Unfiltered — Part 4 | Love Your Enemies
Who is the person you are most tempted to keep at a distance? Your feed already knows, and it is working hard to keep them there. Every app on your phone is built to show you more of what you already like and less of what you do not, until everyone who thinks differently starts to feel strange, other, a little less human than you. In Part 4 of Unfiltered, Pastor Jess DiSabatino opens Matthew 5 and Luke 6 and the saying that cuts closer to the bone than any other in the series: love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. It is the most counter-algorithmic command ever issued. And it is not about how you feel.
Series: Unfiltered
Scripture: Matthew 5:43-48 | Luke 6:27-28
Pastor: Jess DiSabatino
Date: October 4, 2026
Key Takeaways
Your enemy is not a cartoon villain. It is the person whose name makes your chest tighten. "Love your neighbor" comes straight from Leviticus 19, but "hate your enemy" is found nowhere in the Hebrew Scriptures. It was a cultural addition, the logic of every tribe that has ever existed: take care of your own, and everyone else gets something different. Jesus looks at that logic and says "but I tell you." And he is not talking about a Marvel villain. He is talking about the family member who knows exactly which buttons to press, the coworker who cost you the promotion, the friend who betrayed your confidence, the person in your church who made your life genuinely harder, and the people on the other side of whatever political divide feels most real to you right now. Pastor Jess was clear: be civic-minded and know the issues, but wherever you land, refuse to make the people on the other side less human than you.
Having no enemies is not always peace. Sometimes it is avoidance. There are two reasons someone might not have an enemy. One is real forgiveness that has done the hard work of releasing offense. The other is a relationship kept so shallow, safe and pleasant that the wound never has to surface. It looks like peace from a distance. Up close, it is just distance. Jesus was not a conflict avoider. He named what was holding the rich young ruler back, he confronted religious leaders in public, and from the cross he named what was being done to him and forgave the people doing it. Real enemy love sees clearly and forgives anyway. So if you say you have no enemies, the question for you is different: who have you never let get close enough to hurt you?
Agape is not a feeling. It is a direction you point yourself in. When Jesus says love your enemies, most of us hear "feel warmly toward the person who put a knife in your back," and since nobody can manufacture that feeling, we file the command under things Jesus said that sound nice but do not work in real life. But the Greek word is agape, and agape is a choice, an orientation, love that acts in the interest of another person even when you do not feel like it and they do not deserve it. Jesus is not asking you to feel warmly toward your enemies. He is asking you to move toward them: pray for them, do good to them, bless them with your words. And the feelings often follow the actions, not because you willed them into existence but because you obeyed your way into a new posture and God met you there.
You love your enemies because that is what your Father does, and because loving your own tribe is not remarkable. God causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. He does not sort people the way a teacher sorts students or a business sorts clients, and if you have been the good kid all your life, that feels unfair. "Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect" does not mean morally flawless. The word means complete, whole, extending love without condition the way God does. Then Jesus points out that even tax collectors love the people who love them back. If your love only reaches the people in your algorithm, what makes you different? Two limits Pastor Jess set: blessing your enemy is not reconciliation, which takes two parties, and it is not psychological unsafety. It means leaving them to the goodness of God and praying for their flourishing.
You cannot do this on your own, so pray for that person by name, once a day. Pastor Jess called this the hardest saying in the series, not the most theologically complex but the most personally demanding, and she told her own stories: the family friends her eighteen-year-old brother was working for when he was killed on his second day on the job, whose kids she then called every week to tell them they were loved; the conference panelist who argued against women in ministry, whom she felt the Lord tell her to ask about his family over lunch; and the neighbors who heckled her over the Day Space and told her she and her children should die, whom the church kept inviting to quarterly meetings until, two meetings ago, they opened by thanking her for being patient with them. This command was designed to drive you to your knees, because the God who issued it is the God who loved his enemies from a cross, and his Spirit lives in you. So the question this week is specific: who is the person you are most tempted to keep at a distance? Not a prayer that asks God to fix them or smite them. A genuine prayer for their well-being and their flourishing. You cannot algorithm your way out of the division in our world, but you can pray your way into a different posture.
