Thor's Day: Love your enemies deciphered in quartina

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According to the Gospel of Matthew (5:44, King James Version), Jesus said:

But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.

    By way of my first quartina^*, using the end-words love, enemies, pray, and persecutors, I offer what I consider some necessary qualifications to Jesus's reported utterance:

Sure, Jesus said about our enemies,
And about our spiteful persecutors,
How the first we should set our mind to love,
And for the second remember to pray.

But nothing ever happens when we pray
Except perhaps arise a sense of love
That might unguard us from our enemies
And leave us ripe for our persecutors.

The question is: Can our persecutors
Be induced not to be our enemies?
If so, then let us look for, if not pray
For, a mutual ground with them for love.

If interests join, then common need for love
Might convince both to one another pray:
Let's agree not to play persecutors,
And if not friends, neither be enemies.

We must puzzle out "love your enemies"
And decipher "pray" and "persecutors."

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* A quartina is a brief form of sestina, of my own devising, in which four (rather than six) end-words appear in a prescribed order in the poem's four four-line stanzas and in its terminal couplet, as exemplified above for the words love, enemies, pray, and persecutors.
Copyright © 2012 by Morris Dean