If you want to be a faithful priest to God in this area of intercession, you must first acknowledge your total inadequacy. Hence, you must be totally dependent on Christ and the Holy Spirit to do this great work of God.
when you get this feeling of inadequacy, thank God! This feeling is good. For it is God’s designed way of bringing us to Him so that we may receive the necessary resources in order to intercede for others. Just as with the man in the story who felt desperate to supply the need of his friend who had come on a long journey, in which case God did help him to seek Him and supply that need, we too may benefit from times when we feel that we desperately need His help. For He has planned all along for us to feel inadequate and desperate so that we will…
It is certainly clear from scripture that we have a great job ahead of us—to pray for all men. But why must we do it? And if we must do it, how do we get motivated to do it?
Why do we have a responsibility to intercede for people? The answer is that God has made us responsible by making us His priests. As priests He has commissioned us and called us to intercede for all men.
With this calling He has given us a desire deep inside us to intercede. And so, even though we may at times regret the hard work of intercession, deep inside our soul we secretly love it. Yes, we love to be involved with Christ in His work. For as His interceding priests we have the glorious privilege of ruling with Him and extending His rule. Hence, in no other way can we…
Paul wrote, “first of all, then, I urge that entreaties and prayers, petitions and thanksgivings, be made on behalf of all men” (I Timothy 2:1). We see from this verse that there is a sense in which our prayers must include the whole world. They must go beyond our own families, our churches, our friends, and our country. What a great and awesome responsibility we have. And at the same time what a great privilege and honor God has given to us to be able to touch a soul on the other side of the world.
I have laid out for you what I have found from my study to be the main groups of people we should pray and intercede for. Here are those groups, eight in all.
1.Secular leaders (1 Timothy 2:2). Under the heading of “all men,” the first group that Paul instructs…
1. It is standing in the gap or praying on behalf of a person who needs help, and in many cases, for whom Satan is trying to destroy.
2. It is praying for those whom God has given to us—for those whom God has put on our heart; most often it is for those whom we have a ministry with.
3. It is a particular kind of prayer that demands our unselfish devotion to God, to a pure life, and to those whom we pray for. It demands our willingness to loose ourselves for others and for the will of God.
4. To be an intercessor we must feel a concern and a responsibility for those we are interceding for. We must associate with their sins and their needs.
3 Then I set my face toward the Lord God to make request by prayer and supplications, with fasting, sackcloth, and ashes. 4 And I prayed to the Lord my God, and made confession, and said, “O Lord, great and awesome God, who keeps His covenant and mercy with those who love Him, and with those who keep His commandments, 5 we have sinned and committed iniquity, we have done wickedly and rebelled, even by departing from Your precepts and Your judgments. 6 Neither have we heeded Your servants the prophets, who spoke in Your name to our kings and our princes, to our fathers and all the people of the land. 7 O Lord, righteousness belongs to You, but to us shame of face, as it is this day — to the men of Judah, to the inhabitants of Jerusalem and all Israel, those near and…
The story of Esther gives us a clear picture of how intercession works. In the story, Queen Vashti was divorced from King Ahasuerus because she refused to dance before the king and his guests at a banquet. Later, after the king’s anger had subsided, a search was made for a new Queen. Esther was chosen, and the king loved her.
Soon afterwards, King Ahasuerus appointed a man named Haman as Prime Minister; and as the king commanded, all the king’s officials were to bow down to him. But Mordecai, who was Esther’s cousin and the one who reared her, refused to bow down to Haman because of his Jewish faith. Upon hearing this news Haman was furious and immediately began to plot the destruction of all the Jews, out of which a decree was issued and signed by the king that all Jews would be killed on the 28th of…
The following article is an excerpt from this book.
When we look at the Disciples Prayer (or The Lord’s Prayer), I believe we see three types of petitions that Jesus taught (Matthew 6:8-13).
1. Invocation
We get this idea from the first three requests: “Our Father in heaven, Hallowed be Your name; Your Kingdom come; Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
This first type of petition, according to Jennings, is the invocation of our prayer; it is the summoning of the Spirit of God that He would come to us and be God to us, to help us pray and do His will.5
Yes, it is asking Him to help us pray that His name be hallowed–let Your name be hallowed. And bring your kingdom to us; and bring your will to us.
