How to Pray for People Who’ve Hurt You

Jesus said it plainly, clearly, without qualification: *"Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you"* (Matthew 5:44).

No footnotes. No asterisk pointing to the people who really deserve it, or a conditional clause about severity, or an exemption for when what was done to you was genuinely bad. Just: pray for them.

That verse has been used as a cudgel long enough that most people flinch when they hear it. They know they're supposed to do it. They may have even tried. But they also know what the experience of being truly hurt by someone actually feels like — the replays, the conversations you have in your head at two in the morning, the way a certain street corner or a certain song brings it all back. And they know that whatever is happening in those moments is not prayer.

So what does it actually look like to pray for people who have hurt you? Not as a performance, not as an item on a spiritual obedience checklist, but as something real?

That's what this is about.

Why It Feels Impossible (And Why That's Honest)

Let's not skip past the difficulty to get to the application.

Praying for someone who has genuinely hurt you feels impossible for a reason: it requires something from you in a direction that runs against every protective instinct you have. When you're hurt, those instincts are self-preserving. They want the pain acknowledged, the wrong named, the scales balanced. They don't naturally point you toward the person who caused the damage with warmth.

That instinct isn't sin. It's human. It's what surviving harm looks like.

The problem is that the instinct, if you follow it without interruption, also keeps you tethered to the wound. The anger, the replay, the rehearsal of grievances — they feel like protection, but over time they become a way of staying attached to the pain. Praying for someone who hurt you is hard not because it's spiritually advanced — it's hard because it asks you to do something against the grain of what pain wants to do.

Naming that honestly is the beginning of actually being able to move.

What Praying for Them Is NOT

Before going any further, let's be specific about what Jesus is not asking.

Praying for someone who hurt you is not approving what they did. You can hold two things at once: what happened was wrong, AND you are choosing to bring this person before God. Those are not in conflict. One doesn't cancel the other.

It's not pretending the hurt didn't happen. Prayer that glosses over reality isn't prayer — it's performance. You can bring the actual wound to God while still choosing to pray for the person who caused it.

It's not rushing your own healing. There is no spiritual speed requirement here. The expectation is not that you'll arrive at warm feelings overnight, or that you'll fake a serenity you don't have. You're allowed to be exactly where you are while still choosing this kind of prayer.

And it's not the same as reconciliation. Forgiving someone and restoring a relationship are two different things. Praying for someone doesn't mean trusting them again, re-entering a harmful dynamic, or pretending the damage isn't real. Forgiveness doesn't require the other person's participation. Neither does prayer.

What Jesus Actually Modeled

Matthew 5:44 gives the command. Luke 23:34 shows us what it looks like under the worst possible conditions: Jesus, being crucified, said *"Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing."*

Not after it was over. Not when He had distance from it. While it was happening.

This is not meant as a guilt trip — the point is not to say "well, if Jesus could do it while dying, surely you can manage." The point is that this kind of prayer has been done before, under the most extreme circumstances imaginable, by someone fully aware of the harm being done to Him. He didn't pretend otherwise. He didn't bypass the pain. He brought the people hurting Him before His Father anyway.

That's what makes it possible for you, too. He wasn't accessing some exceptional spiritual tolerance that ordinary people can't reach. He was doing what He always did: bringing what was happening directly to the Father. The hurt, the betrayal, the injustice — all of it went to God.

You have access to the same relationship.

What to Say When You Can't Find Words

Here's what most guides on this topic miss: you don't need to start by praying for the person's blessing or wellbeing if you're not there yet.

Start with honesty. Prayer that begins with the actual truth is more real — and more heard — than prayer that begins with what you think you're supposed to feel.

Something like: *"God, I don't want to pray for this person. I'm still angry. I'm still hurt. I'm bringing them to you because I know I can't hold this forever, and I don't know what to ask for except that I don't want to carry this wound into the next ten years of my life. Do whatever needs to happen in them — and in me."*

That's real. That's prayer. It doesn't require you to have arrived somewhere you haven't. It requires you to bring what's actually true into God's presence instead of the sanitized version you think He wants to hear.

Romans 8:26 says the Spirit intercedes for us when we don't know what to pray. You don't need the right words. You need to show up.

If you're in a season of relational pain and need something steady to hold onto, I Need Peace is a devotional resource built for exactly this kind of season — when the hurt is still raw and you're trying to find a way to breathe again.

How This Kind of Prayer Changes You

Here's what surprises people about praying for someone who hurt them: it tends to change you before it changes anything else.

Not because you talked yourself into forgiving them, or because you achieved some spiritual state where the wound doesn't sting anymore. But because the act of bringing someone before God — even with honest anger, even without resolution — begins to shift your relationship with the wound itself.

When you carry a grudge or rehearse a grievance, the person who hurt you stays at the center of your inner world. They take up space they don't deserve and didn't earn. Praying for them is, in a strange way, an act of disinvestment — a way of handing the weight to God instead of continuing to carry it yourself.

Hebrews 12:15 describes bitterness as *"a root that causes trouble and defiles many."* Left unaddressed, it spreads. It colors how you see other people, other relationships, even your relationship with God. Releasing it — even partially, even in small steps — does something in you that willpower alone cannot.

The Connection Between This Prayer and Your Own Peace

Praying for someone who hurt you is not a favor you're doing for them. They may never know you prayed. The prayer is for you — for the weight you're carrying, for the space you're giving a wound that doesn't deserve that kind of real estate in your inner life.

Philippians 4:7 describes *"the peace of God, which transcends all understanding,"* guarding hearts and minds. That peace tends to be exactly what disappears when bitterness takes hold — and often exactly what returns when we bring even the hardest things to God in prayer instead of holding them privately.

This isn't mechanical. It doesn't work like a formula. But there is a real and recurring pattern in the lives of people who learn to pray this way: the prayers that cost them the most tend to return the most in terms of inner freedom. You don't pray for your enemies because they deserve it. You pray because you need the freedom that carrying the weight without God's help keeps you from having.

When the Anger Comes Back

You'll pray this prayer. You'll feel something shift. And then the anger will come back.

That's not failure. It's not evidence that the prayer didn't work or that you haven't actually forgiven them. It's the nature of wounds that cut deep — they don't heal in a single session. The weight lifts a little, and then grief or anger resurfaces, and you bring it back to God again.

Think of it less as a one-time act and more as an ongoing practice. Every time the replay starts — every time the anger rises in the middle of a day that had nothing to do with them — you can choose to pray again. Not because you're obligated to feel better immediately, but because you're refusing to let this become the permanent furniture of your inner life.

We wrote more on the extended process of forgiveness in How to Forgive Someone Who Hurt You, and much of that framework applies here — including the reality that letting go is rarely a single moment and almost always a repeated choice. And if you're in a season where God feels silent in the middle of all this, that's worth reading too.

The Hardest Kind of Prayer. One of the Most Freeing Ones.

Jesus knew exactly what He was asking when He said to pray for people who hurt you. He said it anyway.

Not because it's easy. Not because it erases the damage or rushes your healing or resolves the injustice. But because He knew what holding a wound does to a person over time — and He knew what releasing it could make possible.

This kind of prayer is not primarily for them. It's not a favor to someone who may never know it happened. It's for you — for the weight you've been carrying, for the space you've been giving pain that was never supposed to become your permanent address, for the possibility of moving forward without dragging all of this behind you.

It's the hardest kind of prayer. It's also, strangely, one of the most freeing ones.

Bring it to God. All of it — the anger, the grief, the injustice, the person you don't want to pray for. He can hold what you can't. And He already knows what happened.