For if ye love them which love you, what thank have ye? for sinners also love those that love them.
If you only love the people who already love you back, what's so special about that? Even people who don't care about doing right can manage to love the ones who treat them well.
Real love isn't just returning the energy, it's loving when it's hard.
📚 Historical Context
In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus is delivering the Sermon on the Plain to his disciples and a large crowd, teaching about the radical demands of following God in a world of everyday human interactions. This verse appears in a passage where Jesus challenges the common practice of reciprocal love, which was typical in first-century Jewish and Greco-Roman societies, by showing that it doesn't go beyond what even sinners naturally do. It underscores Jesus' call for a higher moral standard as part of his broader message about the Kingdom of God.
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