There are so many people with so many needs, which require us to spend much time in prayer. But, as Wesley Duewel has said, “We will never have enough time for prayer unless we deliberately plan for it…The time we give to prayer by deliberately planning is the measure of our value of prayer. It is the truest measure of our love for Jesus.”5
I urge you to follow our Lord’s example in praying at night and in the early morning. If the Lord is calling you to get up early in the morning to pray, if you want to be powerfully used by God and if you want to really know Him, you must immediately get up when He wakes you. As E. M. Bounds has said, “No man gets God who does not follow hard after Him.”6
So wake your lazy bones up and get going with God (I’m talking to myself)! If you are prone to be lazy and want to sleep in, I urge you to instead follow the desire to pray. That holy desire will provide for you a great blessing when you heed its call. And when you have decided that you are going to rise early to pray, that decision, backed up with action, will break all your self-indulgent chains, giving you greater and greater strength and desire for God.
Besides morning and evening prayers, Sunday afternoon is a great time to spend an hour or two in prayer. What better time to use for prayer than the Lord’s Day.
If you are planning to pray long, don’t be discouraged if the first few minutes are especially difficult. It seems, at least for me, that after twenty minutes or so of struggling in prayer, the rest of the time is more enjoyable and less of a struggle. That is because it often takes that long to enter into that heavenly realm where you are in awe of God.
When you get to that place in your prayers, you will almost forget that you are on earth struggling in the flesh; you will be more conscious that you are with God in the heavenly places. That is, you will be so taken up with God that you will forget all about your earthly affairs. In that blissful time, your thoughts will be more with God’s thoughts; therefore, you won’t be concerned with all of your worries; you will be more concerned for the will of God. During that sweet time of prayer, you won’t be thinking about what you could be doing or what you should be doing; rather, you will be so overcome with desire for God that all you will want to do is to drink and imbibe deeply of His love.
I challenge you to extend your prayer time for longer than twenty minutes. It will be less of a struggle from then on. And the blessings that follow will be tremendous!
5 Wesley Duewel, Mighty Prevailing Prayer (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Francis Asbury Press, of Zondervan Publishing House, 1990), p. 160.
6 E. M. Bounds, Power through Prayer, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House), 1979, p. 58.
Paul was a great prayer warrior and was always interceding for others. Here are three passages having to do with Paul’s intercession. Then please take note of the three things I have observed from Paul about what intercession is:
Romans 1:9-10
For God, whom I serve in my spirit in the preaching of the gospel of His Son, is my witness as to how unceasingly I make mention of you, 10 always in my prayers making request, if perhaps now at last by the will of God I may succeed in coming to you.
Colossians 1:3-5
We give thanks to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, praying always for you, 4 since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and the love which you have for all the saints;
Philippians 1:3-11
I thank my God in all my remembrance of you, 4 always offering prayer with joy…
The thing about Daniel that I appreciate most is his devotion to God and to a pure life. From his youth he “made up his mind that he would not defile himself” (Dan. 1:8). He also had a practice of praying on his knees three times a day (6:10); and much of his praying was with fasting (9:3; 10:3). If we are to stand in the gap for others this must also be our manner of life and devotion. We must lose ourselves for God and for others. In the following prayer of Daniel’s, in Daniel 9: 1-19, we learn a great deal about what intercession is.
In the first year of Darius the son of Ahasuerus, of Median descent, who was made king over the kingdom of the Chaldeans — 2 in the first year of his reign I, Daniel, observed in the books the number of the…
If you want to be a faithful priest to God in this area of intercession, you must first acknowledge your total inadequacy. Hence, you must be totally dependent on Christ and the Holy Spirit to do this great work of God.
It is certainly clear from scripture that we have a great job ahead of us—to pray for all men. But why must we do it? And if we must do it, how do we get motivated to do it?
The story of Esther gives us a clear picture of how intercession works. In the story, Queen Vashti was divorced from King Ahasuerus because she refused to dance before the king and his guests at a banquet. Later, after the king’s anger had subsided, a search was made for a new Queen. Esther was chosen, and the king loved her.
Stephen Nielsen 