Here’s something I’ve been thinking about lately. Does prayer exist primarily to teach us to love? If so, it’s our means to keeping the two great commandments Christ gave in Mark 12:30-31: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.
The different forms of prayer: blessing (Eph 1:3), adoration (Ps 95:6), petition (Col 4:12), asking forgiveness (Lk 18:13), intercession (1 Tm 2:1), thanksgiving (1 Thes 5:18) and praise (Eph 3:20),
should all help us love God more. What about the second commandment? Intercession covers that, right? We pray for loved ones and friends, strangers and world situations that arouse our compassion like the recent earthquake in China, and the other disasters we’ve been plagued with recently.
So, here’s my question for you and for myself: who do you exclude from your prayers? In all honesty, just between you and God; who do you not want to pray for? Could this be the reason for the miserable state of our world? In the great commandment Jesus says love your neighbor, at other times he said love your enemies. He’s trying to stretch the boundaries of our love. Are we listening, are we trying?
Here’s my challenge: put your problems and loved ones in God’s hands and spend a few days or a week praying for people you usually don’t pray for. Start small with someone you’re ambivalent about, a neighbor you neither like nor dislike, a co-worker you barely know, the person you’re not going to vote for in November. Then take it up a notch and pray for someone who annoys you or sets your teeth on edge, the braggart or gossip, or the lousy driver who cut you off at a stop sign, the relative who let you down. If you get that far, pray for the people you judge and despise, the corrupt cop or politician, the illegal alien, the rapist, the child abusers, the terrorists, the gang members, the murderers.
Can you do it? Can I? Jesus did.
