Intercession

“Your words were heard, and I have come in response to your words.” I often wonder how many promises of God are left unfulfilled because of the lack of human involvement. Gabriel, in the verse above, would not have been dispatched had Daniel not been bombarding heaven with prayer concerning Israel’s captivity. God doesn’t act independently of man. He has intentionally limited himself. Does that mean an omniscient God lacks the ability to personally step in and take over a situation. By all means no, but he rarely does without an intercessor asking. It is our job, as Christians to intercede and ‘loose’ God. “Our calling and function isn’t to replace God, but to release Him.” I believe one apostle said that if you are in right standing with God, your prayers can accomplish a lot.
Dutch Sheets tells a story about the importance of intercessors in spiritual warfare with regards to missions. In the 1970’s he and his team arrived in the capital city of Guatemala, and were to be flown out to do work among tribes up and down the river. The owner of the aircraft said that he wouldn’t take him that day, that he would have to wait until tomorrow. His team argued for three hours with the man to be taken at the time they had scheduled. They only had a certain amount of time to work before the return trip. Eventually, the airport conceded and flew them out as scheduled. That night an earthquake in the capital city killed 30,000 people, and the motel where the missionary team would have been sleeping was completely destroyed. When Dutch returned home he spoke to an intercessor in the church who said that she had prayed for them while they were gone, in fact she prayed exactly three hours one day before she felt a release. Can you guess what three hours that was?
Although speculative in nature, I believe that women’s intercession had a direct impact on the teams survival. No where in Daniel does it say that his prayers ended Babylonian captivity, it just says he was studying Jeremiah and saw that Israel was supposed to be in captivity for 70 years and prayed for it to end. But the question lies in this: if Israel’s captivity had already been prophesied at lasting 70 years, and that seventy years was up, why did Daniel see a need to pray for the inevitable? The answer is simple, our participation is met with God participation. We cannot expect God to move on our behalf, if we aren’t willing to move ourselves! Dick Eastman, of Every Home for Christ, says, “In no other way can the believer become as fully involved with God’s work, especially the work of world evangelism, as in intercessory prayer,” and I am more than inclined to agree.
Prayer is relying on God to do what he does best, the impossible. We are to pray at all times. This is the most effective way that I can provide for the Kingdom. I have a calling to intercessory prayer. I will bombard heaven with petitions as the persistent widow until God intervenes.
“And I searched for a man among them who should build up the wall and stand in the gap before Me for the land, that I should not destroy it; but I found none.” Essentially God is saying that His justice demanded judgement, but at the same time His love wanted forgiveness. He is saying that, “if I could’ve found one human to ask me to spare these people, just one person, it would have allowed me to show my mercy.” But he found none, so His justice obligated him to judgement.45
I refuse to not stand in the gap. The world’s blood will not be on my hands. There is a gap that I stand in as an intercessor. I want to be the person God sees asking for mercy to spare the world. “You and I have the chance of a lifetime. We can rise to the occasion and embrace the incredible invitation to be co-laborers with God, to be carriers of His awesome Holy Spirit and ambassadors for His great Kingdom.”
Take missions for example. I like to think of my prayers for missionaries and the peoples they try to reach as a missiological chaos theory. Much the same way as the chaos theory hypothesizes that a butterfly’s fluttering wings can eventually produce a typhoon halfway around the world, I feel as though my intercession can cause a spiritual tidal wave for the causes of missionaries in ways I will never even know.