Gen 25:21, And Isaac prayed to the Lord on behalf of his wife, because she was barren; and the Lord answered him and Rebekah his wife conceived. 
	We now come to a most important reality of our lives as Christians on this earth. In looking at this passage, we must be extremely careful to not miss one of the greatest responsibilities that is ours under the direction of the Holy Spirit in Jesus Christ. Rom 8:26+27, And in the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words; and He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. This is of such utmost consequence and significance that we will be looking at this vital course of prayer for a while. 
	It struck me full force as I began to study what was at the heart of Isaac and his prayer for his wife. It is this matter of intercessory prayer and what it entails in the heart of God manifested for His people. It is almost certain that we truly have just scratched the surface of what is involved in prayer before God as believers and as His Church on this earth. There are tremendous statements of reality throughout scripture which emphasize the extreme urgency and power of prayer. Preachers have taught concerning prayer for all the centuries of humanity’s creation. 
	It has been part of the direct communication between mankind unto God since Adam and Eve walked in the Garden of Eden. It is the means by which Abraham talked with God and Moses talked with God and David and the Prophets and Jesus Christ, Himself, even to this day as He lives evermore to make intercession for us before the throne of God. Heb 7:25, Hence, also, He is able to save forever those who draw near to God through Him, since He always lives to make intercession for them. 
	Throughout the New Testament, as we will see, we are encouraged to this ministry of prayer in a constant fashion from so many vantage points and for diverse and rich results before the throne of God. Thus we will be spending time in both the scripture and in many commentaries with an emphasis on the absolute necessity of this call to prayer. As well, we will deal with the essential response of the Church to this responsibility of direct communication with God for the sake of His will on this earth. 
	Initially, please realize that no matter how long we do spend with this truth of the Heart of God to us in prayer, we will never more than scratch the surface of what is at hand. Countless books have been written over the ages from the ever present how-to’s to prayer manuals to the absolute misuse and desecration of what it means to truly pray. Many ministers have earnestly sought to enrich their flocks with the treasure of prayer, while, sadly, others have sought to enrich themselves through its absolute perversion. This has made the entire subject of true prayer, and especially intercessory prayer, a sore subject with many people. 
	Therefore, we must always be careful with respect to how we choose to view the means by which God has given us the ability to commune directly with Himself, by the ministry of His Holy Spirit indwelling us. In this heart of the matter, I do not claim to know everything concerning prayer. Matter of fact, I will state right now that I am probably the least familiar with all the precepts and realities of what it means to truly pray with all my heart and with all my soul and with all my spirit. I have become intensely aware of my need to know far more than I have ever known before in this matter. My hope and prayer is that as we go forward together and that we will all ask the Lord to make us increasingly desirous to know what it means to pray effectively to His glory alone. 
	So often, we find ourselves in prayer for the simple reason that we need something from God. We pray for our salvation. We pray for our deliverance. We pray for our circumstances and for our troubles and for our needs. We pray that the Lord will make us a better parent, or spouse, or teacher, or person. It increasingly seems that the focal point of prayer is what God can do for us to meet our understanding. We tend to vilely and stubbornly think of God as our divine butler Who should listen to our commands and our wants and make everything as we want it to be. I realize that this sounds rather calloused. The fact for many of us is that we have become very calloused to God in our prayers. If we honestly take before God the contents of our personal prayer lives, we will find that our requests are absolutely centered on our place in His Divine Economy. 
	Truly look at the core emphasis of our intimate prayer time with the Lord and we will find that the motivation, even in those requests for others in our lives, is that the Lord will bring us through in a better light. Yes, we pray for our loved ones, but many times it is not singly for their benefit, but for our convenience. If the Lord helps them, then we will not have to deal with their complaints and their frustration and their anger and their lack of understanding. If the Lord makes their lives better, then we will be less burdened with having to lift them so often in prayer. If God answers our prayers for them, then we will not have to be that constant and draining encouragement who has to be on call day or night to listen to and support those in such need.  
	   Does this sound callous and self-serving? In all honesty, before God, if we were to dissect our prayers and the motives truly behind them, we would find that this is not too far from the mark of why we pray. This requires a complete opening and investigation into our understanding and stimulus as to what it means to pray. We are at a juncture in our Christian lives that will make an eternal difference in what we do and how we do it! 
In our weekly prayer meetings, we are earnestly praying that God will take this group of believers into the depths of that which will serve only to please Him in every aspect and reality. Effective, God-centered and God-inspired prayer is at the very center of the answer to that petition. It is for this reason that this course of seeking after the Lord in His Word is fundamental and crucial to our continued gathering together in His Name. 
I hope and earnestly pray that we will stand together in one heart that wants to know what God will instruct concerning prayer. This will be for a length of time on Sunday mornings and through a series of learned sources as well as scriptures. I also hope that every one of us will beseech the Lord with regard to our personal times of prayer and our intercessory times of prayer. God needs prayer warriors, as we will see. He needs those who will completely offer themselves as a living sacrifice unto the altar of His Glory in prayer. 
We are in utmost need of those who will commit themselves to this vital ministry for the sake of His Body of Believers. Where there is no prayer, there will be no fellowship. Where there is no ministry of prayer, there will be no growth in Christ. Where there are no prayer warriors, there will be no service of worship or means of honoring God, individually or corporately. It is that utterly simple. Where there is no prayer, there is no Church!
With these introductory remarks and encouragements after seeking the Lord for His revealed plan and purpose in prayer, let us begin to look at this morning’s passage with an eye after what it means to participate in true intercessory prayer. Let us consider the aspects of Isaac’s intercessory prayer for Rebekah. And Isaac prayed to the Lord on behalf of his wife, because she was barren; and the Lord answered him and Rebekah his wife conceived. 
