“Love your enemies”

“Love your enemies” is a teaching from Jesus’ sermon that Gary D. Chapman presents as a demanding guide to loving a spouse who has become a source of hurt rather than affection. Its significance in the book lies in the way Chapman carries the instruction from scripture into marital counseling: not as a promise that loving behavior can control another person, but as a possible practice when a relationship’s emotional love tank is depleted.

Biblical Teaching and Ethical Demand

In Luke’s account of Jesus’ teaching, the instruction reaches beyond reciprocal kindness. Jesus calls on his hearers to love enemies, do good to those who hate them, bless those who curse them, and pray for those who mistreat them; he also invokes the Golden Rule and observes that loving those who return love is no special achievement. Chapman identifies this as love’s greatest challenge because it asks for action precisely where ordinary emotional reciprocity has failed.

The teaching appears alongside another statement from the same sermon: “Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.” Chapman reads this as a general principle of human response, not a technique for making another person behave as desired. People remain independent agents; they may reject love or walk away from it. The distinction matters to his argument: the teaching can guide a person’s conduct, but it does not guarantee a particular outcome.

Ann’s Marriage as a Test Case

Chapman turns to the teaching while considering Ann, whose husband, Glenn, had refused her requests for counseling and for shared efforts to learn about marriage. Ann described years of criticism and condemnation that had depleted her emotional energy and badly damaged her self-esteem. When Chapman revisited the situation with her, she said she no longer knew whether she could love Glenn after what he had done. The question was not abstract: she was weighing whether to leave or stay in a marriage marked by rejection and contempt.

Chapman connects Ann’s circumstances to the sermon by asking whether Glenn had treated her as an enemy rather than a friend. Ann affirmed that he had, and confirmed that he had told her he hated her. The scriptural language thus names the extremity of the relational problem instead of minimizing it. Chapman does not present Ann’s lack of loving feelings as a moral failing; he explains it through the image of an empty emotional tank, where pain and emptiness have displaced affectionate feeling.

The Counseling Experiment

Chapman proposes testing whether Ann can learn Glenn’s primary love language and speak it consistently. The hypothesis is that meeting Glenn’s emotional need for love might eventually lead him to reciprocate. He sets a six-month horizon for the experiment and makes clear that Ann, not Glenn, would be taking the initiative, since Glenn was not trying to work on the marriage. The plan therefore asks Ann to act without first receiving evidence that Glenn will change.

The biblical promise of giving and receiving is explicitly qualified. Chapman tells Ann that kindness often tends to invite kindness, but cannot make another person kind; the experiment offers a possibility, not certainty. His framing separates the moral action of expressing love from the hoped-for response. That boundary keeps the teaching from becoming a claim that Ann can manipulate Glenn into caring for her or that the responsibility for the marriage’s outcome rests entirely on her.

Love, Intimacy, and the Limits of Feeling

The proposed experiment included a recommendation that Ann take more initiative in physical affection and sexual intimacy. She explained that their sexual encounters had become rare because she felt ignored in daily life and experienced intimacy as being used rather than loved. Chapman acknowledges that her response was natural: for many wives, desire for sexual intimacy grows from feeling loved, while the absence of that feeling can make intimacy seem instrumental. His application of the sermon therefore confronts the gap between loving action and spontaneous loving emotion, rather than pretending that the two are already aligned.

Ann also questioned whether expressing love sexually while feeling negatively toward Glenn would be hypocritical. The passage presents that concern as part of the experiment’s moral and emotional difficulty, not as proof that Ann’s feelings should be disregarded. Chapman directs her toward her religious faith and the sermon’s call to love those who hate or mistreat, while the larger argument remains conditional: action may create an opening for a different relationship, but it cannot ensure that one will follow.

Service, Faith, and Significance

Elsewhere, Chapman connects love expressed through action with Jesus Christ washing his disciples’ feet. In a setting where servants customarily washed guests’ feet, Jesus takes a basin and towel, performs the service himself, and encourages his disciples to follow his example. The scene gives practical form to the book’s broader claim that love can be expressed through acts that serve another person; in the discussion of Ann, the enemy-love teaching extends that service ethic into a painful marriage.

Chapman ultimately locates the capacity to love without reciprocity in spiritual resources. Recalling his own marital struggles, he describes examining the Christian faith and coming to understand Christ’s death as an expression of love and his resurrection as evidence of power. He says that his commitment to Christ gave him inner spiritual energy to love when love was not returned, and points to Christ’s prayer for those who killed him as love’s ultimate expression. The teaching’s role is consequently both practical and theological: it furnishes Ann’s counseling experiment with a direction, while the book refuses to turn that direction into a guaranteed method for changing another person.