Loving Others vs. Liking Others

In 1 John 3:11 we are reminded that the gospel is intended to produce in our lives a love for others. Does this also mean that we have to like others? There is a difference between loving others and liking others. Liking another person means that we have a personal preference for that person, a natural affinity for him. And so the reality is that there are going to some people in our lives who we always like naturally more than others, simply because there are some with whom our natural personalities or interests overlap with more than others. And there are also going to be some, quite frankly, who we struggle to really like or enjoy or appreciate, even if they may be followers of Christ.

And so how do we love someone that we may not necessarily like all that much? By remembering a key quality of the kind of love we have received from God through Christ. At the heart of how Christ loves us is sacrifice. He sacrificed himself for us, gave up his rights and privileges, and died for us while we were his enemies. An enemy, by definition, is someone who doesn’t like you. In our dead and sinful state apart from Christ, the reality is that we do not like God. We run from him, reject him, and choose to make gods of ourselves. And yet Christ still died for us, even when we didn’t like him.

We love those who we struggle to like not by trying harder to like them, but by asking the Holy Spirit to reproduce the sacrificial love of Christ in and through us toward them. It’s easy to love those whom we naturally like. The real test comes in sacrificially loving those whom we may not necessarily like.