How to Love Someone Who Is Hard to Love (Because Jesus Said to Do It Anyway)

You know who I am talking about.

The coworker who drains every room they enter. The family member who makes every holiday feel like a hostage negotiation. The friend who only calls when they need something. The person who hurt you and never apologized and still shows up at every gathering acting like nothing happened.

You know their name. You felt something in your chest just reading that last paragraph.

And if you are a Christian, you know what you are supposed to do: love them.

Not tolerate them. Not endure them. Not grit your teeth and count the minutes until you can leave. Love them. Genuinely. The way Jesus said to.

Which is, frankly, one of the hardest things He ever asked anyone to do.

What Jesus Actually Said

Let me put the actual words in front of you, because they are more uncomfortable than most Christians admit.

Matthew 5:44: "But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you."

Luke 6:27-28: "But to you who are listening I say: love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you."

John 13:34: "A new command I give you: love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another."

Notice what is missing from all of those: conditions. Jesus did not say "love your enemies if they apologize first." He did not say "love one another when it is convenient." He did not say "love the people who are easy to love." He said love. Period. Everyone. Including the ones who make it incredibly difficult.

That is not a suggestion. It is a command. And it is one of the defining marks of what it means to follow Christ.

And if you are honest, it is one of the ones you struggle with the most. Welcome to the club. The club is enormous, and everyone in it is pretending they are not a member.

Why Difficult People Exist in Your Life

I am not going to tell you that God put difficult people in your life for a reason, because I do not know if that is precisely how it works in every case. But I will tell you this: difficult people reveal things about you that comfortable people never will.

The person who irritates you reveals your patience, or lack of it. The person who wronged you reveals your capacity for forgiveness. The person who demands more than they give reveals your boundaries, or your inability to set them. The person who pushes every button you have reveals which buttons still have wires attached.

You can go years thinking you are a loving, patient, gracious person, and then one Thanksgiving dinner with the right family member will dismantle that entire self-image in forty-five minutes.

That is not a failure. That is information. And what you do with that information determines whether the relationship makes you bitter or makes you grow.

What Love Is (And What It Is Not)

Before you can love someone who is hard to love, you need to be clear about what love actually means. Because the word gets used so loosely that it has lost most of its weight.

Love, in the way Jesus uses it, is not a feeling. It is a decision. It is a pattern of behavior directed at the good of another person, regardless of what that person does in return.

Read that again. Regardless of what that person does in return.

That is the part that separates Christian love from every other version. The world loves people who love them back. Jesus says love the people who do not. The world loves when it feels natural. Jesus says love when every feeling in your body is screaming the opposite.

Here is what that means practically:

Love is not approval. Loving someone does not mean agreeing with everything they do. It does not mean pretending their behavior is acceptable. It does not mean smiling while they hurt you and calling it grace. You can love a person deeply and still disagree with them, confront them, or set a boundary they do not like.

Love is not passivity. Loving a difficult person does not mean becoming their doormat. It does not mean absorbing abuse and calling it Christlike. Jesus loved people by telling them the truth, sometimes harshly. He flipped tables in the temple. He called the Pharisees a brood of vipers. Love does not mean letting someone walk all over you. It means caring about them enough to be honest, even when honesty costs something.

Love is not the absence of anger. You can be angry at someone and still love them. God does it constantly. The Bible is full of God being furious with people He loves. Anger is a response to injustice, to violation, to things being wrong. That response is appropriate when something is genuinely wrong. Love does not eliminate the anger. It directs it. It says, "I am angry about what you did, and I still choose your good over my comfort."

Love is choosing someone's good when they have given you every reason not to. That is the whole thing. That is what makes it supernatural. Anyone can love the lovable. It takes something beyond human willpower to love the person who has earned your contempt and choose their good anyway.

What "do everything in love" actually looks like on a hard day is this: choosing love when every feeling in you says don't.

The Difference Between Loving and Liking

This distinction will save your sanity, so let me say it clearly: Jesus commands you to love everyone. He does not command you to like everyone.

Liking someone is a natural emotional response based on compatibility, personality, shared interests, and mutual enjoyment. You cannot force it. Some people you will naturally enjoy being around, and some people you will not. That is not a moral failure. That is just how human beings work.

Love is different. Love is a choice, not a reaction. It is not based on whether the other person is enjoyable, deserving, or reciprocal. It is based on a decision you make about how you will treat them regardless of how they treat you.

You do not have to enjoy someone's company to pray for their well-being. You do not have to be their best friend to treat them with dignity. You do not have to feel warm and fuzzy about them to choose their good when you have the option not to.

Some of the most loving things I have ever done were for people I did not like. And some of the most loving things done for me were done by people who probably did not like me very much either. That is the beauty of it. Love that depends on liking is just preference. Love that operates independent of liking is something only God could have invented.

