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Last time together, we started building a case that none of us wanted to need — a case for how to survive the schmucks in our lives. We looked at three safeguards: recognizing the real enemy behind our opposition, regarding our own capability for sin apart from grace, and respecting the fact that even the most difficult person we know still carries the smudged, defaced, but unerased image of God.

Today we go further, and we start in the last place your flesh wants to go when a schmuck is making your life miserable — the Book.

IV. Read the Canon (The Scriptures)

If the truth be told, when someone opposes you, your instinct is to reach for your phone, your journal, a friend who will agree with you, or — let's be honest — a second helping of ice cream or something fried. What Scripture tells us to reach for instead is the Canon itself: the whole, sixty-six-book, Spirit-breathed testimony that God has never once left His people to fend for themselves.

A. His Promises. Immersing yourself in God's Word means relearning His language — the vocabulary of promise instead of the vocabulary of panic. "I will never desert you, nor will I ever forsake you" (Hebrews 13:5, NASB). "Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you" (Isaiah 41:10, NASB). "Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the LORD delivers him out of them all" (Psalm 34:19, NASB). Notice that verse doesn't promise the righteous will avoid affliction — it promises deliverance out of it. When you read the Canon, you stop rehearsing the schmuck's version of your story and start rehearsing God's.

B. His Precedent. Here's something that ought to steady every one of us: the God we're calling on has already walked this exact road, and He walked it perfectly. Jesus "learned obedience from the things which He suffered" (Hebrews 5:8, NASB), and Hebrews assures us we don't come to a distant, unsympathetic throne: "we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but One who has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin" (Hebrews 4:15, NASB). And how did His story end? Not in defeat. "For the joy set before Him [He] endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God" (Hebrews 12:2, NASB). He didn't skip the adversity. He went through it and came out victorious — and He is not asking you to walk anywhere He hasn't already gone ahead of you.

C. His Repayment. But reading the Canon does something else too — it reminds us that God is keeping better records than we are. Near the very end of his life, writing from a Roman prison with the executioner's axe not far off, Paul mentions almost in passing a man who had wronged him: "Alexander the coppersmith did me much harm; the Lord will repay him according to his deeds" (2 Timothy 4:14, NASB). Notice what Paul does not do. He doesn't plot revenge. He doesn't organize a smear campaign. He simply hands the account over to the only Judge qualified to settle it, and moves on with his letter. That's remarkable restraint from a man who had every earthly reason to be bitter.

Beloved, here is the sober truth tucked inside that verse: time is running out for every oppressor who refuses to repent. God is patient — "not wishing for any to perish" (2 Peter 3:9, NASB) — but His patience is not the same as forgetfulness, and it is not unlimited. Every schmuck who has ever wronged you is living on borrowed time, given by a merciful God for the express purpose of repentance. If they use that time to harden their heart instead, the same verse that comforted Paul stands ready to be repeated over them: the Lord will repay. That's not a promise for you to gloat over — it's a promise meant to loosen your grip on vengeance, because the account is already being kept by hands far more capable than yours.

V. Respond Correctly

Jesus dealt with a lot of schmucks when He traversed the dusty roads here on earth and He gave us four sure proof commands we can apply when facing opposition.  

"Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you." – Luke 6:27–28 (NASB)

Love. Do good. Bless. Pray.

Here's a question worth sitting with for a moment: what does it actually mean to do good, to bless, and to pray for someone who has hurt you?

For an answer, we don't have to guess. We have front-row seats to the greatest example ever given, and it happened on the worst night of Jesus' life.

Jesus knew from the very beginning who would betray Him (John 6:64). And yet — notice this closely — He never treated Judas any differently than the other eleven. He washed Judas's feet. He shared bread with Judas at the table. "Having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end" (John 13:1, NASB) — and "them" included the man who was, at that very moment, pocketing thirty pieces of silver.

Then comes the garden. Judas leads the mob to Jesus and signals Him out the way they'd arranged — with a kiss. And how does Jesus respond? Does He recoil? Does He call out Judas for the schmuck he was being in that moment? No. Listen carefully: He looks at the man walking toward Him with soldiers, torches, and betrayal in his eyes, and Jesus says, "Friend, do what you have come for" (Matthew 26:50, NASB). Friend. Of all the words available to Him in that moment, Jesus chose friend — for the schmuck of all schmucks. He extended a final open hand to a man who did not deserve it. And neither, if we're honest, did you or I.  Yet, Jesus did exactly what He said we should do.

Love. Do good. Bless. Pray.

But I need you to understand something important: not one of these is a natural human response. Not one. Look, for example, at the one word Jesus uses for "love" here. He uses the word agape (ag-ah-PAY),¹ a term reserved for the divine love of God Himself — "for God is love" (1 John 4:8, 16). This is supernatural love. There is no version of you or me that can love a schmuck in our own strength. It has to be planted first. As John reminds us, "We love, because He first loved us" (1 John 4:19, NASB).

