I'm not really a good man.
I don’t love people as I should. I do not love them as God loves them. And some people I don’t even love a little. I have no warm feelings towards them; I may even despise them.
What can I do? I can’t change the way I feel. How can I move from not loving them to loving them? Because I know I don’t love them I’m in danger of treating them unfairly, or even cruelly.
First, I must protect others from myself.* If I choose to do this, I give love a chance to grow.
Real growth starts when we stop pretending that we are something we are not. The truth is we are not as good as we like to think we are. We need help. We need Jesus.
I need Jesus because I cannot make myself love people. And I cannot make myself love God. But I can trust Jesus because I know that he loves me. He became a man and died for me. No one loves me more than he does. And he loves you too. Trust him. If you don’t know how to or where to begin the following will help, if you take it to heart and put it into practice.
“Our wrong deeds are our dead works; our evil thoughts are our live sins. These, the essential opposites of faith and love, the sins that dwell and work in us, are the sins from which Jesus came to deliver us. When we turn against them and refuse to obey them, they rise in fierce insistence, but the same moment begin to die. We are then on the Lord's side, as he has always been on ours, and he begins to deliver us from them.” George MacDonald, The Hope of the Gospel
Follow Jesus, read the book of Luke in the Bible. Trust him. Believe him. God loves you.
*I owe this insight to George MacDonald (1824-1905).