Silas
Beloved of All
I have read your prayer and I want to respond to you with honesty and care, because what you have asked God to do is not in line with His heart or His word.
Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment is, and He answered that we are to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. He said that all of the law and the prophets hang on those two commands. The apostle Paul later wrote that love is the fulfilling of the law, because love does no harm to a neighbor. If I truly love my neighbor as I love myself, I will not lie to him, steal from him, or seek to harm him or push him away. I will want for him the same good, safety, dignity and provision that I want for myself.
Your prayer asks for the opposite. It asks that a group of people be treated as superior and another group be treated as outcasts, that public places be divided, and that foreigners be despised and driven out. That is not love. That is asking God to help you do harm to your neighbor, and Scripture is clear that love works no ill to its neighbor.
Hatred stirs up strife. It creates division and conflict, and it does not stay outside of us. When we hold on to hatred and bitterness, we are the ones who are hurt by it. It eats away at our own heart. Love, by contrast, covers sins and seeks to heal. God has shown us what He delights in. He is the Lord who exercises loving kindness, judgment and righteousness in the earth, and He delights in those things. He is kind and patient toward His children, but He is also just, and He will judge what is unjust. To use a past injustice as a reason to create a new injustice is not righteousness. God does not call us to repeat the sins of history, He calls us to turn from them.
Because of this, I cannot join you in praying for segregation or for contempt toward foreigners. To do so would be to ask God to bless what He has called sin. Instead, I want to invite you to consider a different prayer, one of repentance.
Scripture makes a distinction between a sorrow that is merely worldly and a godly sorrow that leads to repentance. Worldly sorrow may feel regret but it does not change the heart. Godly sorrow leads to a real change of mind and direction, a turning away from what is wrong and turning toward God for forgiveness through Jesus Christ. That is what is needed here.
Your neighbor is not only the person who looks like you, speaks like you, or was born where you were born. Jesus taught that our neighbor is anyone in need whom God places before us, including the stranger and the foreigner. We are called to love them as we love ourselves, to treat them as we would want to be treated if we were the stranger in another land.
So my prayer for you is that God would give you a new heart, that He would forgive you for the hatred expressed in this prayer, and that He would fill you with His love. I pray that He would help you to see every person as made in His image and worthy of dignity and kindness, and that He would lead you to love foreigners who live among you rather than despise them. I pray that you would know His loving kindness toward you in Christ, and that from that kindness you would learn to show kindness to others.
If you are willing, ask Him to change you, to cleanse you from hatred, and to teach you to walk in love toward God and toward your neighbor.
Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment is, and He answered that we are to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. He said that all of the law and the prophets hang on those two commands. The apostle Paul later wrote that love is the fulfilling of the law, because love does no harm to a neighbor. If I truly love my neighbor as I love myself, I will not lie to him, steal from him, or seek to harm him or push him away. I will want for him the same good, safety, dignity and provision that I want for myself.
Your prayer asks for the opposite. It asks that a group of people be treated as superior and another group be treated as outcasts, that public places be divided, and that foreigners be despised and driven out. That is not love. That is asking God to help you do harm to your neighbor, and Scripture is clear that love works no ill to its neighbor.
Hatred stirs up strife. It creates division and conflict, and it does not stay outside of us. When we hold on to hatred and bitterness, we are the ones who are hurt by it. It eats away at our own heart. Love, by contrast, covers sins and seeks to heal. God has shown us what He delights in. He is the Lord who exercises loving kindness, judgment and righteousness in the earth, and He delights in those things. He is kind and patient toward His children, but He is also just, and He will judge what is unjust. To use a past injustice as a reason to create a new injustice is not righteousness. God does not call us to repeat the sins of history, He calls us to turn from them.
Because of this, I cannot join you in praying for segregation or for contempt toward foreigners. To do so would be to ask God to bless what He has called sin. Instead, I want to invite you to consider a different prayer, one of repentance.
Scripture makes a distinction between a sorrow that is merely worldly and a godly sorrow that leads to repentance. Worldly sorrow may feel regret but it does not change the heart. Godly sorrow leads to a real change of mind and direction, a turning away from what is wrong and turning toward God for forgiveness through Jesus Christ. That is what is needed here.
Your neighbor is not only the person who looks like you, speaks like you, or was born where you were born. Jesus taught that our neighbor is anyone in need whom God places before us, including the stranger and the foreigner. We are called to love them as we love ourselves, to treat them as we would want to be treated if we were the stranger in another land.
So my prayer for you is that God would give you a new heart, that He would forgive you for the hatred expressed in this prayer, and that He would fill you with His love. I pray that He would help you to see every person as made in His image and worthy of dignity and kindness, and that He would lead you to love foreigners who live among you rather than despise them. I pray that you would know His loving kindness toward you in Christ, and that from that kindness you would learn to show kindness to others.
If you are willing, ask Him to change you, to cleanse you from hatred, and to teach you to walk in love toward God and toward your neighbor.
