RE: Are you praying for them?
I think praying also helps us see our own hearts, and the sin that we bring to the table.
It opens our eyes to our own self-centeredness. Our grumbling shows us that our hearts are mainly focused on ourselves. We think that it’s all about us…about how we’ve been wronged or treated poorly, or about how we’ve been offended. Why do we not pray for others? Because we’re too concerned with ourselves. We have our heart idols that we worship. And not only do we fight back and get defensive when our heart idols are being attacked, but we actually want our idols to worship us. And we want others to worship us. We want to be worshipped!
And our grumbling also shows us how self-righteous we are. We complain when we don’t get the ”good” (ie-respect, honor, etc) that we think we deserve, or we complain when others give us the “bad” (ie-disrespect, lack of graciousness, etc) that we think we don’t deserve. But what we deserve for our wretched idolatry of self-worship and self-righteousness is judgment, death and hell, not God’s grace and love and forgiveness. But in His kindness, He’s given us Christ! And salvation! And all the promises of heaven, which are given to us in Christ! And so when we pray, we need to remember the Gospel. Humbly acknowledging what we deserve because of our sin but what Christ has given us instead. Which in turn helps us not be offended when others do actually treat us poorly, and which hopefully encourages us to treat others as we’ve been treated by God in Christ.
That’s a couple of ways how the Lord uses prayer to work in me as I pray for others.
The other thing that I’d encourage us to do when praying for others is to thank God for the evidences of grace that we see in them. It’s a good exercise to thank God for the good fruit that we see in others as the evidences of a changed life in Christ. And hopefully our praying for others in this way will lead to actually acknowledging these thing to those people, verbally encouraging them with the specific evidences of grace that you see in their lives. Or even writing a note or email. And hopefully that humility, warmth and graciousness will start to smooth the way towards unity…breaking down walls of hostility and division.
