“Introduction to Intercessory Prayer”

In God’s salvation history, all the world’s history is ecclesiastical history, the story of success and, the seeming failure, the advance and hindrance of the ideal humanity, - that humanity seen in the Church of the living God.

The Old Testament is the witness and record of His salvation history with His people, a story of His love covenant with them, a covenant in which He was always faithful, but in which they were always in denial about His faithfulness.

He had chosen them, not because they were larger, stronger, more lovable than any other people.

Nor did He choose them because they were morally superior.

No - quite the opposite.

He chose them simply because He loved them, and desired a response of love and fellowship with them.

They failed miserably.

They were always prone to fall into lapses about the faithfulness of God, and their faithfulness to Him was always wanting. 

But even that could not cancel out His love and the glory of His movement with mankind.

We learn from this history of God’s salvation in the Old Testament how He works, which is not at all what we expect - He moves slowly, He moves unpredictably.

He even moves paradoxically at times. 

And, looking at the record, He is not impressed with size, wealth, power, activities, status, not intellectual prowess.

Faith is what He wants - heroes of faith.

Read Hebrews 11 once again to see the importance the Divine Mind places upon this one matter.

God’s history focuses on those who hold faithful to Him, regardless of how things turn out.

When Nebuchadnezzar, one of the world’s many tyrants who persecuted God’s people, threatened to torture the three Hebrew boys with fire, they responded:

“If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to save us fom it, and he will rescue us from your hand, O King. But even if he does not, we want you to know, O King, that we will not serve your gods nor worship the image of gold you have set up.” 
(Dan.3:17-18 -NIV)

Whether God would save them or, whether He would not, in the face of death, they still stood faithful to Him.

Slowly, seemingly painstakingly, God has written His history on earth through the deeds of those who have been faithful to Him right on through the New Testament record and into His present day Church.

It all bears testimony to the naturalness, the simplicity, and the beauty of the New Testament process by the way in which it has invaded the world - by Jesus becoming the true Lord of all men. 

It has been His life in the Church that has gone quietly forth and met the life of the world, to possess it for His sake and by His glory.

This is how the Church was making its history - the history of God’s salvation - in the New Testament period.

It grew to know of His faithfulness - faithfulness that was quite often quiet in its ways, yet powerful in its effect.

His being in its midst was to remind the Church to keep moving with Him to the Divine objective, to that spiritual end of God’s glory and Sovereign thought.

The spiritual growth to that end was and is to involve a real battle, a battle that is becoming more intense, harder, with greater opposition garmented in subtle, yet alluring enticements. 

It is a battle that calls for the committment of those who really mean business with God.

It calls for those who are willing to become a working, participating part of His full thought and plan.

This is a call that has always been a part of the Church’s function but the living Message of the living Christ today seems to be ever more importunate.

This is a message for those dark days lying yet ahead as the world keeps moving swiftly on to judgment, a living message for the hour.

The thoughtful observer needs no convincing that we live in a world that has gone mysteriously but radically wrong.

There is a futility about the whole world system that seems like an endless merry-go-round.

The ills of human life are apparent to us all: we have chosen paths which have led disastrously astray.

Man’s folly and sin have brought upon man its own inevitable consequences. 

In some strange way, the contagion of our own evil has spread beyond the confines of man’s life and the whole creation is involved.

But though the confusion in which God’s order appears at times to be involved may seem like complete frustration, ‘the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ’ offers hope.

The futility of things has for its object the offer of hope.

In the glorious liberty of Christ, there will be an emancipation to glory.

It will be a new world in which the Body of the Church will match man’s redeemed condition.

Isa.65:17: gives us the convincing argument that God would ‘create new heavens and a new earth’, and to Peter, decades later, in 2.Pet.3:13., this re-created universe was to be the dwelling place of the righteous.

But, a new order does not come painlessly to birth; the confusion which we are witnessing in our day and in which we all share is the travail out of which the new world is to come.

And it is the Church that is called to participate in its birth, in two very specific areas: in stedfast faith in the living, operating Christ and in earnest and travailing prayer.

This is to be the Church’s share in the sounding forth of the all-sufficiency, the faithfulness, the Sovereignty, and the glory of its Christ.

In looking at the stedfast faith to which the Church is called, I would like to go back to the record in Acts of the disciples meeting with Jesus just before His ascension.

When Jesus met with the disciples at that time, they asked Him the question of: “Lord, wilt Thou at this time restore again the Kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6).

Notice that Jesus did not answer their question. 

Instead, He corrected it with: “It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in His own power. But you will receive power...and you will be witnesses unto Me.” (Acts 1:7-8)

He shifted the emphasis from speculation about the future to demonstration in the present.

