When Blessing Your Enemies Feels Impossible
When Blessing Your Enemies Feels Impossible
In my last blog post, “Blessing Enemies,” I shared about how God challenged my ideas of what’s right and just and good when He asked me not only to pray for someone who was hurting me, but to pray blessings over them.
What I didn’t anticipate — what I should have anticipated — was someone asking me, in response to that blog post, how it could even be possible for them to pray blessings over their enemies, given the extent and severity of the harm they’d suffered at their enemies’ hands.
I know this person’s story, or part of it at least. Their hurts are far worse than any I’ve had to endure.
In light of that reality, my struggling to pray blessings over my enemies — real as that struggle has been at times — pales in comparison to how impossible it must feel for my friend.
But this is what I realized, as I wrestled with my friend’s questions:
Simply acknowledging that we’re struggling to live out the words of Jesus is a great place to start! Because you and I can’t receive the grace we need to accomplish the will of God until we come to the end of ourselves, recognizing that the task at hand is impossible for us, in our own strength.
So if you’re struggling to bless your enemies: (1) You’re in good company, and (2) you’ve set yourself up for success, simply by acknowledging that you don’t have it in you to bless them on your own.
Blessing our enemies — especially when our enemies have knowingly and willfully caused us serious harm — isn’t something that happens in one fell swoop. It’s something that happens in steps, and it takes intentionality and time and repetition.
Step 1: Repenting
Before we can bless our enemies, we first have to acknowledge that what God says is the right response toward our enemies (e.g. loving them, blessing them, praying for them, desiring good for them) contradicts what we naturally want for them; and we have to admit that that means we’re wrong. (Oooof.)
In other words, blessing our enemies starts with repentance on our part (i.e. a change of mind, that leads to a change of heart, that leads to a change of behavior), and agreeing that God is right when He says that blessing our enemies is the better way.
Step 2: Receiving grace
Once we’ve come into agreement with God, we need God’s empowering grace in order to follow through. And not just grace to bless our enemies, but before we even get to that part, the grace to forgive them.
It’s true that every one of us has experienced deep hurts at the hands of other human beings. What’s not true is the idea that human suffering is dished out equally among all. Some have, undoubtedly, suffered more than others.
But the good news is that the grace of God, which empowers us to live out the commands of Christ — even to forgive those who’ve hurt us and to pray blessings over our enemies — isn’t just dished out equally to each of us. God’s grace is dished out to His children in equitable portions. He offers each of us the perfect portions of grace we’ll need to follow Christ’s commands, specific to our circumstances.
Receiving grace is an act of faith. It starts with presenting our weaknesses to our heavenly Father and asking for His help (Hebrews 4:14-16), and believing that He will give us exactly what we need. Then, trusting that the grace He provides is enough (2 Corinthians 12:9), we can move forward in faith.
Step 3: Forgiving
At a root level, in order for any of us to pray blessings over our enemies and mean it, there has to be some willingness (even half-hearted willingness) on our part to forgive the person who’s wronged (or is wronging) us.
By forgive, I do not mean letting that person off the hook; but I do mean letting them off our hook, and entrusting their fate to God. When we forgive someone, we’re relinquishing the role of judge, and we’re trusting God to judge as He sees fit, believing that He is good and just, even if His justice ultimately looks like mercy.
I have struggled, heavily, with this. Truth be told, I still struggle with this. There is a part of me that wants to know that, in the end, the people who hurt other people on purpose and aren’t sorry for it will be punished for their actions. This is our natural human response, but this is not the heart of God, which is part of the reason why God is good and we are not.
2 Peter 3:9 tells us that God’s desire isn’t for anyone to perish — not even the very worst people. Rather, God’s desire is for everyone — even the very worst human alive — to turn to Him. And at the heart of that verse is this truth: God doesn’t want to punish any of us, despite the fact that all of us deserve to be punished.
God allows the rain to fall on both the just and the unjust, the grateful and the ungrateful (Matthew 5:44-45; Luke 6:35). His heart is merciful, and we have all certainly benefited from His mercy. So if we want to have a heart like our heavenly Father, we have to learn to love mercy. And mercy is most merciful when it’s poured out on the least deserving.
If you and I want to have the heart of our good heavenly Father, we have to somehow get to a place where we, like our heavenly Father, don’t want anyone — even that person who’s hurt us beyond measure — to pay the penalty for what they’ve done.
