How to love your enemy

Do you ever wonder how to love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you (Mt. 5:44)?

John Piper, contemplating that command of Christ, relates it to the familiar pattern for prayer that follows in Mt. 6 —

It would be unwarranted to think that the loving prayer for our enemy should ask for less important things than we are told to pray for ourselves. So I assume this prayer is what we should pray for our enemies.

• This means that we should ask God that our enemy first and foremost come to hallow God’s name, that he value God above all and reverence him and admire him in proportion to God’s worth.
• We should pray that our enemy come under the saving sway of God’s kingly rule and that God would exert his kingly power to make our enemy his own loyal subject.
• We should pray that our enemy would love to do the will of God the way the angels do it in heaven with all their might and without reservation and with purest motives and supreme joy.
• We should pray that God would supply our enemy with all the physical resources of food and clothing and shelter and education and health care and transportation, etc. that he needs to fulfill God’s calling on his life. We should want this for him the way we want it for ourselves.
• We should pray that his sins would be forgiven and that he would be a forgiving person.
• And finally we should pray that God protect him from temptation and from the destructive powers of the devil.

This is what love prays.

It is pathetic to see love stripped of God. Even some Christians are misled into thinking you can love someone without longing for and praying for and aiming at the exaltation of God in the heart of their enemy. What is so sad about this is that it not only betrays the diminished place of God in the heart of the Christian, but also implies that there can be real love where we don’t care if someone perishes eternally, as long as they prospered here on earth. It is true that our love and prayer may not succeed in wakening our enemy to faith in Jesus and to the hallowing of God’s name. Love is the aim of our sacrifice, not its success. We may or may not succeed in the Jesus-exalting, God-hallowing transformation we aim at. But a heart that does not aim at our enemy’s eternal joy in Jesus is not the full-orbed, robust love that Jesus demands. It is a narrow and pathetic substitute, no matter how creative and sacrificial and media-admired the labor is for our enemy’s earthly welfare. Love prays for our enemy with all the aims and longings of the Lord’s Prayer. [my emphasis]