Okay. So Jesus commanded the Jews to love their enemies, and to pray for those who persecute them. In an exact same way, you and I are to love our enemies, and to pray for those who are out to make life very hard for us. But if we are honest, there is something in here that feels absolutely strange to us. We are to make life easier for our enemies, yet something inside of us is fighting just that. We are to pray for God to bless our enemies, but our bodies are telling us to do the opposite. Loving our enemies makes us fish out of water, and it is not what we want to do. Praying for our enemies feels forced no matter if we do it once or a hundred times. It feels fake each time we love our enemies, and pray for those who persecute us.
If it does not feel natural to us, God knew that. Think about it. If it feels natural to us, you and I will be doing it without being told, and God has just made a moot point. He understands how unnatural it feels for us to love our enemies. He knows how awkward it feels for us to pray for them. It feels fake. The Bible doesn’t call these people our “friends” for a reason. It calls them our “enemies”. It is hard for us to even be around our enemies. They don’t love us, and they are out to make life hard for us. If we are honest, all we want to do is to make life hard for them back. God knew all along it would not be easy for us to love our enemies, and pray for them.
Nonetheless, when God commanded us to love our enemies, and to pray for them, he did not make a mistake. He repeats the same command, albeit using different words, in the Book of Romans. Check this out.
Romans 12:14 Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. Romans 12:17 Never pay back evil for evil to anyone. Romans 12:19–21 Never take your own revenge, beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay,” says the Lord. But if your enemy is hungry, feed him, and if he is thirsty, give him a drink; for in so doing you will heap burning coals on his head. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
There may be other reasons, but the big reason why we find it unnatural to love our enemies, and to pray for them, is because we have been doing it wrong. If loving our enemies and praying for God to bless them feel funny to us, then it is possible we have been trying to do this by our own strength. We have not been doing this God’s way. Our behavior and thinking have not yet been changed to reflect God’s behavior and thinking. Why do I say this? Take a look at Romans 12:2, a mere few verses before the Romans verses I showed you.
Romans 12:2
And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.
If we love our enemies, and pray for them by our own strength, I promise you it will be very hard. On top of that, we will not get to where we want to go. Our enemies make us unhappy. We feel very hurt by what our enemies did and continue to do to us. Naturally, we don’t want to treat them nice. We don’t want to love them, and pray for them. We feel frustrated at God that he is asking us to do something we can never do.
Loving our enemies, and praying for them by our own strength can also make everything worse. We may not realize it at the moment, but it is possible we love our enemies, and pray for them, expecting to get something from them in return. We treat our enemies with grace and kindness, hoping in our hearts they will return grace and kindness back to us. But when they continue in their ways and they don’t stop persecuting us, and greet everyone in the room except us, we feel discouraged. Worse, we become bitter. It would have been better to not love and pray for our enemies than to love and pray for our enemies, and to become bitter afterwards. We say to ourselves we will not make the same mistake twice.
As you probably have guessed by now, what we have been missing all this time is to love our enemies, and to pray for them by the power of God. It is only by the power of the Spirit that we can expect to make any progress. Only by the Spirit, we will begin to be able to see our enemies the same way God sees them. We will begin to love our enemies, and pray for them, unconditionally. We will do it without any expectation of anything in return. If they do not, in turn, love us back but continue to make life very hard for us, we will not be discouraged or become bitter. We are disappointed, but we will be okay. If we learn to draw from the power of the Spirit to love our enemies, and pray for them, we will experience some hint of naturalness for the first time in our lives. Somewhere sometime, the Apostle Paul learned this secret. You and I need to learn this secret too.
There was a time when we didn’t know God. We didn’t want to have anything to do with him. We certainly did not love God. Some of us may even say we persecuted God. Make no mistake about it, we were his enemies. But even before we turned from our ways, he loved us, his enemies. While we were sinners, he loved us. He prayed for us. Let’s learn together, you and I, how to love our enemies, and to pray for them, while they are our enemies.