We have to figure out how to get to the place where our heart for them, even in their uttermost wickedness, is for God to show them His mercy and kindness. Because while you and I were still sinners, completely absent-minded of God, caring for no one but ourselves — Jesus died for us (Romans 5:8).
Jesus didn’t wait until after we’d repented. He didn’t wait until we felt bad for what we’d done. He showed us mercy, while. And so, while our worst enemies are still warring with us (and perhaps even still warring with God), God’s heart for them is for their salvation and their redemption and their good.
So the question for each of us is this: Am I willing to align my heart with God’s heart for that person?
This is unnatural for us. This is impossible for us… except that, with God, all things are possible (Matthew 19:26).
Step 4: Blessing our enemies
Once we’ve repented, received grace (both the grace to forgive and to bless), and chosen to forgive our enemies, we are ready to do exactly what God calls us to do. Empowered by God’s grace, we can pray blessings over the people who’ve hurt us the most, as often as they come to our minds.
Rather than focusing on all the bad things they’ve done to us (or to anyone else), we can focus on praying for the things we know God wants for our enemies…
God wants our enemies to know Him, so we can pray for their salvation.
God wants to redeem our enemies’ lives — even their worst and most harmful choices — so we can pray for their redemption.
God wants to bless our enemies with every good thing with which we’d ask God to bless us or our closest friends, so we can pray for God to do for our enemies what we’d want God to do for us.
But here’s the trickiest part of all, in my opinion:
Sometimes, we can get to a place where we’re doing this — we’re blessing our enemies… and then all of the sudden, it’s impossible again. So, what do we do when that happens?
We go back.
We repent, again.
We receive grace, again.
We forgive, again. (Because forgiveness is not a one-and-done thing, because while we might forgive someone for their actions against us, we still have to keep on forgiving them for the pain that keeps coming up as a result of their actions.)
Then, having repented, received grace, and extended forgiveness once again… we can bless our enemies, again.
If blessing your enemies feels impossible
If blessing your enemies feels impossible… that’s because it is.
None of it is easy. None of it sounds appealing, to our flesh. None of it is even possible…
Except that, with God, all things are possible!
Just before Jesus’ crucifixion, He spoke these words to His followers:
“Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I am going to the Father. Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it. If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.” - Jesus (John 14:12-17, ESV)
I used to love these words, because I thought they meant that, as Christians, we would be able to perform miracles in Jesus’ name. And really, who doesn’t want to move mountains and raise the dead and walk on water? And not to say Jesus couldn’t have meant that as well, but I wonder now if He wasn’t talking about an even greater miracle...
Because while moving mountains and raising the dead and walking on water are all impossible feats, you know what else is impossible for us, in our own strength? You know something that even Jesus never had to do, while He was walking on this earth?
Jesus came into our fallen world, fully God and fully human, and He lived a sinless life. Given all the temptations that a fallen world throws at a person, for Jesus to have not sinned, even without having a sin nature, was miraculous! (Clearly, none of us could have accomplished that, given that we couldn’t even manage to say no to temptation in pre-fallen world.)
But though Jesus came into our world, fully human, and lived a sinless life, Jesus never had to say no to all the temptations that a fallen world throws at us as a fallen human, born with a sin nature. And that is exactly what He is calling you and me to do…
When Jesus left us, He sent us the Helper (His Spirit) to live within us and to empower us to do not only what He did, but even greater works. So could it possibly be that this — obeying God, when you and I are incapable of doing so in our flesh — is the “greater work” that Jesus was referring to?
With man, it is impossible! But Jesus made a way for us, so that with God, even this is possible! And I’m suggesting that following the commands of Jesus — these impossibly unnatural commands of Jesus — is an even greater miracle than moving a mountain or raising a dead man or walking on water!
So if it seems impossible, today, to bless your enemies, don’t lose heart! It seems impossible, because it is…
But if Jesus is calling you to do this impossible thing — to bless the people who’ve hurt you the most — He’s inviting you to partake in a miracle!
“But I say to you who hear, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” - Jesus (Luke 6:27-28, ESV)
Want to read more articles like this one? Subscribe today for free, and you’ll get blog posts and updates sent straight to your inbox, so you’ll never miss a thing!
