How to Pray for Your Enemies (Part 2)

John Piper,
What Jesus Demands from the World (Crossway, 2006), 225–226.

But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. (Matthew 5:44)

Bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. (Luke 6:28)

As we pray for our enemies, it is to be with genuine love that sincerely hopes for the very best for them. John Piper writes:

[T]he demand to pray for our enemy tells us what that best is that we should want for our enemy. Fourteen verses after this command in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus tells us what he expects us to pray. He tells us to pray like this:

Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come,
your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. (Matt. 6:9–13)

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.