From Matthew 5:43-48 / What if? – In the age of social media, news “pundits”, endless op-ed venues and “cancel culture” – what if prayer for those who oppose our views or we theirs – dominated over discourse? What if? What if we actually prayed for them, and not just about them? What if we took just 1 minute out of every 5 of tirade, conversation and complaint to ask God to bless those who vex us so? What if for every skewering post we pass on to others, we offer up another one that shines the light of the Gospel? What if we began to be truly broken over how our fallenness in Adam has poisoned our minds so, that we wept for the abortionists as well as for their victims? What if every time we groaned to one another about the state of wickedness around us, we closed by turning one another’s eyes back to our Sovereign God? What if for every newspaper or online article we read castigating our enemies, we stopped and prayed “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”? What if we shined the light of Jesus’ substitutionary death, every time – or even in place of – cursing the darkness? Christians are realists. We do not and should not ignore nor whitewash evil. We are duty bound to call it out for what it is. But if we stop there, and do not bring the Gospel in along side; if we do not seek the good of those whose ideas and actions we oppose (and they ours), we’ve done nothing more than any still lost and outside of saving grace. But what if we stopped fighting the fire of this age with the same fire, but instead, were ignited in prayer to weep with the Spirit’s fire? What if the Spirit of the One who “while we were enemies” completed the work of reconciliation to the Father, spilled over just a bit into us. What if we took Jesus seriously here? What if?