Should I Pray for My Enemies?

Question 11128.

Praying for enemies is not offered in Scripture as an optional spiritual extra reserved for the unusually mature Christian, it is a direct command from Jesus Himself: love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you (Matthew 5:44). I want to be honest that this is one of the hardest instructions in the whole of the Sermon on the Mount to actually obey, and I want to work through both why Jesus commands praying for enemies and what it should practically involve when the person in question has genuinely hurt you.

A Command, Not a Suggestion

Jesus sets this command directly against the common assumption of His hearers, that you should love your neighbour and hate your enemy (Matthew 5:43), and roots the alternative in the character of God Himself, who sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous alike (Matthew 5:45). Praying for enemies, in Jesus’ own logic, is not a naive denial of real wrong done to you, it is a reflection of the kind of undeserved kindness God Himself shows to people who have done nothing to earn it. If God extends that kind of common grace to the very people who oppose Him, His followers are not given room to withhold a simple prayer from those who have wronged them personally.

Does This Fit With the Imprecatory Psalms?

Readers sometimes wonder how praying for enemies squares with the psalms that call down judgement on the psalmist’s enemies, such as Psalm 137’s harsh closing verses or Psalm 69’s extended curses. As I explore at greater length in how we read the imprecatory psalms in light of Christ’s command to love our enemies, these psalms are prayers, addressed to God, asking Him to act as judge and to vindicate His own name and His people, rather than the psalmist taking vengeance into his own hands (compare Romans 12:19, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God). Read this way, the imprecatory psalms and Jesus’ command to pray for our enemies are not in tension: both hand the matter of justice to God rather than to personal retaliation, while Jesus additionally calls us to a personal disposition of goodwill and prayer for the individual, even while trusting God with the outcome of true justice.

This distinction matters pastorally. A believer who has suffered real harm is not required to pretend the harm was trivial or to suppress every honest cry for justice; the imprecatory psalms give full, unedited voice to that cry, addressed to the only One with the right to answer it. What Jesus adds, in commanding prayer for our enemies, is that this honest cry for justice must sit alongside a genuine, prayed-for desire for the offender’s good, not a quiet nursing of hatred dressed up as righteous concern for justice.

Examples From Scripture

Stephen, being stoned to death by an angry crowd (a scene closely tied to the difference between conversion forgiveness and ongoing forgiveness), prayed Lord, do not hold this sin against them (Acts 7:60), echoing Jesus’ own prayer from the cross, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do (Luke 23:34). Neither prayer pretended the wrong being done was not real or not serious. Both asked God for the offender’s forgiveness even in the middle of genuine, undeserved suffering, which is about as demanding an example of praying for enemies as Scripture provides anywhere in its pages.

What Praying for Enemies Might Actually Include

In practice, I encourage people to pray for an enemy’s repentance and genuine wellbeing, rather than simply praying that the conflict between you would go away or that you would feel better about it. It is entirely appropriate to also pray that God would guard your own heart from bitterness, since an unforgiving spirit does real spiritual damage to the one who carries it (Mark 11:25, Hebrews 12:15). None of this requires pretending you have not been wronged, and it does not require immediate reconciliation or restored trust, which may take considerably longer and may involve wise boundaries in the meantime. Praying for enemies and trusting them again straight away are not the same thing, and Scripture never confuses the two.

A Word for When You Cannot Yet Feel It

Some readers will recognise the command to pray for enemies as right in principle while finding themselves entirely unable to feel any goodwill toward the person in question, particularly soon after a fresh and serious wound. In that season, I would encourage praying the bare words even before the feeling arrives: ask God simply to bless this person and to bring them to repentance, and trust that obedience in the words often precedes any change in the heart rather than waiting for it. Feelings of goodwill toward a genuine enemy are, for most of us, the fruit of sustained obedience in prayer over time, not its precondition.

Praying for Enemies and the Wider Command to Love

Praying for enemies sits within Jesus’ wider teaching on love throughout the Sermon on the Mount, which repeatedly pushes His hearers beyond the minimum the Law required toward a generosity that reflects God’s own character. Just as He extends the command against murder to cover unresolved anger (Matthew 5:21-22), and the command against adultery to cover lustful intent (Matthew 5:27-28), He extends the command to love your neighbour all the way out to your enemy, refusing to let love remain confined to people who are easy to love in the first place. Praying for enemies is simply this wider pattern applied to the hardest possible case.

What This Does Not Require

It is worth being clear about what praying for enemies does not require, since misunderstanding this has caused real pastoral harm. It does not require staying in an abusive relationship or situation, since Scripture elsewhere commends prudent self-protection and even physical flight from danger (Matthew 10:23). It does not require pretending a genuine wrong was not wrong, since both Stephen and Jesus named the sin plainly even while praying for the offenders. And it does not require an artificial, forced feeling of warmth toward the person; obedience in prayer is what Jesus commands, and the feeling, where it comes at all, typically follows rather than precedes that obedience.

Praying for Enemies in Corporate Worship

I have, on occasion, led our congregation in praying for a specific enemy of the church, whether a hostile local authority, a persecuting regime overseas that our missionaries report on, or simply a difficult individual affecting a member’s life, and the corporate act of naming that person before God and asking for their good, together as a body, tends to soften a congregation’s collective heart in a way that private, solitary prayer alone rarely manages on its own. Praying for enemies, done together, also guards against any one individual quietly nursing an unaddressed grievance alone for years.

A Final Encouragement

If praying for enemies feels impossible to you right now because of something genuinely serious that has been done to you, I do not want to minimise that. Bring the whole of your honest anger and grief to God first, in the pattern of the imprecatory psalms, before you attempt the harder step of praying for the person’s good. God can bear the full weight of that honesty, and I have found that believers who start there, rather than skipping straight to a forced, premature forgiveness, arrive at genuine prayer for their enemy far more solidly in the end than those who try to leap past the pain altogether.

A Closing Biblical Illustration

Joseph offers one further, quieter illustration of this whole principle worth remembering. Sold into slavery by his own brothers and left for years in an Egyptian prison on a false charge, he had every reason to nurse bitterness by the time his brothers stood before him again, unaware of who he was. Instead, he wept, provided for them generously, and told them plainly that what they had intended for evil, God intended for good (Genesis 50:20). Joseph never denies what his brothers actually did to him, yet his response looks remarkably like the praying for enemies Jesus would later command in the Sermon on the Mount, centuries before that sermon was ever preached.

None of this is easy, and I would be doing you a disservice to pretend otherwise. But Jesus never commands what He does not also enable by His own Spirit, and the same grace that carried Stephen through his final moments is available to any believer willing to ask for it honestly

I have watched this discipline slowly soften hearts I once thought were permanently hardened against forgiveness, my own included, and I would rather commend a slow, honest obedience here than a quick, performed forgiveness that never actually reaches the heart it claims to have changed

Give this command time to do its slow work in you, since it rarely transforms a heart overnight but almost always transforms one that keeps returning to it faithfully

So, now what?

So should you pray for your enemies? Jesus does not leave this as an open question, He commands it, and He backs the command with His own example from the cross. Start small if you need to. Name the person honestly before God, ask for their good rather than pretending the wrong did not happen, and ask Him to keep your own heart from the bitterness that so easily takes root when we have been genuinely hurt. Praying for enemies rarely feels natural at first, but it is, I have found, one of the most quietly transforming disciplines a wounded believer can practise.

“But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven.”

Matthew 5:44-45 (ESV)