5 Powerful Ways to Love Difficult People
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Do you have that one person in your life who tends to push your buttons?
- A nitpicky coworker
- A difficult family member
- A neighbor who stirs up drama
- A person in the church who rubs you the wrong way
Have you ever asked yourself, “Why is loving people so hard?”
The good news is, while loving people can be difficult sometimes, there are five things that we can begin doing today to love difficult people with God’s love.
Loving difficult people isn’t about trying harder; it’s about removing the barriers in our own lives that prevent God’s love from flowing through us to touch a world in desperate need of Him.
5 Ways to Love Difficult People
As someone who grew up in the church and who has been a pastor’s kid all of my life, you would think that this is easy for me.
Loving difficult people is never easy because dying to ourselves and our own human nature isn’t easy.
There was a time when I was really frustrated at my job. Every day I would come home and complain to my parents about all of the things that were wrong, and I wished were different.
- I complained about my boss.
- I complained about the environment
- I complained about our customers
- I complained about my other coworkers.
After several days of this, my dad gave me a challenge to find 5 things each day about my job that I was grateful for.
He recognized in me this tendency to look at the negative, not the positive.
In doing so, he began to build in me a framework for loving difficult people and seeing people with God’s eyes, not mine.
It didn’t take very long before my attitude about my job was transformed, and I went on to work at that job for several more years.
Are you ready to begin building a foundation of God’s love in your heart so that you can love difficult people with God’s love?
1. Be filled with God’s love
You cannot give to others what you don’t have in abundance in your own life.
We have a tendency to love others out of pity or obligation. Perhaps we make an effort to do good things for that person so we can soothe our conscience, knowing we’ve done a good thing.
This isn’t love, this is patronizing.
When we look at the fruit of the Spirit, we can see how each of those attributes can be expressed through our human nature as well as through the Holy Spirit.
The difference being when they are expressed through our human nature, they are distorted and defiled by our pride and selfishness.
God doesn’t want us to love people out of pity or obligation; He wants us to love them with His love that truly sees their worth and value.
God’s agape love isn’t a kind of love that we possess naturally. It is His love that is flowing through us supernaturally to those around us.
But in order for that love to flow through us, we have to be filled with His love.
How do we become filled with God’s agape love?
This part is so simple: We ask.
Ask God to fill you with His love. And keep asking each day. Make it a part of your daily prayer, “Dear God, fill me with your love today and help me show that love to those around me.”
Don’t complicate something that is simple.
2. Reach out for God’s grace
In order to love difficult people, we need to remember God’s grace.
If people were generally easy to love, we wouldn’t need this blog post. But many people are not easy to love, and that is why God has given us grace in abundance each day so that we can do what doesn’t come naturally for us.
Whenever I think of God’s grace, I remember Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 10:13, “No temptation has overtaken you except such as is common to man; but God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will also make the way of escape, that you may be able to bear it.“
Often, we are tempted to get frustrated and angry, even lash out, at difficult people.
But God’s grace gives us a way of escape.
I like to think of this in terms of downloading software. Often, when you download free software, it is paired with something you didn’t know you were getting – like McAffee Antivirus. (so annoying!)
Well, God’s grace is like that with temptation.
The enemy sends temptation our way, but because we are a child of God, that temptation is paired with an escape route – and God’s grace that is sufficient for us to have the power to take that way of escape.
Isn’t that powerful!
No longer do we have to be frustrated with difficult people. That temptation comes with a way of escape. We just have to tap into God’s grace that will give us the supernatural power we need to love them with God’s love instead.
3. Daily pray for God’s blessing on them
I promise you, if you will daily pray for God’s blessing on that difficult person in your life, your heart will change.
I know, you were hoping they would change.
But you have a choice: you can wait for years for that person to change, and maybe they’ll change, but maybe they won’t.
Or you can allow God to change you.
Knowing the goodness of God is trusting that God is doing His work in their lives and being content with that, while giving Him the freedom to do in our lives what He wants to do.
When we realize that we are as broken and flawed as the other person, and that we are as in need as they are of God’s mercy and grace, it sets us free from trying to be the voice of the Holy Spirit to them.
And that freedom allows us to love them as they are.
And this begins with daily praying for God’s blessing on their lives.
4. Pray and ask God for His eyes for them
In order to love difficult people, we have to get beyond seeing them as difficult so we can see them the way God sees them.
If all we can see is how difficult they are, we will miss seeing their worth and value.
God has created each person with worth and value. He has given each person a gift that He intends for them to use to bless the world around them.
But many people don’t see this worth and value in themselves; they don’t recognize the gift they have.
That gift is hidden underneath layers of brokenness and pain, so that it takes the eyes of God to see who they truly are.
God wants you to see in them what He sees.
Remember the words of God to Samuel, “For the Lord does not see as man sees; for man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.” 1 Samuel 16:7
5. Choose to call out to them the good in their lives
People who are difficult to love often know they are difficult to love. This fact is not lost on them, but it doesn’t mean that they don’t have a desire to be loved and accepted.
So often, this cruel world has left them so damaged inside that they don’t feel they can take the risk to receive the love God has for them.
With encouragement and the authentic agape love of God, they can be healed.
All throughout Scripture, God brings out of man what no one else could see. He brought a warrior out of David. He caused Sarah, who was past the age of childbearing, to have a child. He healed the blind, deaf, and lame.
When God gives us His eyes to see the difficult person in our lives the way He sees them, He wants us to take the next step to call out the good He has put into their lives.
Why is this important?
Because it helps them to see those gifts He has given to them.
- It gives them hope.
- It gives them life.
- It gives them healing
God has put that person in your life for a purpose, and He has already given you everything you need to be His hands and feet to them.
Sharing His love, hope, and mercy with them.
Are you ready to begin?
Get these 15 Bible Verses about Love in a set of free downloadable Bible verse cards.
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