Prayer

Jesus in his teaching said this to his disciples: "But I tell you who hear me, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. If someone strikes you on one cheek, turn to him the other also. If someone takes your cloak, do not stop him from taking your tunic.

Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. Do to others as you would have them do to you." And we're just gonna focus on these few verses. But in particular, I want us to look at one of the overriding actions that Jesus emphasises here, which is prayer. A prayer for one's enemies.

Now the first question we have to ask and what we have to deal with this morning is: who is my enemy? As civilised people, as people living in a peaceful country, we don't really feel comfortable with labelling people enemies. We don't talk about that with one another when you're having a bit of a whinge about someone. We don't call them an enemy. We just don't feel comfortable with that.

We don't like thinking we have enemies. But if we were asked, is there someone who you are bitter with? Is there someone that you have been desperately disappointed by? We might give a different answer. You see, bitterness and those feelings of pain is a sign that you've been hurt by someone who you deeply love.

That's a start. It's a sign that you've been hurt by someone you deeply love. If you didn't care about them, you wouldn't feel hurt. The culture of Jesus' time was a bit different to us today. You see, for Jews in that time, nearly everyone was an enemy.

The Jews had been conquered generation after generation, starting by the Assyrians and then the Babylonians and then the Persians and then the Greeks and now the Romans. So everyone was an enemy. If you weren't a friend, pretty much, you were an enemy. You treated every non-Jew with suspicion and even fellow Jews you couldn't trust all the time. Perhaps you can understand their feelings because these poor guys and girls had been conquered over and over and over again.

So no wonder they called everyone an enemy or they could. But Jesus' definition here changes that even a little bit more. If you have a look at what we just read, by Jesus' definition here in Luke 6:27-31, an enemy could be someone that hates you. It could be someone that curses you, that abuses you or mistreats you. It's someone that physically hits you.

It's someone that steals from you. This is what Jesus said here. He made mention of it in these verses. So basically, it's anyone who can do you physical harm, emotional harm, or psychological harm. In the Psalms, if we were to go back a few hundred years before that, you actually notice this agony that the Jews had, in particular someone called David, the king of Israel.

David often spoke about his enemies. Sometimes these enemies were enemies of the state. They were faceless kingdoms or kings that rose up against Israel to destroy them. But at other times, they were very personal. They had faces, they were friends, sometimes they were even family members.

If you have a look at Psalm 3, you'll see that David actually writes a psalm about his enemy and his enemy is his son, Absalom. This wasn't a Philistine king who was his enemy. This wasn't a faceless man. It was his own flesh and blood. So who is the person that frustrates your heart?

Do you have someone like that in your life? When you feel perhaps you are heading in a good direction, is there someone that comes continuously, consistently, and tries to overturn what you're busy with? Try and change up your life, destroy something in you. I think the word here "consistently" is an important one to make mention of because we all make mistakes.

Right? And that's what being a part of a human is and dealing with other people, especially in a community like the church. But consistently breaking someone down shows a maliciousness. So is there someone that gets under your skin? And if you were to look down deep inside, you would probably say that yes, sometimes you wish that they would just not be a part of your life.

Is there someone that if they were to move back to Iceland or someplace like that, you'd be the first one to tell them to pack their long johns? These type of individuals may just be the ones that Jesus was talking about here. But Jesus has a point to make. Jesus identifies them, but Jesus has a practical way of dealing with them in your life. Jesus' overriding answer to this is to pray for them.

Now, first of all, you know, we're thinking this is too easy. It's too simple. Where's the 12-step program? Where is the book on how to win friends and influence people? Where's the top tips?

But Jesus' overriding command here in verse 27 is to say love your enemies and do good to those who hate you. And He follows it up by answering the question: okay, so how do we do that? How do we love our enemies? How do we do good to them? He says, pray for them.

Bless them and do not curse. When Jesus says love your enemies, it's in fact a call to an unnatural, to a supernatural action. It's an unnatural thing for us to love our enemies. That's why it's so radical even today to hear something like this. But by praying for them, the truth is we actually are loving them.

Have you realised that? It's not easy to pray for someone that has hurt you. To genuinely pray, not just to say, "Alright God, you know, you deal with them." It's not easy to pray for those who have hurt us. We don't want to drag all that muck with us when we go and speak to our heavenly Father.

