Unfairness is part of the human condition. You can’t live on this earth for long without feeling like someone has treated you unfairly.

Maybe it’s a parent who put you through a miserable childhood. Maybe it’s a neighbor who’s spreading gossip about you in your neighborhood. Maybe it’s a congregant who is making false accusations against you at church.

 

You can choose to respond to the people who hurt you by hurting them. That’s the easiest choice to make, no doubt about it, but it’s not what God calls you to do.

God gives us another option in his Word: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:43-44 NIV).

When people hurt you, they expect you to retaliate. They expect you to seek revenge. 

But God wants you to do the exact opposite—he wants you to respond in love.

Responding to mistreatment with love keeps the other person from controlling you. You can’t control when another person treats you unfairly, but you can control whether you get bitter in the process. You can control your response to injustice.

Just because you respond to an offender lovingly doesn’t mean you continue to allow injustice to happen. On the contrary, we must lovingly seek justice. We must work for justice in the world without retaliating. The Bible commands us to “be fair-minded and just. Do what is right!” (Jeremiah 22:3 NLT).

Martin Luther King Jr. was a great example of this. He fought against injustice without violence. He overcame evil through the power of love. He followed the example of Jesus, who chose to forgive his persecutors even as they were killing him.

That’s our calling as followers of Jesus. Unfairness and injustice may be part of the human condition, but we must not feed into it. Instead, God calls us to respond in love.