How do we practice love? And how do we tap the Christ within so that we are able to love the difficult and irksome ones? The call is even to extend love to those who have abused us—our enemies. First we must function in a higher framework. Hannah Whitall Smith in her classic The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life said, “The human beings around us are often the bottles that hold our medicine prescribed and given to us by the Great Physician of our souls to heal our spiritual diseases.”⁷⁵ Graham Cooke in his book, Approaching the Heart of Prophecy, also points us to this higher plane: “It’s not easy to love everyone, but it is the call on every prophet’s life. To test us in this, God deliberately puts people around us who are meant to be loved by us. Often we will have to be very creative to love them; some of them, by design, are not easy to love. But those unlovable ones, ironically, teach us the most about God’s heart. I call people like these grace growers. They cultivate the grace in my life by forcing me to be intentional about loving them.”⁷⁶ Cooke continues, “God puts these people in our lives to teach us about being Christlike….We all have difficult people around us, but they are going to teach us experientially how to discover and explore the love of God. It will kill us to love some of them; such struggle cracks open our heart to the Holy Spirit. God wants us to look at His children with the same love He feels. The harder they are to love, the more God will pour Himself out on us to accomplish that action. What a mystery this is! The very people we find the hardest to get along with can bring us the closest to Christ.”⁷⁷ We must know God’s ways and perceive His hand in relational struggles. We must understand that God orchestrates things such that we must enter into His death on the cross—the cross our self nature is placed on in union with Christ—and so bear about in the body death to our natural reactions. At the point of death to self, the Holy Spirit releases Christ’s resurrection life. We experience His supernatural grace in order to love. Death works life is the Scriptural principle. (See Galatians 2:20.)

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