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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]
In a recent post, Bob Kauflin wrote,
"I once heard someone say that books don't change people — sentences do. If I glean two or three sentences from a book that affect the way I think and the way I live, that's time well invested. So I read."
I find it virtually impossible to read without a highlighter and pencil in hand — highlighting the key ideas, starring key ideas, and writing down interactive thoughts, marking the outline, and noting passages and sentences to place in my quotation file.
Sometimes I stop immediately and jot down a sentence of comment on a file card. As I did yesterday. The sentence that has been transforming me over the past 30 hours or so is from Joel Beeke in Reforming Pastoral Ministry:
"Pray in response to the least impulse to do so."
I know. It's not particularly erudite but it is a godly and Biblical exhortation. One I needed and need to hear and heed.
(HT: Challies)
Do you have trouble arising early in the morning to pray?
This word of encouragement and exhortation from John Calvin is a good encouragement to continuance in the discipline of prayer:
“Although we ought always to raise our minds upwards towards God, and pray without ceasing, yet such is our weakness, which requires to be supported, such our torpor, which requires to be stimulated, that it is requisite for us to appoint special hours for this exercise, hours which are not to pass away without prayer, and during which the whole affections of our minds are to be completely occupied; namely, when we rise in the morning, before we commence our daily work, when we sit down to food, when by the blessing of God we have taken it, and when we retire to rest. This, however, must not be a superstitious observance of hours, by which, as it were, performing a task to God, we think we are discharged as to other hours. It should rather be considered a discipline by which our weakness is exercised and stimulated.…
“It must be our anxious care, whenever we are ourselves pressed, or see others pressed by any trial, instantly to have recourse to God. And again, in any prosperity of ourselves or others, we must not omit to testify our recognition of God's hand by praise and thanksgiving. Lastly, we must in all our prayers carefully avoid wishing to confine God to certain circumstances, or prescribe to him the time, place, or mode of action. In like manner, we are taught by [the Lord’s] prayer not to fix any law or impose any condition upon him, but leave it entirely to him to adopt whatever course of procedure seems to him best, in respect of method, time, and place. For, before we offer up any petition for ourselves, we ask that his will may be done, and by so doing place our will in subordination to his, just as if we had laid a curb upon it, that, instead of presuming to give law to God, it may regard him as the ruler and disposer of all its wishes.”
(HT: CQOD)
These words echo the chapters I read this week in Spurgeon's Lectures to My Students ("The Minister's Private Prayer," and "Our Public Prayer"). They are both well worth reading.
