How to Love Difficult People: What the Bible Actually Says

What Jesus Actually Asked For

In Luke 6:35, Jesus speaks directly to the situation you are in: loving people who give you nothing in return, who may even actively work against you. He calls them enemies. He does not soften that word.

The command has three moving parts — love, do good, and lend without expecting anything back. Each one asks you to act, not just feel. Jesus is not asking you to manufacture warm emotions about someone who has wounded you. He is asking you to make choices that serve their genuine good.

The reason he gives is striking: God himself is kind toward the ungrateful and the evil. Your love for a difficult person is meant to mirror something true about God’s character, not earn something from him.

Love Is Not the Same as Approval

One of the most common misreads of passages like Luke 6:35 is the idea that loving someone means accepting everything they do. It does not. You can love a person while being honest that their behavior causes harm.

The New Testament holds both truths at once. Passages like Romans 12:18 and Matthew 18:15-17 give clear space for confronting wrong, setting limits, and protecting yourself and others from ongoing damage. Love does not require you to stand silently while harm continues.

Think of it this way: a good parent loves a child who is acting destructively, but love does not mean letting the destruction go unchecked. Caring for someone’s soul and protecting yourself from their behavior are not opposites.

What to Do When Your Feelings Will Not Cooperate

You may read Luke 6:35 and think, ‘I simply do not feel love for this person.’ That is an honest place to start. Feelings are real, but in the biblical picture, love is primarily an action before it is an emotion.

Start with the smallest available act of good will. Pray for the person — not that God will make you feel warmly toward them right away, but that God will bless them and work in their life. Jesus calls for exactly this in Luke 6:28. That prayer may feel stiff and mechanical at first. Do it anyway.

Over time, choosing to act lovingly — even when the feeling is absent — tends to shift something inward. This is not a guarantee of instant warmth, but it is how many people have found the resentment beginning to lose its grip.

If you are carrying deep grief, trauma, or anxiety connected to a difficult relationship, that weight deserves real care. Talking with a licensed counselor or therapist alongside your prayer life is wise, not faithless. Both belong together.

The Difference Between Distance and Hatred

Loving difficult people does not always mean staying close to them. Some relationships require physical or emotional distance to remain healthy and safe. Loving someone from a distance is still loving them.

Proverbs 22:3 speaks to the wisdom of seeing danger and acting prudently. If a relationship involves abuse, repeated manipulation, or serious harm, removing yourself from that situation is not a failure to love — it is a responsible act of stewardship over the life God gave you.

You can genuinely pray for someone’s wellbeing, hold no bitterness toward them in your heart, and still maintain firm limits on how much access they have to you. These are not contradictions. They are the shape that love sometimes has to take in a broken world.

Forgiveness: What It Is and What It Is Not

Forgiveness comes up in almost every conversation about loving difficult people, and it deserves careful handling. The biblical picture of forgiveness — rooted in passages like Colossians 3:13 and Ephesians 4:32 — is about releasing a debt, not pretending it never existed.

Forgiving someone does not mean the harm they caused was small. It does not mean trust is automatically restored. It does not mean the relationship returns to what it was before. Trust is rebuilt slowly, through changed behavior over time. Forgiveness can happen in your heart before any of that rebuilding begins.

Practically, forgiveness often looks like this: you make a decision — sometimes repeatedly, sometimes daily — not to let that person’s offense define your posture toward them or toward life. You are not carrying them as a permanent debt. That release is as much for your own freedom as it is for them.

Where God Fits Into This

Here is something that may be quietly reassuring: you are not expected to generate this love on your own. The New Testament frames love for others as something that flows from what God has already poured into you (Romans 5:5, 1 John 4:19). You are drawing from a source, not manufacturing from nothing.

This is why prayer is not just a nice add-on to the practical steps — it is foundational. Asking God to give you his own love for a difficult person is asking for something he is generous with. You are not asking for the impossible; you are asking for what he has already offered.

When loving someone difficult feels completely beyond you, that is actually a reasonable place to start a conversation with God. Saying ‘I do not have this’ is honest. It opens the door for help rather than closing it.

Practical Steps You Can Take This Week

Name the person specifically in prayer each day this week. Ask that God would bless them — their health, their peace, their relationship with him. You do not have to feel it to mean it.

Identify one small, concrete act of good will you could do for them or toward them. It does not have to be dramatic. A civil response instead of a cold one. A genuine question about how they are doing. Something that chooses their good over your discomfort.

Write down what this relationship costs you emotionally. Be honest about the toll. Then write down what you want for your own heart — not bitterness, not distance from God, not a hardened spirit. That second list is worth protecting.

If the relationship is one that has caused serious harm, consider speaking with a pastor, counselor, or trusted mature believer about what healthy limits might look like. You do not have to figure that out alone.