Praying for Your Enemies

This is the prayer no part of you wants to pray, which is exactly why Jesus commanded it.

Praying for your wife makes sense. Praying for your kids comes natural. Praying for the man who wronged you goes against everything in your chest. Your gut says he does not deserve it, and your gut is right, he does not, and neither did you, and that is the whole point.

Jesus did not teach this one from a comfortable distance. He did it with nails in His hands.

"But Jesus was saying, 'Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.'"

Luke 23:34, NASB 1995

Read where He was when He said it. He was on the cross. The men He was praying for had just driven the spikes and were gambling for His clothes at His feet. That is not an enemy who insulted Him online. That is an enemy killing Him. And His prayer was not "get them, Lord." It was "forgive them." He prayed for the good of the men murdering Him, in the moment they were doing it.

And His people learned it from Him. When they were stoning Stephen to death, the last thing he did was pray for the men throwing the rocks, that God would not hold the sin against them. He got that from watching his Lord. This is not a fringe teaching. This is the family resemblance. This is what the people of Jesus do, all the way down.

So let me be plain about what this prayer is and is not, because men get wounded here by bad teaching.

Praying for your enemy is not saying what he did was fine. Jesus did not pretend the cross was a misunderstanding. He called it sin and asked the Father to forgive it. You can name the wrong for exactly what it was and still pray for the man.

Praying for your enemy is not restoring him to your trust. It is not opening your door to him again. You already read that love is not the absence of a fence. You can pray for a man through a wall you have every right to keep up.

Praying for your enemy is you refusing to become him. Because here is the thing bitterness does. It slowly turns you into a smaller version of the person who hurt you. You start carrying the same poison you were poisoned with. And the one prayer that breaks that is the one where you ask God for his good instead of his ruin. You cannot pray "Father, be merciful to him" and go on plotting his downfall in the same heart. One of them has to go. That is why God commands the prayer. He is not mainly trying to fix your enemy through it. He is prying the bitterness out of you.

It will feel fake the first time. Pray it anyway. You are not waiting to feel forgiving before you pray. You pray because you have decided to obey, and the feelings follow the obedience, sometimes months later, but they follow. I have watched men pray for an enemy through gritted teeth for a year and then wake up one day and realize the knife is not in their hand anymore. They did not feel it leave. The praying took it.

And remember who you are praying for. Not evil. A man. A fellow sinner losing his own war, someone God made and someone Christ died for, a man God may be trying to reach the same way He reached you. You are not asked to like him. You are asked to want for him what was wanted for you when you were the one in the wrong.

Here is one to pray tonight, for the person whose name just came to your mind. Put that name in it.

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A prayer for your enemy.

Alone, with the door shut, because this one is hard.

Father, You know who I mean. You know what he did. I am not going to pretend it did not happen.

But I am done carrying it. I do not want to become him, and the bitterness is turning me into something I do not want to be.

So here it is, and I mean it as much as I am able tonight: be merciful to him. Do for him what You did for me when I was the one in the wrong. Reach him. Get him, the way You got me.

I am handing him to You, and the justice too. It is not my job to make him pay, and I am tired of trying. Take the knife out of my hand.

The battle begins on my knees, even for him. Amen.