How to Actually Do It

Alright. Here is the practical part. Because knowing you are supposed to love difficult people and knowing how to do it are two very different things.

Pray for them. Actually pray for them. Not the "God, change them" prayer, although that is fine to start with. The real prayer: "God, bless them. Show them Your love. Help me see them the way You see them." It is nearly impossible to hate someone you are genuinely praying for. Prayer rewires your perspective because it forces you to bring the person before God, and in God's presence, your categories shift. How to pray for someone else when you do not know what to say works for this too, even when the person you are praying for is the one who hurt you.

Write those prayers down. After Amen ↗ was built for the kind of prayers you do not want to pray out loud. The ones that start with "God, I do not want to do this." Those are the honest ones. And God does more with an honest, reluctant prayer than He does with a polished, fake one.

Separate the person from the behavior. This is hard, but essential. The behavior might be terrible. The person is still made in the image of God. You can reject what someone does while still valuing who they are at a level deeper than their worst actions. This does not mean excusing the behavior. It means refusing to reduce a human being to the worst thing they have done.

Set boundaries without setting traps. Boundaries are not walls. They are not punishment. They are not silent treatment dressed up in Christian language. A boundary says, "I love you, and I will not allow this behavior to continue in our relationship." That is love. It protects both of you. It gives the relationship a chance to be healthy instead of enabling it to stay toxic.

What a boundary is not: a way to control the other person. You set boundaries on yourself, not on them. "I will leave the room if you raise your voice" is a boundary. "You need to stop raising your voice" is a demand. One you can enforce. The other you cannot.

Remember what you have been forgiven. This is the nuclear option, and it works every time. When you are struggling to extend grace to someone, remember how much grace has been extended to you.

You are not perfect, just forgiven. Those six words level the playing field faster than anything else. The person who is hard to love? You have been that person to someone. Maybe to God Himself. And He loved you anyway. He did not wait until you were lovable. He loved you while you were still the difficult one.

If God can do that for you, you can do a version of it for someone else. Not perfectly. Not easily. But intentionally.

Do something kind when you do not feel like it. Love is a verb before it is a feeling. And sometimes the feeling follows the action. You do not have to feel loving to act lovingly. Make the phone call. Send the text. Show up at the thing. Bring the meal. Say the kind word. Not because they deserve it. Because love is not about deserving. It never was.

When Love Means Letting Go

I need to say this because some people will read this post and think it means they should stay in a situation that is destroying them: loving someone does not always mean staying close to them.

Sometimes the most loving thing you can do is create distance. If a relationship is abusive, if a person is consistently harmful and unwilling to change, if staying close to them is costing you your peace, your safety, or your relationship with God, then stepping back is not a failure of love. It is love, directed at yourself and at them simultaneously.

Letting go of a relationship does not mean letting go of love. You can love someone from a distance. You can pray for them without being in the room. You can forgive them without giving them access to hurt you again.

Forgiving someone who hurt you does not require reunion. It requires release. And sometimes release means releasing yourself from the obligation to be present for someone who is not safe to be present with.

That is not un-Christian. That is wisdom. And wisdom and love are not enemies. They are partners.

Why This Is the Hardest and Most Important Thing

Here is the truth at the bottom of all of this: the way you love difficult people is the most visible evidence of your faith.

Not your church attendance. Not your Bible knowledge. Not your prayer life. Not your social media posts. The way you treat the person who is hardest to treat well.

Jesus said it in John 13:35: "By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another." Not by your worship music. Not by your theology. By your love. And love that only works when people are easy to love is not the kind Jesus was talking about.

This is where the brand verse lives. "Let all that you do be done in love." All. Not "let the easy things be done in love." Not "let the comfortable things be done in love." All of it. Including the hard conversations, the strained relationships, the people who test your patience until you are not sure you have any left.

I wrote about hitting that wall in Deep Water ↗. The place where your own capacity to love runs out and you either give up or you let God's love move through you instead. That is the moment where faith stops being theory and becomes life.

You will not do it perfectly. You will lose your temper. You will think unkind thoughts. You will avoid the person when you should have shown up, or show up when you should have stepped back. That is okay. Not Perfect, Just Forgiven. The goal is not perfection. The goal is direction. And the direction is love.

Even when it is hard.

Especially when it is hard.

Keep a daily devotional ↗ close. Not because it will make you a better person overnight. Because it will keep reminding you, every single morning, whose love you are operating out of. And it is not your own. Yours runs out. His does not.

Love the hard ones. Not because they earned it. Because He did.

"Let all that you do be done in love." - 1 Corinthians 16:14

Read next: How to Forgive Someone Who Hurt You (When Everything in You Says They Do Not Deserve It)