.

Who’s the hardest person in your life to love? Let’s just be honest, their face probably came to mind as you were reading this. You have a list of reasons to feel the way you do. But in Jesus Christ, God has shown you love when you were unlovable. He had a list of reasons not to, but still he did. If God has loved you like that, could that be what lifts you to your feet and gets you on the journey to loving others?