How To Love People That Are Hard To Love

We are called to love. Jesus said, that we should love God and then love others as we love ourself. That can be easy sometimes to love the lovable, but what about those who get on our nerves or are difficult to love? Joyce encourages us with a few ways where we can begin to start loving those who are hard to love.

Today…….I am asking all my prayer warriors to say a prayer that may help others. So many people are hurting right now. Many are struggling with finances and need jobs. Some are facing foreclosure and don’t even know how they are going to make it from week to week..

Many are lonely. . Many are heartbroken. . Many are facing sickness and health is fading. . Some are dealing with difficult family members. Many have lost HOPE.. Tonight, let us put our prayers and faith together decree and declare breakthrough over our families. Financial miracles WILL take place. Jobs WILL be found. Our Bodies WILL be made whole & sickness WILL flee. Marriages and relationships WILL be restored. Family members WILL find Jesus. Heartbreaks WILL be healed. JOY WILL be restored and HOPE WILL be found. In Jesus Name. Amen!!!!!! Keep God First…….

If we want to love people that are difficult to love.
The first thing we need to do is pray for ourselves to have a proper attitude before we ever bother to pray for them to change.
And I’m serious, I learned a long time ago, I do not go to God and pray for my husband to change without approaching the throne in this fashion.
Lord, this thing is really hard for me.
And obviously I would like you to work in Dave’s life. Hi, babe.
He usually sits down there.
He’s up here tonight because he’s got a cough and if he started coughing, he wanted to escape quickly.
However, he’s now closer to me. So if I say much, he can come up here and take the microphone.
But first I will pray now, Lord, maybe I’m not even seeing this right.
I may be the one with the problem.
And so first of all, deal with me, don’t ever go to God in prayer about somebody else’s fault.
If you don’t go with a humble attitude, amen.
That’s just not a very safe thing to do because just because we think we know what’s wrong with somebody doesn’t mean that we do.
Amen. This is better than I thought it might be.
Pray that we will see our own faults.
Because if we do it will make it much easier to be patient with the weaknesses of others.
Because when we see our own faults, it brings a degree of humility into our lives. Matthew 73.
Why do you stare from without at the very small particle that’s in your brother’s eye?
Uh Let me give it to you. I think it’s the living Bible.
Why do you, why do you stare from without at the toothpick that’s in your brother’s eye.
But you don’t become aware of the telephone pole that’s in your eye.
And they said, just imagine if there were two people up here and 11 had a toothpick sticking out of his eye and another one had a telephone pole sticking out of his eye.
And the guy with a telephone pole sticking out of his eye is trying to correct the guy with a toothpick in his eye.
And actually, if you go and read all those scriptures in Matthew seven, I mean, it gets really good because he said, go first and get the telephone pulled out of your own eye, then you will see clearly how to take the toothpick out of your brother’s eye.
See, we really, we don’t know how to help people properly.
There’s no compassion, no gentleness. If we’ve got a bigger mess in our life than they do, but we’re blind to our faults and only see theirs.
Maybe there’s just somebody listening in here by TV.
Maybe you could just think about this a little bit.
Maybe you could just think about all those people you don’t like and you could just maybe ask yourself, is it even remotely possible?
I mean, I know it would be very remote but is it even remotely possible that I could have more problems than they do?
Hm.
Well, I’ll just leave that with you now, you’ll like this one better.
Number three, pray for the person who’s being difficult to get along with.
Yes, thank you. But don’t pray for them to change just to make it easier for you.
But pray for them to be all that God wants them to be so pray for the person with humility, realizing, but for the grace of God, there go.
I Romans 12 3 for by the grace.
I, I love what Paul, how Paul approaches us.
He’s getting ready to correct the Romans and he says, by the grace of God, I warn everyone among you not to think more highly of yourself than you ought to.
So he didn’t just go in there and start telling them off.
He said, look, I’m only coming to you and daring to tell you this because God has given me a grace to do this.
And so I’m telling you don’t think more highly of yourself than you ought to.
Don’t have an exaggerated opinion of your own importance.
And, you know, honestly and truly, sometimes being judgmental of other people, it is a mechanism that we come up with to not have to deal with our own problems.
As long as I stay busy thinking about what’s wrong with you.
I don’t have to deal with what might be going on in my own life.
So I’ve kind of found out in my many years of experience of doing a whole bunch of stuff wrong and hopefully learning to do a lot of it right now that I really need to spend less time on other people and more time on me and ma’am don’t have an exaggerated opinion of your own importance, but rate your ability with sober judgment each according to the degree of faith apportioned by God to him, pray for people.
I’m just going to give you a few ways to pray for people pray that God will help them be all He wants them to be to do what he wants them to do.
