PRAYING FOR ENEMIES

When you pray the prayer Jesus taught His disciples, you ask God to forgive you as you forgive those who wrong you. It says nothing about those who wrong you forgiving you, or changing their mind about you. It says nothing about those who wrong you asking you -- or even God -- for forgiveness. What 'they' do is not in the picture. It has no part in your being forgiven by God. It does not affect your need and your duty before God to forgive others. A 12-step observation can be made here : you can't change someone else, you can only change yourself. (Whether your changes change others is between them and God, and is not set by you.) Forgiveness does not cause reconciliation; if the other party has not forgiven, if either party has not taken steps beyond forgiveness to cause change in the situation, there is no reconciliation. But forgiveness is the essential step. It is where you are led as the Spirit likens you to Christ. Christ bids us to turn around our thinking toward others. This isn't a call to pretend we are not being wronged, or to be silent or still as it happens to others. The wrong is still there, and the wrong is still every bit as wrong. But in forgiveness, we share the grace God gave to us for the wrongs we did. Jesus taught us to pray for God to give us what it takes to do so.