Peter here continues with the theme of loving our enemies, and the picture above displays a bit of something Peter must have in mind when thinking about loving his enemies, namely, that Jesus washed his feet despite the fact that he would go on to deny Jesus. Here are Peter’s words from 1 Peter 3:8-12

Finally, all of you, have unity of mind, sympathy, brotherly love, a tender heart, and a humble mind. Do not repay evil for evil or reviling for reviling, but on the contrary, bless, for to this you were called, that you may obtain a blessing.

Whoever desires to love life

and see good days,

let him keep his tongue from evil

and his lips from speaking deceit;

¹¹ let him turn away from evil and do good;

let him seek peace and pursue it.

¹² For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous,

and his ears are open to their prayer.

But the face of the Lord is against those who do evil.

I want to begin with the last verse here because it is connected to the verses I mentioned in our last meditation. “His ears are open to their prayer.” Remember the admonition for husbands to love their wives “so that their prayers might not be hindered.” This is a stunning connection here. It is not that the Lord actually doesn’t hear the prayers of certain people, but that those who disobey God in one part of their life necessarily lack intimacy with God in their prayer life. On the other hand, those who are obeying God by treating their wives, husbands, friends and ENEMIES correctly are going to experience intimacy with God in their prayer lives. This is an interesting connection, and there would seem to be a sort-of feedback-loop. What I mean is that when we pray, we experience intimacy with God and we are motivated - hopefully - to live by His standards, and then when we actually follow those standards we are enjoying God by obeying Him and the intimacy is made even more intense. The obedience, instead of puffing us up, should drive us back to God in prayer because we have experienced how great it is to follow Him. Just a few thoughts on prayer.

Note the command to bless those who revile us, and the command to bless those who do evil to us. This is a difficult principle, no doubt. I’m interested in hearing how we can apply this in the church today. So I will leave this as the end of the article and ask people to comment about what exactly they think it means to do this. I want us to think specifically about how to do this. In other words, what can we do today to live this text and obey God?