Am I suggesting we or this church pray they hurt more people? No, what I am saying is that we pray for our enemies.
Why would anyone in there right mind pray for such evil men? I mean, the main reason I could think to pray for them is so that a bullet could find them! However the Bible has a different response: the death of a wicked man who hurt people should not be met with a sense of vengeance. Justice is to be done only by God, we can rejoice that people will not be hurt anymore by this man. However wicked this man was, he was an image bearer of God and a human being. Vengeance is always left to the Lord, however we can be happy that a bad man is no longer hurting people and pray that he finds Jesus and stops hurting people.
I love how the Resurgance website puts this:
The appropriate Christian response lives in the tension of these verses:
Proverbs 11:10 - “When it goes well with the righteous, the city rejoices, and when the wicked perish there are shouts of gladness.”
Proverbs 24:17 - “Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, & let not your heart be glad when he stumbles.”
What does grace do?
Grace puts us all on the same playing field as Dan Rockwell wonderfully used to tell me. I am just as deserving of hell as Bin Laden is. I have angered God, just like Bin Laden has. We all are sinners and we all are wicked. I can repeat that again, we all are sinners and no one on this earth is better then anyone else. You may think the Pope is better then Bin Laden or a drug dealer but that is not true.
The Pope may act more moral and ethical but in God's eyes the drug dealer and the Pope are both sinners.If you say that one person is better then the other, you put yourself in a dangerous spot. Grace puts us all in the same boat and the same playing field. It labels us all as needy and sinful because in order to need grace you need to be in trouble. If at some point you want to say one human is better then another you have made a tactical error. You forgot that God sees only 2 types of people, Holy and Bad. In the Holy camp we have Jesus and in the Bad camp we have everyone else.
We all deserve hell, and knowing that we all want mercy but when its someone else we want them to get vengeance. So maybe we should be thinking twice when looking down out that down and out person in prison. We should be glad they can't hurt anyone but also we should be praying they find Jesus because they are in the same place we are - broken and sinful.
So maybe we should pray for our enemies - pray they find Jesus and pray they stop hurting people.
Check out our sermon series - The DNA of Life where Jason dives more into this topic of grace
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| DNA of Life:Grace |
