How to Pray for Someone You Are Angry With (When You Do Not Want To)

There is a name you flinch at. Maybe it is a former friend, a family member, a boss, someone at church who said the thing that still rings in your ears. You know what Jesus said about people like that. You are supposed to pray for them. And on the days it matters most, you would rather do almost anything else.

I want to take that difficulty seriously, because most advice on this subject does not. It jumps straight from the command to the feeling of peace, as if there were no road in between. There is a road, and the first steps are more practical than you might expect.

The command nobody feels like keeping

The instruction is not ambiguous, which is part of the trouble. It sits in the Sermon on the Mount, in the middle of the most demanding stretch of teaching Jesus ever gave.

“But I tell you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who mistreat you and persecute you.” (Matthew 5:44, WEB)

Read it again and notice what is missing. There is no clause about how you are supposed to feel while doing it. Love here is a set of actions: bless, do good, pray. The feelings are not forbidden, and they are not required. That matters, because most of us have been quietly waiting for the anger to fade before we start, and it does not fade on its own. It waits for us.

So the first thing to say is that you can pray for someone you are still angry with, and it counts. It is obedience in the only condition obedience is ever available: the one you are actually in.

Anger is not the sin

Many believers carry an extra weight here: guilt about the anger itself. It helps to see how much anger there is in the Bible, and whose it is. The prophets are angry. The Psalms are angry, sometimes shockingly so. Jesus is angry in the temple and at the hardness of hearts. God’s anger runs through Scripture from beginning to end, and God is not sinning.

Paul puts the distinction in five words: “Be angry, and don’t sin” (Ephesians 4:26, WEB). The verse goes on to say not to let the sun go down on your wrath, which is not a ban on anger but a warning about what it becomes when it is kept overnight, and the next night, and the night after. Nursed anger is a decision to keep the wrong alive so you can keep feeling it.

Jonah is the cautionary example. He gets angry that God spares Nineveh, and God does not tell him to stop feeling it. God asks him a question: “Is it right for you to be angry?” (Jonah 4:4, WEB). That is the question to sit with. Not “how do I stop being angry,” which is often out of your hands, but “what is my anger asking for, and is that right?” Sometimes the honest answer is that it is asking for justice. Sometimes it is asking for the other person to suffer. Those are not the same request, and only one of them can be prayed.

Start with the honest prayer

Here is the practical beginning: tell God what you actually feel, in the words you actually have. Not the cleaned-up version. The real one, including the parts you are ashamed of. You are refusing to hide, which is the only posture in which anything else can happen.

The Psalms give you both permission and a pattern. Read Psalm 109 or Psalm 137 and you will find prayers that ask God to do terrible things to people. Those prayers are in the Bible, and they are there on purpose. They show what it looks like to bring rage to God instead of to the person, and to leave it there. The psalmist does not take vengeance. He asks God to. That is not the last word on enemies, but it is an honest first one.

Say it plainly. “Lord, I am furious with this person. I do not want good things for them right now. I am telling you because you told me to come to you with everything, and this is part of everything.” Start there and keep going.

What to pray for them

Once you have said the honest thing, the next step is to pray for the person, and here the content matters. There is a counterfeit version that sounds spiritual and is not: “Lord, help them see what they did.” “Lord, convict them.” “Lord, show them how they hurt me.” Those are prayers about you, wearing the other person’s name. They ask God to take your side. That is not what Jesus told you to pray.

Pray instead for their good, the way you would for someone you love. Their health. Their family. Their work. That they would know God. That whatever is broken in them would be healed. This is hard to say and it will feel false the first several times. Say it anyway. The words go ahead of the heart, and after a while the heart tends to follow.

Jesus on the cross prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34, WEB). Stephen, dying under a hail of stones, prayed almost the same thing (Acts 7:60). Neither of them waited until they felt warmly toward their killers. They prayed the good prayer in the middle of the harm. Yours will be smaller. It works the same way.

What this is not, and how to begin

Praying for someone is not the same as reconciling with them. It is not the same as trusting them again, and it is not pretending nothing happened. Some relationships should not be restored, at least not now, and some people are not safe. Scripture does not ask you to hand them the keys. It asks you to release the vengeance, not the wisdom.

Paul is direct about this: “Don’t seek revenge yourselves, beloved, but give place to God’s wrath” (Romans 12:19, WEB). Give place. Step back and leave room. The justice question is real and it does not disappear, but it is transferred to someone who can actually settle it, which frees you from being judge, jury and prosecutor in a case that runs in your head at all hours.

So keep your boundaries. Tell the truth about what happened. Involve the people who need to be involved, whether that is a pastor, a counselor or, in some cases, the law. And pray for the person anyway. Those are not in tension. They are what love looks like when it has to be wise.

Do not try to fix this in one sitting. Take a week. Each day, one sentence for the person, out loud or written down, before you do anything else. Day one might be the honest prayer only. Day two, one thing you can ask for their good. By the end of the week you will probably notice that the flinch at their name has changed shape. Not gone. Changed.

Write it down if you can. Writing it down lets you see the movement, which is easy to miss from inside it. If you use SoapBox, the private journal is a place for exactly this, and the prayer wall is there for the days you need someone else to carry it with you. If you want to read the passages above in context, ORA will retrieve and cite them. It is a research aid, not a counselor, and this is one of the places where a person matters more than any tool. But it will get you to the text, and the text is where the road starts.

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SoapBox is a free Bible app with a live prayer wall, daily devotionals, and ORA, an AI study assistant that answers questions about faith with grounded, Scripture-cited responses — judgment-free, in 140+ languages.

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