Out of that divine love flows the rest — the doing good, the blessing, the praying — reflecting the character of our Heavenly Father, who "makes His sun rise on the evil and the good" (Matthew 5:45, NASB). Loving people who are kind to you is not spiritual maturity — even the schmucks of this world manage that much (v. 46). But extending love that was first extended and implanted in you to the people who oppose you is the family resemblance that proves whose child you really are.

VI. Rely on the Comforter

But here's the honest truth each of us must surrender to: we cannot, in our own selves, love, do good, bless, or pray for our opposers on our own.  

It doesn't come from gritted teeth and willpower. Beloved, it comes from the Holy Spirit — the Comforter Jesus promised would take up residence in every believer. Before He ascended and sent forth the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost, Jesus told His disciples: “I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Comforter (Counselor, Helper, Intercessor, Advocate, Strengthener, and Standby), that He may remain with you forever—The world is unable to receive Him because it doesn’t see Him or know him. But you do know Him, because He remains with you and will be in you.” (John 14:16-17).  Notice, the promised Comforter will be “IN” you to remain with you forever!  Hallelujah!  The Apostle Paul later testifies, “Don’t you realize that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives IN you and was given to you by God?” (1 Corinthians 6:19, NLT).  It is not us, but God in us, working out His glorious Word through us!  And church history hands us illustrations of this so remarkable, you'd think they were fiction if they weren't so thoroughly documented.

During the upheaval of the early twentieth century, a young Armenian nurse watched a soldier murder her own brother in front of her.² I can hardly imagine the weight of that kind of trauma. She escaped, and years later completed her training as a military nurse. One day she was stunned to discover that very same soldier lying in her hospital ward, gravely wounded. Every instinct in her told her to walk away — or worse. Instead, she cared for him, day after day, until he recovered. When he finally recognized her and asked why on earth she had saved his life, she answered simply, "I am a follower of Him who said, 'Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.'"

Can you imagine being in her position? Would there be a reflection of the Father's love pouring out of your heart at that moment?

Many of you already know the story of Corrie ten Boom, who survived the Nazi concentration camp at Ravensbrück, where her beloved sister Betsie died.³ After the war, Corrie traveled through Germany preaching a message of God's forgiveness. At the close of one service in Munich, a man approached her — and she recognized him instantly. He had been one of the SS guards stationed at the very shower room where her sister had suffered unimaginable things. He extended his hand, thanked her for her message, and asked if she would forgive him.

Corrie later wrote that her arm felt frozen at her side. Everything in her resisted. But in that moment, she remembered the calling of Christ. She had to see him as God's creation, remember her own desperate need for grace, and choose to respond the way her Father would. Silently, she prayed, "Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give me Your forgiveness." As she reached out and took his hand, she said a warmth flooded her heart and traveled down her arm — and the power to forgive was never something she manufactured. It was supplied, entirely, by the Lord.  Yet, she took the initiative by faith, following the commands of her Lord. 

Notice what both of these women had in common: neither one felt a sudden rush of warm emotion beforehand. Both had to come to God first and ask for a supply of love that went far beyond anything they had in themselves. That's the secret of this sixth safeguard. It has to flow from the inside out. The Word has to prompt you.  Love has to compel you.  All the while it is the Holy Spirit doing the work in us — otherwise, how would God ever get the glory? "No flesh should glory in His presence" (1 Corinthians 1:29, NASB). That kind of supernatural display is by sovereign design, nothing more and nothing less.

God does not ask you to manufacture forgiveness out of your own limited willpower. He simply asks you to come to Him, as Corrie ten Boom did, to yield to His Spirit, and let His grace flow through you to someone who could never earn it — the same grace that once reached down and saved you. And in doing so, your schmuck of an adversary might just get a glimpse of the Savior who lives inside you.

This Week's Challenge

This week, before you respond to your adversary at all, open the Book first. Let God remind you of His promises, His precedent, and His repayment before you say a single word back. Then, when you do respond, let it come the way Christ responded to Judas, and let the supply come from the Spirit, not from your own dwindling reserves.

Next time, we'll look at three more safeguards: how to run to the cross when the flesh wants to fight back, how to reason courteously the way Jesus did, and why we must remember there are consequences for every soul who never turns to Him.

Until then, Shalom in Messiah!

Endnotes

  1. Agape — see standard Greek lexicons (e.g., Strong's, Vine's) on 1 John 4:8, 16, 19.

  2. A frequently retold missionary-era illustration of forgiveness amid the Armenian genocide period, circulated across pulpit and devotional literature.

  3. Corrie ten Boom's account of Ravensbrück and her encounter with the former SS guard is recorded in her memoir, The Hiding Place (with John and Elizabeth Sherrill, 1971).