Praying the Hard Stuff
READ
In Matthew 5:38–48, Jesus doesn’t just describe how his followers should live — he tells them how to pray. Right in the middle of his command to love enemies, he drops a line that’s easy to skip past: “Pray for those who persecute you” (v. 44). That’s not a throwaway detail. It’s the hinge. Jesus seems to understand that the path to loving difficult people runs directly through how we talk to God about them. This passage isn’t just a call to act differently. It’s an invitation to pray differently — about our enemies, our anger, our retaliation, and the places in our hearts that would rather hold on than let go.
Read Matthew 5:38–47, and this time, read it as a guide for prayer:
“You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you. “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others?”
REFLECT
There are some things that are just hard to pray about. Not because prayer is hard — but because honesty is. When Jesus tells us to pray for the people who have hurt or wronged us, he’s not just giving us a to-do. He’s asking us to bring the full, messy truth of our inner life before God — the resentment, the desire for payback, the exhaustion of being the person who has to go the extra mile again. That kind of prayer requires a level of vulnerability most of us would rather skip. It’s easier to just ask God to fix the situation than to let him examine our hearts in the middle of it.
But look at what Jesus actually invites us into. He says to pray for those who persecute you — not around them, not about them, but for them. That’s a significant shift. Praying around someone keeps you at a safe distance: “God, deal with this person.” Praying about someone can quickly become a complaint session dressed up as devotion. But praying for someone — genuinely asking God to move in their life, to bless them, to meet them — requires you to see them as a person God loves. And that changes something in you, even before anything changes in them.
This is why prayer is the starting point Jesus gives, not the finishing touch. Before the turned cheek, before the extra mile, before any outward act of radical love — there’s a conversation with God that has to happen first. Because the truth is, most of us can’t manufacture enemy-love on our own. We don’t have enough. But prayer positions us to receive what we lack. When we bring our anger, our hurt, and our unwillingness to God honestly, we’re not pretending those things away — we’re handing them over and asking him to do something with them that we simply cannot do ourselves.
Jesus also gives us something hopeful to anchor our prayers to. He reminds us that God “causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous” (v. 45). In other words, God’s generosity isn’t rationed based on who deserves it. He lavishes it on everyone — the grateful and the ungrateful alike. When that truth sinks in, it reshapes how we pray. We stop asking God to withhold blessing from the people who’ve wronged us and start asking him to help us reflect the same scandalous generosity he’s already shown to us.
There’s also something quietly powerful about praying for someone you’re struggling to love. It’s almost impossible to stay fully hardened toward a person you’ve been genuinely bringing before God. Prayer has a way of softening the edges of our anger — not by dismissing the hurt, but by slowly shifting our perspective from “this person is my problem” to “this person is God’s concern.” That’s not a small move. That’s the beginning of freedom.
So here’s the invitation from this passage: don’t just read it, and don’t just try harder. Pray it. Bring the name of the person who is hardest to love and hold it before God. Bring your honest feelings — the frustration, the exhaustion, the part of you that would rather keep score. And then ask God, slowly and without pretending, to do what only he can do: make you someone who loves like he loves.
RESPOND
Take a moment to process what God might be leading you to do in light of what you read.
Is there someone you’ve been talking to God about rather than praying for? What would it look like to shift from praying about them to genuinely praying for them — for their good, their growth, their life?
Jesus says God sends rain on the righteous and unrighteous alike. How does God’s indiscriminate generosity challenge the way you pray for people who’ve hurt or wronged you?
What honest, unfiltered thing do you need to bring to God right now — the resentment, the exhaustion, the desire to get even — before you can begin to pray for someone else?
REST
Take a moment to rest in God’s presence and consider one thing you can take away from your time reading, then close your devotional experience by praying:
Father, I want to be honest with you: there are people in my life I’d rather not pray for. I bring those names to you now, along with everything I feel when I think of them — the hurt, the frustration, and the part of me that would rather hold on than let go. I’m asking you to do what I can’t do on my own: soften what has hardened in me, and help me see the people who are hardest to love the way you see them. Teach me to pray with open hands, trusting that you are at work even in the relationships I’ve given up on. Amen.