Pray that God will open their eyes that they actually can see and recognize when they hurt other people because I don’t see it.
They didn’t get up that day planning to hurt you.
Pray that God will help them get to the root of their problem because behavior modification is not the answer.
You can be in a relationship with somebody and you can say if you don’t do this and this, I’m leaving, well, maybe out of fear they’ll straighten up and be able to change something for a period of time.
But you’ve all had the experience, it comes back, it pops up again somewhere else because just behavior modification is not what people need.
They need a heart change, they need a nature change.
And if they’ve got so many problems in their life that they can’t see God themselves, then they need to see us act like God.
And it is a sacrifice.
I am going to talk to you a little bit this weekend about being willing to live a little more sacrificially for the sake of the gospel.
Listen, we’re not gonna be here forever.
Jesus is gonna come back and maybe pretty soon the way things are looking. I don’t know.
But when it’s over, honey, it’s over, there’s no do overs and I want to really make an effort to take as many people to heaven with me as I possibly can.
So if I have to keep forgiving the same person over and over and over and over and over or I have to keep believing the best, believing, the best, believing the best, believing the best.
Now we all need to see a little progress. There’s no doubt about that.
But II, I really believe that you can kill the meanness in people with kindness.
I mean, I proved that with my own father and it’s too long of a story to get into right now.
But many of you have heard me tested by about how God put it on my heart to take care of him and my mother till they died.
And if anybody in the room thinks I wanted to do that or thought it was fair, you have got another thing coming because I did not.
But it was the single most powerful thing that I’ve ever done in my whole life and my father is in heaven getting to hear the message tonight.
So, isn’t that good news? Pray for discernment. We need more discernment.
We are, we are too much off the top of our head.
We need to pray for discernment.
Discernment goes deeper than just what we see or what we think.
You remember Jesus when the woman was caught in adultery and they were trying to trap him because they knew he, you know, was this big love guy.
And I hear she’s broken the law and the law says you got a stoner.
So now, ok, Mr Love, what are you gonna say about this one?
And so he knelt down on the ground and the bible says he wrote in the dirt with his finger.
Now, what, what’s that all about? Like, you know what?
And then he slowly gets up and he says, well, I’ll tell you what, let whichever one of you has no sin.
Throw the first stone, you know what I believe he was doing.
This is my personal opinion but I believe that he was taking just enough time to hear from his father about the just right way to handle that situation, what would happen in our lives and in our families instead of just, well, if you do that again, I’m out of here.
And if you get me, I mean, to them we all know that don’t work.
I mean, when my kids were teenagers, I screamed at them and my son would roll his eyes at me and there’s nothing that I dislike worse than a teenager whose eyes roll back in their head every time, every time you try to correct them or when the room looks like a swap house and you say clean this up and then like what’s wrong with it?
But it didn’t change.
You can scream at your kids till you don’t have a voice left.
It’s just gonna make them hate you.
But through more discernment, through more prayer, through more realizing what you were like at that age.
Oh no, you were all perfect when you were 12 and 13, 14.
I mean, I did some dumb stuff when I was a kid.
Pray for more discernment.
Take a little more time with things who I’m praying. I’m praying, praying, praying, you can pray for me.
I’m praying that I can just think before I open my mouth and say something.
Not, not up here when I’m preaching because, you know, I believe God is speaking to me.
I don’t have to think. I just open my mouth and out it comes.
But, you know, man, when I’m dealing with people, sometimes I’m like, oh, why didn’t I just shut up for a few minutes?
All right.
Number four, you’re not gonna like this one, but it’s got to be part of it.
Number four way to love people that are hard to love. You got to be ready.
You got to get up ready to forgive them often.
You know, if you’re with somebody that’s fairly obnoxious, there’s not much of a chance of getting through a whole day.
So you need to make your mind up before it ever starts.
So I’m gonna forgive you. You are not gonna beat me.
The devil working through you is not gonna beat me. I’ve got more love.
I have got more love than you’ve got me here again.
I’m not saying that, you know, I, yeah, I like, ok, let’s bring it down a notch.
You don’t need to talk to me like that. There’s nothing wrong with that.
I’m not talking about not confronting people’s bad behavior, but what I am talking about is not then building walls around yourself and keeping them out of your life thinking you’re protecting yourself from ever getting hurt again.
Got to keep in mind that if you wall people out, you wall yourself in.
Hm.
Be ready to forgive him often seven times I can do seven Lord, no Peter just over and over and over and over and over.
Forgiving one another.
Ephesians 4 32 says forgiving one another readily and freely as God in Christ has forgiven you.
You will never and I will never have to forgive somebody else for more than Jesus has had to forgive me for every day, every day, every day, every day, every day.