BLOG SERIES: WHEN FORGIVENESS IS HARD – Part 5: What Jesus asks us to do with the people who hurt us most
“But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father in heaven.” — Matthew 5:44–45 CSB
I remember the first time I tried to pray for someone who had hurt me deeply.
I sat down with my Bible open and my journal in my lap and I said the words out loud, slowly, like I was learning a foreign language. I prayed for his health. I prayed for his peace. I prayed for his relationship with his kids. And then I sat there in the silence afterward and thought, “I have absolutely no idea if I meant any of that.”
What I felt was closer to grinding gears than to grace. The words were right. The posture was right. Something inside me was still clenched around the very name I had just brought before God, and I couldn’t tell if what I’d done was holy or just obedient or maybe just the beginning of something I wasn’t finished with yet.
I’ve since come to believe it was all three. And that all three were enough to start.
The Command Nobody Wanted
Jesus is in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount when he says it, and he says it like he knows exactly how it’s going to land. “You have heard it said: love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you: love your enemies.” Pray for the people who are making your life hard.
The crowd listening to him that day had real enemies. People under Roman occupation knew what it meant to have oppressors with names and faces and authority over their daily lives. This was not an abstract theological exercise for them. Jesus was asking something that cost actual money.
And he grounds the command in something that stops me every time I read it. He says, “Do this so that you may be children of your Father in heaven. Because your Father causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good. He sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous alike.” God extends goodness to people who have done nothing to deserve it, every single day, without condition. And you are invited to look like him.
He’s not asking you to feel warmly toward people who wounded you. He’s asking you to choose them anyway — the way your Father chooses you.
That reframe changed everything for me. Because I had been reading this command as something Jesus required of me from a distance, something I was supposed to summon from my own reserves of goodwill. But he’s grounding it in family resemblance. In inheritance. In who you already are because of whose you already are. The love he’s asking you to extend is his love, moving through you, toward someone he also died for.
What Love Actually Means Here
The word Jesus uses for love in this passage — agape — is the one worth understanding, because it is the one we most often misread. We read love and hear affection. Warmth. The feeling you have toward people who make your life better.
Agape is something else entirely. It is a willed orientation of goodness toward another person, regardless of whether you feel like it, regardless of what they have done, regardless of whether they will ever change or acknowledge the harm they caused. It is love as a direction, not a feeling. A choice you make in the will before it ever reaches the emotions.
Which means Jesus is asking something hard, but he is asking something possible. He is asking you to orient yourself toward the good of someone who hurt you. To hold them before God with open hands instead of a clenched fist. To refuse to make their destruction your agenda, even when part of you wants to.
You can agape someone you are estranged from. Someone who is unsafe. Someone you will never speak to again. The love Jesus is describing lives in the interior, in the posture of the soul, and it has very little to do with proximity or reconciliation or pretending the wound was small.
Agape is love as a direction. You can point yourself toward someone’s good without being anywhere near them.
Why Prayer Is the Practice
He doesn’t just say love them. He says pray for them. And I have come to believe that the prayer is the mechanism by which the love becomes possible.
There is something that happens in the act of bringing someone before God with any sincerity at all — even reluctant sincerity — that slowly shifts the posture of your heart toward them. It is very hard to sustain contempt for someone you are regularly holding up in prayer. The hatred has to work harder when you are simultaneously asking God to be good to them. The two things cannot fully occupy the same space.
I think about Corrie ten Boom, whose story we looked at in Post 2 of this series. The moment she saw the guard at the speaking event and felt the old revulsion rise up in her — she prayed. She asked God for what she could not find in herself. And she described what happened as a warmth moving from her shoulder, down her arm, into her hand. The love came through her. She was the conduit, not the source.
That image has stayed with me. Because on my own I do not have enough love for the people who have caused the most damage in my life. My reserves run out. But I am connected to a source that runs deeper than my feelings, and when I pray for someone, even stumbling and imperfect, I am opening that connection. I am making room for something to move that I could never manufacture myself.
“For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Even the tax collectors do the same, don’t they?” — Matthew 5:46 CSB
Jesus is saying loving the people who love you back requires nothing extraordinary. It costs you very little and proves very little. The love that marks you as different — the love that looks like your Father — is the love that extends in the direction of people who have given you every reason to withhold it.
That love is a miracle! Every time it happens it is a miracle. And it happens through prayer.
The Person I Had to Pray For
I want to be honest with you here, the way I’ve tried to be honest throughout this series.
There is a person whose name I will not write, whose face I know better than almost anyone’s, who caused damage to me and to my children that I am still, years later, sorting through the wounds and new waves of pain. And for a long time I believed that praying for this person was something I would get to eventually — once I was further along, once enough time had passed, once the wounds were older and the anger was quieter.
What I discovered was that the prayer came before the healing. I had it backward. I was waiting to feel ready to pray, and the readiness was on the other side of the praying. Every time I brought this person before God — haltingly, imperfectly, some days with tears and some days with clenched jaw — something very small shifted. The grip loosened. Barely. Incrementally.
I do not pray for this person because I have arrived. I pray because I have learned that holding him before God is the only thing that keeps me from being held by the enemy. The prayer is for my freedom as much as it is for anything else.
I pray because holding him before God is the only thing that keeps me from being held by the enemy.
What to Do When You Have Nothing
Maybe you are reading this and the person who comes to mind is someone you cannot yet bring yourself to pray for with any real intention. The wound is too fresh. The anger is too present. The idea of asking God to bless them feels like a betrayal of yourself and everyone who watched what happened to you.
Start with this, “God, I am willing to become willing.”
That is a prayer. A real one. It is honest about where you are and it is turning your face in the right direction, which is all God has ever asked of anyone taking a hard first step. He is not waiting for you to arrive with a full heart. He meets you at the threshold with whatever you actually have.
You can pray, “I have nothing for this person right now. Give me something.” You can pray, “I want to want to forgive them.” That desire — however faint, however buried under layers of legitimate hurt — is enough for him to work with. He has always done his best work with not enough.
Corrie ten Boom didn’t arrive at that moment with grace already in hand. She arrived empty and she asked. The warmth came after the asking.
It will come after yours too.
Questions to Sit With
- Is there a person whose name surfaces immediately when you read this post? What has kept you from praying for them?
- What would it mean to separate agape — willed goodness — from the feeling of warmth you may never have for this person? Does that distinction give you any room to breathe?
- Have you been waiting to feel ready before you pray? What would it look like to pray first and trust the readiness to follow?
- Can you pray, even today, “God, I am willing to become willing?” What comes up when you try?
Link back to Post 1 in this series on Forgiveness.