Sometimes we feel we have to be happy and holy all the time. But that's not true. By praying for those who have hurt us, we show them love in a real way. And they may not even know that you are doing that. Most of the time, they probably don't.

But I don't believe that it is possible to actually authentically love someone who has hurt you if you can't pray for them. I don't know if it's possible to authentically love someone who has truly hurt you if you cannot pray for them. I once read a book called Tortured for Christ by a man called Richard Wurmbrand. And he was a Romanian evangelical minister during the time of the communist regime in Romania. He wrote this book called Tortured for Christ.

He had been imprisoned in a communist prison for fourteen years. And after that, he escaped and went to America and started a ministry there publicising the persecution of Christians in communist regimes, so trying to advocate for them and eventually, you know, it caused the collapse of some of those regimes in Soviet Russia. This story is amazing. But what blew me away in his book was the extent of the love for the enemies that were persecuting these Christians.

And these Christians in these terrible situations in prison took Jesus' command that we read here this morning literally. Listen to this. He writes in this book: "I have seen Christians in communist prisons with 50 pounds, which is roughly 23 kilograms of chains on their feet, tortured with red hot iron pokers in whose throat spoonfuls of salt has been forced, being kept afterward without water, starving, whipped, suffering from cold, and yet praying with fervor for the communists." He writes elsewhere of a story of a minister who had been horribly beaten and was thrown into his cell. This is what he writes: "He was half dead with blood streaming from his face and body.

We washed him, some prisoners cursed the communists. But groaning, he said, 'Please don't curse them. I wish to pray for them.' Around me," he said, "were many Jobs. Some much more afflicted than Job had been himself.

But I knew the end of Job's story, how he received twice as much as he had before. I had around me men like Lazarus the beggar, hungry and covered with boils. But I knew that angels would take these men to the bosom of Abraham. I could also see in our persecutors a soul of Tarsus, a future Apostle Paul, and some have already become so. Many officers of the secret police to whom we witnessed became Christians.

And in fact, we're happy to later suffer in prison for having found our Christ. Although we were whipped as Paul was, in our jailers, we saw the potential of the jailer in Philippi who became a convert. We dreamed that soon they would ask, 'What must I do to be saved?' In those who mocked the Christians who were tied to crosses and smeared with excrement, we saw the crowd of Golgotha who were soon to beat their chests in fear of having sinned. It was in prison that we found the hope of salvation for the communists.

It was there that we developed a sense of responsibility towards them. It was in being tortured by them that we learned to love them." Amazing story. Are there people in our lives that we would consider to be our enemies? Is there someone who is torturing you or has tortured you physically, emotionally, psychologically?

Is there a friend who has betrayed and broken your trust? Is there someone in your life who consistently tries to pull you down? How much space in your prayer life, I wanna ask you this morning, do these people occupy? How often do you bring them to the throne of God? The one who really is the only one that is able to change their hearts is the one we need to go to.

Because He is the one, the only one who can redeem sinners. Instead of sending your enemy a special little gift to care of Spot the dog, like Sharon Osbourne does, we can get on our knees before God and approach the one who can really make a difference. Because you see what happens when we pray for our enemies, we pray that God changes their hearts and at the same time, God is in the process of changing ours. Ultimately, to see how this actually works in practicality, in reality, is to look at our example Jesus, who not only taught us how to pray, not only taught us to pray for our enemies, but also showed us. On the very cross where Jesus hung, at the hand of these enemies, He prayed, "Father, forgive them for they don't know what they are doing."

How much grace? How much compassion? How much forgiveness? You see Jesus was not asking forgiveness for simply those who had done the cross. It was every person who had yelled, "Crucify him, crucify him" in the streets.

Jesus not only prayed for those people, He prayed for every corrupt person from Judas Iscariot to Pontius Pilate who were too concerned about wealth and safety to do anything about his future. It was for every soldier who laid his fist against his face and a whip against his back. It was for every Pharisee who plotted to have him killed. It was for every disciple who turned tail and ran away. It was for every person who had been instruments in locking down his fate, including us.

Including us. Romans 5 says, "God demonstrates His love for us in this: that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." Father, please forgive them.