When times are hard, it is always a temptation to dream about the future and to project into the future all things that are longed for now, yet, at the same time, miss in seeing the present.

So the Jews dreamed about the Kingdom.

But Jesus was of a different mind.

“Be witnesses unto me”, He said.

‘Begin now and let the world see a demonstration of what the power of God can do when it works through the fellowship of those who trust Him, whose faith is in absolute reliance upon Me’, Jesus was saying.

Furthermore, He shifted the emphasis from the restoration of the past to the transformation of the present.

Some people, when times are rough, hark back to the past - to the ‘good old days’.

The disciples were doing that when they asked for a restoration of a kingdom that was like it was in David’s days.

‘There is no way back’, Jesus’ answer implied.

History is a stream of events and it moves forward.

What is done is left behind and the clock moves onward.

The Church’s task, in the history of God’s plan, is to transform the present by being His faithful and stedfast witness now, no matter what.

It requires the faith that every one of those heroes in Hebrews 11 exemplified, - and nothing short of that.

It is the faith the Hebrew boys demonstrated to Nebuchadnezzar.

There are times when God does not seem to be anywhere near - what happens to faith then?

When Jesus left the disciples, never again to be seen with their physical eyes, everything seemed so obscure to them.

But, they were soon to realize that, whereas He had dwelled among them, He was now dwelling in them and, by faith, accepted the fact so that - in some ways - He became more real to them than He was before He left.

They had come to the place where they could reach Him whenever and wherever, a place where they had an even deeper and more abiding relationship in being blended together into a single chord.

They were getting a working knowledge of how He worked, His ways, ways that were not always easy to embrace.

And it was faith that kept them steadily moving along while their personal, deep association with their ascended, risen Lord made them amazingly effective in holding steady His witness.

It was through faith - the ever-deepening faith in Him alone - that was the secret of the Church’s strong witness of Him, that wrote the pages of God’s salvation history that extends to us today.

It is in this deepening kind of faith in which the Church is naturally led to the ministry of intercession, the second area in which the Church is called to participate in the Reign of Christ.

The time of the enemy’s constant, protracted battering of the walls of Christ’s Church may be drawing to a swift close; I do not know.

But, I do know that the battle is becoming more intense, and so I thank God for those who have been called to earnest prayer and intercession, who have been, and are being, sorely tested in faith, who have the vision of the Person of Christ, and are remaining faithful in this function of His Church.

For this ministry of intercession is of all-importance to the continuance of God’s salvation history.

In it, the Church is called not to ask God to answer prayer in ways that please the human conditions, unrelated to His perfected purpose.

When this happens, we have stepped between Him and the way of the Cross, and the sight of Him gets quite clouded and His glory is obscured. 

But the Church is called to enter intercession with only His glory in view.

No glory comes to God when we pray to ‘squander’ that glory on ourselves: He does not share His glory with another.

We must remember that His glory is His glory - we can only be the witnesses of the glory that He is.

The faith that works in prayer is the faith that glories in Him alone and it is that depth of faith that combines itself with intercession on behalf of His witness.

This is the kind of praying with which the Church is to function.

The intercession - true, prevailing intercession - is an area that I dare not rush through.

We will, Lord willing, look at it together, in the light of what God has already accomplished in His salvation history.

It will take some time and much concentration, and much, much dependence upon the Holy Spirit to minister His desire in all of this.

We will take this up in a number of weeks.

In the meantime, others will be sharing for a while on Sunday nights, so please keep all of this in prayer, to let the Lord have His full and perfect way.

Let me read two Scripture passages:

2.Cor.5:18: “But all things are from God, Who through Jesus Christ, reconciled us to Himself [received us into favor, brought us into harmony with Himself] and gave to us (the Church) the ministry of reconciliation that by word and deed we might aim to bring others into harmony with Him.”

And 2.Cor.6:4-10: “...in every way, we show ourselves to be servants of God: in great endurance; in troubles, hardships and distress; in beatings, imprisonments, and riots; in hard work, sleepless nights, and hunger; in purity, understanding, patience, and kindness; in the Holy Spirit and in sincere love; in truthful speech and in the power of God; with weapons of righteousness in the right hand and in the left, through glory and dishonor, praise and blame; genuine, yet regarded as imposters; known, yet regarded as unknown; dying, and yet we live on; beaten, and yet not killed; sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; poor, yet making many rich; having nothing, yet possessing everything.” (NIV)

As such, God is continuing to write His history through this kind of faithful ministy, as here described in 2.Corinthians, ministry that will all culminate in His Son.

We, the Church, through deepening faith and faithfulness and in prevailing intercession, are called to participate in it.

Do we realize how honored and privileged we are to be included in the courts of His service?

For, you know “He is the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords”, which, one day, all the world will see and bow to.