“Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse” (Rom. 12:14).
The apostle Paul gave that instruction with an authenticity born of personal experience. He had once stood by, a persecutor himself, nodding approval as Stephen was executed—stones pounding the life out of a faithful follower of Jesus. Stephen cried out in his final moments, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them!” (Acts 7:60), a dying prayer that mirrored the heart of Jesus, who on the cross said, “Father, forgive them” (Luke 23:34), adhering to his own command to “pray for those who persecute you” (Matt. 5:44).
With each stone hurled at him, Stephen absorbed the blows into his body yet responded not with curses but with prayer. He interceded for those wounding him. In a remarkable twist, God answered Stephen’s prayer by rescuing Paul the persecutor. And Paul himself would later carry wounds—some physical, others emotional—inflicted by believers and unbelievers. Like Stephen, Paul would absorb this pain and, through the Spirit’s power, turn those wounds into prayerful intercession for those who harmed him.
What we see in these examples is something deeper than mere forgiveness. It’s wounded intercession: taking the wounds inflicted on us by others and turning the pain into prayer.
We All Carry Wounds
Nobody passes through this world unscathed. Each of us bears wounds—perhaps from harsh words, or maybe a friend’s betrayal, or the sting of rejection, or the cold shoulder, or the invisibility of neglect. Heartbreak shapes us in ways we may be slow to recognize. We internalize the pain, nurse the slights, and replay the scenes. That’s when bitterness can creep in and poison our souls.
The solution to bitterness is forgiveness, but let’s be real . . . forgiveness isn’t easy, and it’s never cheap. It doesn’t come naturally. Tim Keller explains why we find it so difficult:
Resentment always makes us feel morally superior to the wrongdoer, which in turn makes it harder to shed the resentment. If you don’t see that you too are a sinner needing grace, your resentment will twist and defile you. . . . If you are going to forgive, you must identify with the wrongdoers—you must realize you are a co-sinner and they are co-humans.
John Piper connects our need for forgiveness to Christ’s call to forgive:
You cannot rejoice that your life hangs totally on the undeserved mercy of being blessed by Christ when you were his enemy, and then turn around and curse those who persecute you.
This lines up with how Jesus taught us to pray: “Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” Forgiveness from God and forgiveness of others go hand in hand. But how?
Turn Pain into Prayer
To forgive someone doesn’t mean we pretend the pain isn’t real. We don’t excuse evil or sweep sin under the rug. So how do we even start down this road? How can the wounds we carry be transformed from a source of harm into a source of healing?
The path becomes clear in the New Testament command to pray for those who’ve harmed us. Prayer is where we bring our wounds—the cuts, the bruises, the stings—to God. We acknowledge the sins committed against us and then raise our wounded hands to the Spirit, whom we trust can transform suffering into compassion.
When we pray for those who have wounded us, we join Christ in his work of intercession. Just think: Jesus prays continuously for us—you, and me, all of us responsible for the wounds he received on the cross. United to Christ, our wounds can become like his—no longer a mark of defeat or despair but a channel of grace toward the undeserving. When we bless those who curse us and pray for those who hurt us, we trust that our wounds, in Jesus’s hands, can be transformed into prayers the Spirit can use to bring healing not only to us but also to our enemies.
That was the prayer of Oswald Chambers, that we “not only experience the indwelling of the love of God in our hearts but go on to a hearty abandon to that love so that God can pour it out through us for his redemptive purposes for the world. He broke the life of his own Son to redeem us, and now he wants us to use our lives as a sacrament to nourish others.”
One of my favorite hymn-writers, Nicolae Moldoveanu, suffered under Romania’s Communist regime, enduring imprisonment and persecution. Yet his hymns overflowed with grace. I like how his song “Cu haina iubirii” (“With the Garment of Love”) captures the transformative nature of God’s love:
May I pour endlessly into wounds caused by sin
the balm of divine love,
for love is the sign that the Lord of glory
has made me born anew for himself.
For Moldoveanu, loving our enemies is proof that Christ has renewed our hearts. It’s the sign of his life in us. Wounded intercession isn’t a spiritual technique—it’s an expression of new life, a witness to the transformative power of grace.
Embrace the Wounds of Christ
Thomas Watson wrote, “A true saint carries Christ in his heart and the cross on his shoulders.” This is the Christian life.
No one escapes this life without wounds. The wounds are often wrong. Unfair. Senseless. Forgiveness begins with the upward look of trust to a benevolent Father and then the outward look of love to those who do us harm. In Christ, undeserved wounds can be met with undeserved kindness. We embrace our nail-scarred Savior and join the fellowship of his suffering.
So, as we walk in the steps of our crucified Lord, we ask the Spirit to turn our pain into prayer, our wounds into intercession, our suffering into healing.
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