Pray
for Your Enemies and Persecutors

Pray for your enemies even though it is challenging to do

Pray for your enemies and persecutors. Finding time to pray for those we love seems challenging enough, but Jesus also wants us to find time to pray for people we don’t even like.

Just writing about praying for our enemies is challenging

Well, here we are. I have been writing these posts since April 27, 2020, and I knew before I penned the first post, that I wanted and needed to write to you and tell you that you — that WE — need to pray for our enemies.

This post is not a post I have anticipated writing. I am not especially having fun writing this post because, to be perfectly honest, I think I am especially bad at praying for my enemies, and it is something I need to improve upon.

Jesus wants us to pray good, not evil, for our enemies

Oh, I do pray for people who are unkind to me or my daughter to leave us alone, and at certain, very difficult points in my life, I did ask God if it would be ok to pray King David’s prayer for his enemies which is recorded in the Psalms and is more along the lines of “Lord, please crush my enemy,” but that isn’t the kind of prayer that this verse contemplates.

Instead, the verse reads, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” Jesus, Himself, spoke these words, and they cannot be more clear. We need to pray and ask God to be good to those who are not good to us.

Why would Jesus command us to pray for our enemies?

I confess that I am not quite sure why Jesus wants us to do this, but He does. Perhaps He wants us to do it because when we pray good for someone who is bad to us, we are unable to harbor hate in our heart, and harboring hate make us bitter. Maybe by praying for someone who is terrible to us we become a better person. Maybe our prayers for an unkind person will help them to change and become a better person. We know that all things are possible with God. He can wrought change in their hearts.

God’s thoughts are higher than our thoughts

We may never know, this side of eternity, why Jesus commands us to pray for our enemies. God tell us that His thoughts are not our thoughts. We do not necessarily know what God or Jesus is thinking. Whether we know or understand Jesus’s reasoning, we are nevertheless commanded to pray for our enemies.

Who will join me?

So, who will join me? Today, I am going to begin by writing the name of one person, who is unkind to me, on my prayer list, and I am going to commit to praying for this person for the next 30 days. Will you join me?

I’m Robyn Monroe . . .
. . . . Writer, Speaker, Prayer Provocateur . . .
. . . . . . . . Encouraging You to Pray. Everyday. One Prayer at a Time.

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