Our ministry this month was preaching, with some more preaching and a few testimonies thrown in. We visited churches in India and shared the Gospel, while doing our best to encourage believers and share with them what we were learning from the Word.
I wanted to share with you a little bit of a sermon I preached to a small service of maybe 30 people last week, so here goes!
Vandanaalu (praise the Lord, or greetings)!
I want to start today in Psalm 35, so let’s dive right in.
Psalm 35:11-14 Malicious witnesses rise up; They ask me if things that I do not know. They repay me evil for good; My soul is bereft. But I, when they were sick— I wore sackcloth; I afflicted myself with fasting; I prayed with head bowed on my chest. I went about as though I grieved for my friend or my brother; As one who laments his mother, I bowed down in mourning.
When I first read this psalm, I was shocked, and honestly very confused. I knew that Jesus teaches us to love our enemies, but that this was written much before Jesus’s time. I thought that loving your enemy was only a New Testament phenomenon, and in some ways I was right, but mostly David was proving me very wrong.
The Old Testament is full of battles and God’s favor. It’s filled with armies and Kings who are thirsty for power. David wrote this psalm while he was being hunted by Saul, who desperately wanted to kill him. If someone were attacking me with spears and trying to turn my best friend and my spouse against me, my instinct would not be to pray and fast for them. But David did.
I want to talk with you all today about why we can pray for our enemies, why we should pray for them, and why we often don’t do it. Like I said, I had thought of loving your enemies as confined to the New Testament, something that we as Christians should do because Jesus told us to. But David didn’t have the teachings of Jesus to guide him. His reaction to pray for the people who sought his life was based in a deep, unshakeable trust in God.
David actually had the chance to get revenge on Saul and to kill him. Throughout the Old Testament, there is a strong emphasis on the Lord delivering one’s enemies into his hand. Their understanding of what God wanted was based on what God made possible or available for them. But you can tell that David had a much deeper relationship with God, and continued to inquire of the Lord when deciding if he should take advantage of opportunities to attack. When David had the chance to kill Saul, he was inches away from him and Saul was extremely vulnerable. But in that moment, the scripture says that “David’s heart struck him” (1 Samuel 24:5) because he knew it wasn’t right and wasn’t what the Lord wanted for both their lives.
Just because you can defeat someone, doesn’t mean you should. David fully trusted the Lord to fight his battles for him. His psalms are full of refrains that make God the hero of the story, not himself. And as he tells Saul of his choice not to kill him, David says, “May the Lord judge between me and you, may the Lord avenge me against you, but my hand shall not be against you.”(1 Samuel 24:12)
We should pray for our enemies because we can trust God to work things out for His own glory and for the good of those who love Him. David lived by this promise, and it allowed him to pray for his enemies with full faith in the Lord’s plan for who would prosper (Ezra 8:22, Ecclesiastes 8:12, Romans 8:28)
We should also pray for our enemies because they need it.
People, in their hearts, do things because they believe it is the right thing to do. I know this because when I lived a life of sin, I was convinced that I was doing the right thing. I didn’t have Jesus in my heart, and I didn’t know I could turn to God and ask Him what He wanted me to do.
The people who put Jesus onto a cross, who nailed his hands and mocked him and punished him, were people of great loyalty. They had a strong desire to uphold honor and to do the right thing, but their hearts were misplaced. They thought they were carrying out justice, as plain as it is for us to see that they were wrong.
Jesus, in His last moments of life, prayed for the people who were crucifying Him. He cried out, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” (Luke 23:34)
And that has to be true for us, also. These people who act out of hatred, out of anger, or jealousy, they know not what they do. Their actions are proof of that. Because who, truly knowing the love of the Lord, and understanding the sacrifice that Jesus made to cleanse you of your sins—who, knowing that, would want to hurt others the way your enemies hurt you? When Saul began to act out against David, it says it was because the Lord had departed from him. (1 Samuel 18:12) When Judas, who betrayed Jesus and led his persecutors to him, turned away from Jesus, it was because Satan had entered him. (Luke 22:3)
We need to pray for our enemies to know the Love of Jesus and to have their hearts turned toward the Lord. That’s a prayer that God will honor, because it aligns with His will and His long term vision for the Kingdom. You can pray for your enemy to get a flat tire, or for them to lose against you in an argument, but they will put more air in the tire. They will find new reasons to argue with you. They will keep coming back and they will continue fighting for what they think is right.
God doesn’t want a quick fix. He doesn’t want a superficial solution. He wants to do what He does best—which is radically change hearts and adopt new believers who will live lives focused on preserving and prospering His kingdom.
So why don’t we pray for our enemies? There are probably a number of excuses we can give, but I believe they stem from one big issue. We don’t pray for our enemies because we have a distorted sense of Victory.
In America, I live in the capital city, where people argue a lot. There are two sides to every story. And people walk around saying, “I’m right and you’re wrong.” We all like to believe we have a strong sense of right and wrong, and that we know injustice when we see it. But our actions tell a different story. We put so much effort into winning petty arguments, and we triumph over proving someone else wrong. And through all that effort, it becomes overwhelmingly clear that we value this win for ourself more than we value God’s plans for His kingdom.
The Old Testament understanding of victory falls short. But we the church, in 2019, have everything we need in order to know what true victory is. It’s right here, in the Gospel. We know that Jesus came, sacrificed His flesh, rose from the dead, and declared victory over sin and grave.
Victory is forgiveness.
Victory is mercy.
Victory is not one group of humans winning over another group of humans.
Victory is eternal life in communion with God almighty. It is restoration of that perfect relationship God created us to have with Him.
Romans 5:8-11 says, “but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.”
As believers, we need to embrace this understanding of victory and we need to fight for it. We need to shift our perspective and think beyond ourselves. It’s not about whether I win or lose, whether in that moment I am right or wrong. It’s about claiming victory for the Kingdom, not for the individual. We must choose to value salvation over self.
God wants to redeem the souls of those who are working against His kingdom. The victory that we should be seeking is not us winning a small argument. No, the true victory, and the one the Lord has planned, is winning the hearts of our enemies for the Kingdom of God.
So don’t fear empathy. It’s okay to see your enemy hurting, and to feel pain with them, to understand their sorrow, and to ask Father God to minister to them in that. Praying for your enemy will not change the will of God to work against you. He is still sovereign and He will always do what is right for the Kingdom. But prayer can change your heart posture, can help you better love your enemy, and look more like Jesus.
There’s an English worship song that says, “when I was your foe, still your love fought for me.” (Reckless Love) Jesus was up against the very people He came to save. He knew that He would save mankind, and that mankind would reject Him, mock Him, persecute Him, and try to confine Him in a grave. He knew this and still He loved mankind fiercely. He wept with His enemies. He broke bread with His foes. He prayed for His persecutors. And we should do the same. Amen.
