Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. (Matthew 5:44)
The connection between love and prayer here is not accidental. I have often heard and understood this as a way of dealing with hatred toward my enemies: "It's impossible to hate someone you're praying for." This does not seem to hold water for myself, nor for other people who pray for their enemies, like the pray-er in Psalm 137:8-9:
Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction,
happy is the one who repays you
according to what you have done to us.
Happy is the one who seizes your infants
and dashes them against the rocks.
Not very appealing. I can't say I've prayed that way, but then I haven't had my children killed in front of me, either.
So either I am left to redefine love or redefine prayer. I want to start with prayer. First of all, prayer is not about having love and pleasant feelings all the time. Nor is it about pretending to care about what I don't really care about. Nor is it pretending to love someone I dislike or even hate. Unfortunately, the kind of praying that I have been taught and that I practice often is merely pretending to be more loving, more concerned, and more forgiving than I really am. It is disconnected from my life and really just becomes a lot of words. One thing that can be said about that atrocious prayer from Psalm 137 is that it is not pretended.
Secondly, although prayer is, at its heart, requesting, it encompasses so much more than mere requesting. Prayer really comes from how I live my life. If I have no blessings for my enemies, then I have yet to grasp what love is and Who it is that loves me and Who loves the one that I dislike so much. My requests reflect the sort of heart that I have been cultivating. I must admit that my prayers are far more stunted than I would like. I do not like pretending, so I find that I don't do much praying.
Can I pray my way into loving other people? Not usually. The direction of transformation is from the inside out, according to Jesus - "wash the inside of the dish and the outside will become clean, too" and "by their fruits you will recognize them." But my current practice of avoiding prayer certainly doesn't help either. Like all change, I must begin be seeing something better, something greater and then say, "I want to be like that. God help me."
The truth behind praying for my enemies so that I might come to love them is this: I cannot convince myself to love my enemies through mental tricks: trying to convince myself that I should or that they really aren't that bad or that I really am worse than they are, etc. Prayer must come in because transformation involves not just new thoughts, but new actions and intentions. Instead of being ready to do harm or say nasty things, I need to find myself ready to not do harm and bless them. I must be ready to join in God's kingdom which is overcoming evil with good.
In this way prayer becomes a spiritual discipline (though it is never only a discipline). Love is an indirect result of such prayer rather than a direct result. If I pray so that I feel like loving my enemies, then my prayer is about me more than about them. Like the psalmists, I lay my frustrations and malice before God instead of taking it out on my enemies. (This working out things with God can be plainly seen in Psalm 73). This will prevent me from pretending or harming.
Next, prayer places me next to God where I can hear his concerns and desires. This is where prayer can become so much more than well-wishing and general platitudes. Somehow God desires to work with my desires for other people by making my requests both my own and ones that are also his own. The reason: my prayers will be answered. I will truly be given what I ask for!
This is why prayers are not merely requests. The psalms are prayers so unlike a list of concerns because for my concerns to be truly heard and understood requires confession, praise, pondering, wonder, and so much more. Faith is connected to prayer because it involves the whole person. Faith certainly has to do with my desires being strong and real, but also with my desires being true. So prayer becomes work, a work in me and on me, so that I can truly work with God on other people and other situations. Also, prayer moves me to serve and act in the sense that only when I am ready to act with love and concern have I truly prayed.
Like so many things I think I see much further than I really am. How can I hope to live in this kind of prayer? Many of my habits are against me. I guess one step I am taking is that I don't want to pretend and often avoid such situations where pretending prayer is practiced. Currently, I am in the midst of learning how to not harm other people, but forgive them and let them be. My "help" often comes in the form of judgment or condemning, even if it seems to be well-meaning advice. In prayer, perhaps I should try to avoid mere well-wishing or praying just so I can pray something.
This next step I am fumbling toward, like when Nathan, my son, took his first steps looking like a drunken sailor. I long to live intercession as Jesus did and does. I see prayer as the primary labor of disciples on which all other labors are built and grow. Like so many other parts of a spiritual life, the prevailing attitude is just to pray "something" rather than not pray at all. I think this will never bring about the kind of prayer that prevails. This is why the disciples said, "Teach us how to pray." They did not know what or how to ask.
I suppose this must be approached like anything else. When I meditate on the Bible, I wait for God to show me something, to instruct me about what he wants me to see. So when I pray for people and situations, I need to wait on God for guidance and instruction. Since he wants my desires to be part of it too, it will not merely be a list of requests, but thoughts, feelings, and pictures from my own mind impressed with the his understanding and power.
In short, I guess the instruction is:
- Do not pray as the hypocrites do, pretending so that they can just say something.
- Be real with God, even if it is ugly. Always be ready to cry out, "Help my unbelief and lack of love!"
- Wait on the Teacher to develop true faith and true desire in my prayers, as he would have.
Lord, you know these ideas on prayer are shots in the dark. You know I don't know much of what I am talking about. I only know that much of my prayer is broken because it remains unanswered. I truly do not know how to pray. Teach me to be like you. Amen.
Scriptural fulfillment is a big picture of what God wants to do with me everyday. He has wonderful plans in store for me and each person. He longs to bring them about in my life. My part is to wait. Wait with eagerness, with anticipation, with joy. In the waiting there will be preparation. In the preparation, personal change. Those changes will lead to the power to live fully with him and abundantly in a new life.