First of all, please note that we are not told that Isaac was praying for a son for himself. We are told that he prayed on behalf of Rebekah. His heart was for her sake and all that she was undergoing. It is important to realize that the culture of that day was greatly based on women conceiving and having children. Unlike our current society, the communal worth of a woman was completely centered in her reproductive capacity. They were not scientifically aware that the male could be as much an inherent and genetic part of the failure of the female to bear children. Everything was put upon the woman and if the marriage was childless, the blame lay upon her.
There was a great stigma that a barren woman faced in the eyes of her peers. She was ridiculed and the brunt of much shame was placed upon her head. She lost all respect and standing within her tribal community and was thought of with less regard than the livestock who could at least produce sustenance and wealth for the husband. Such was the societal framework under which Rebekah was forced to bear her shame of childlessness. Such was the heart of love that Isaac bore for her that he interceded on her behalf with God. He loved his wife and wanted her to become fruitful and so he prayed on her behalf, and God listened and answered that prayer with Esau and Jacob. 
At the core of our intercessory prayer should be that desire for those whom we lift before the Lord to become fruitful in their spiritual lives. We should be filled with all love and earnestness on their behalf for them to partake of the fullness of Jesus Christ. This should even be to the point of bearing their reproach in our hearts and minds for the sake of their benefit.
Think of how the Lord Jesus Christ laid down His life for us. He, the altogether lovely and perfect One, bore the complete burden of our sin by taking upon Himself the full brunt of God’s Holy wrath and righteous judgment. He suffered the full force of the penalty of death in our stead, for our sakes, and to bring us into the whole glory of a living relationship with God. And, as we read earlier, He now unceasingly intercedes for us before the throne of God’s grace and mercy. 
This is the heart of what it means to truly and to honestly pray for others. This is how Isaac prayed for Rebekah and how the Church is to pray for all those whom God so brings into our lives. Are we ready to bear the mantle of death as those who are ready to intercede for others? It is to be so much more than just mentioning needs when we gather on Wednesday evenings or Sunday mornings before worship. It means that we set aside our thoughts of what should take place and our ideas of how one should live. In intercession, we simply and earnestly ask God to place the burden of those lost and confused and troubled and suffering people upon our heads and upon our hearts and upon our relationship with Himself. It means that we are willing and ready to lay down our time, our possessions, our comfort, our schedules, our relaxation, and our physical beings for all that the Lord purposes and develops in order for them to come to know Him and His fullness and His glory.
Listen to the description of how God so lifts up those in desperate need. Ps 113:4-9, The Lord is high above all nations; His glory is above the heavens. Who is like the Lord our God, Who is enthroned on high, Who humbles Himself to behold The things that are in heaven and in the earth? He raises the poor from the dust, And lifts the needy from the ash heap, To make them sit with princes, With the princes of His people. He makes the barren woman abide in the house As a joyful mother of children. Praise the Lord! 
God humbled Himself in Jesus Christ, the Son, to come into this world, filled with all its garbage and refuse and muck and mire to redeem us unto Himself. In order to lift us up, He had to come to where we were wallowing in the cesspool of our sin. He reached in raised us up out of that filth and washed away all the scum of our horrible condition. He lifted us from the ash heap and gave us new life in Himself by carrying to the cross the affliction and the torment and the ugly and defiling consequences of our sin. 
Let us never, ever forget that His entire life was and continues to be a living expression of constant and eternal intercessory prayer on our behalf. We are not yet finished with all the cleansing required in our physical lives. We are now perfect in Him in our spiritual being, but our earthly lives are still undergoing the refining work of the Holy Spirit in our day by day walk with Him. 
Has it ever crossed our minds why we are still so needy after the working of God on this earth? Why can’t we just be completed now, in this time, so that we do not have to undergo all that is required of the Lord to purify and to bring us methodically into the full knowledge of Himself? 
While there are many reasons in the heart of God as to this inquiry, the basic one before us is that it causes us to have an ever increasing need to call upon Him for our day to day walk in this realm. We are brought into the continual realization that we need God just to get out of bed in the morning. The truth of this understanding is that we are enabled to so consider the needs of those for whom we intercede. Just as we must moment by moment count on the Lord, so do we have that fellow sensitivity for the needs of others. Rather than judge and despise and ridicule them, our repeated lessons from God keep us humble and soft and attuned to the continual needs of others. 
The Prophet Isaiah recognized this as we read in Isa 58:9-11. Isa 58:9-11, "Then you will call, and the Lord will answer; You will cry, and He will say, 'Here I am.' If you remove the yoke from your midst, The pointing of the finger, and speaking wickedness, And if you give yourself to the hungry, And satisfy the desire of the afflicted, Then your light will rise in darkness, And your gloom will become like midday. "And the Lord will continually guide you, And satisfy your desire in scorched places, And give strength to your bones; And you will be like a watered garden, And like a spring of water whose waters do not fail. 
	As I stated in these introductory remarks, when we resume, we will look at the actuality of intercessory prayer as it pertains to us as the Church. In the mean time, I ask that you would join in the true and earnest prayer that we would desire to know all that the Lord will open up in these studies. So be it!
And Isaac prayed to the Lord on behalf of his wife, because she was barren; and the Lord answered him and Rebekah his wife conceived. Amen. 

This morning’s benediction is Ps 113:1-4. Praise the Lord! Praise, O servants of the Lord. Praise the name of the Lord. Blessed be the name of the Lord From this time forth and forever. From the rising of the sun to its setting The name of the Lord is to be praised. The Lord is high above all nations; His glory is above the heavens. Amen.