Week #12 – Intercession

Invocation:
O Lord, You lover of souls, in whose hand is the life of every living thing, I bring before You in my prayers all those who are lonely in this world. Yours they are, and none can pluck them out of Your hand. In Your mercy let my remembrance reach them and comfort their hearts. For Your love’s sake. Amen.

Weekly Scripture Reading: Psalm 20

Daily Scripture Readings:

Monday Numbers 14:11-20
Tuesday 1 Samuel 12:12-25
Wednesday Psalm 106:1-48
Thursday Genesis 18:16-33
Friday Hebrews 7:23-25
Saturday Romans 8:28-39
Sunday 1 Timothy 2:1-8

Selections for Meditation:

Personal Meditation

Prayer:
Lift up to God those persons who have asked you to pray for them. Try to visualize your becoming strength in their weakness, courage in their fear, freedom in their guilt and hope in their despair.

Hymn: “Lord, As to Thy Dear Cross We Flee”

Lord, as to Thy Cross we flee.
And plead to be forgiven,
So let Thy life our pattern be,
And form our souls for heaven.

Help us, through good report and ill,
Our daily cross to bear;
Like Thee, to do our Father’s will,
Our brethren’s grief to share.

Let grace our selfishness expel,
Our earthliness refine,
And in our hearts let kindness dwell,
As free and true as Thine.

If joy shall at Thy bidding fly,
And grief’s dark day come on,
We in our turn would meekly cry,
“Father, Thy will be done.”
-C.M. Windsor-

Benediction:
Grant my Savior, that Your patience in bearing with me and suffering for me may be the model and principle of my patience in suffering for You, and that, entering into Your designs of my salvation, which You would secure for me by the good use I make of afflictions, I may receive all things with humble submission to Your holy will. Amen.

Selections for Meditation:

* And why should the good of anyone depend on the prayer of another? I can only answer with the return question: “Why should my love be powerless to help another?”
-From An Anthology of George MacDonald
Edited by C.S. Lewis-

* A Christian fellowship lives and exists by the intercession of its members for one another, or it collapses. I can no longer condemn or hate a brother for whom I pray, no matter how much trouble he causes me. His face, that hitherto may have been strange and intolerable to me, is transformed in intercession into the countenance of a brother for whom Christ died, the face of a forgiven sinner. This is a happy discovery for the Christian who begins to pray for others. There is no dislike, no personal tension, no estrangement that cannot be overcome by intercession as far as our side of it is concerned. Intercessory prayer is the purifying bath into which the individual and the fellowship must enter every day. The struggle we undergo with our brother in intercession may be a hard one, but that struggle has the promise that it will gain its goal.
How does this happen? Intercession means no more than to bring our brother into the presence of God, to see him under the Cross of Jesus as a poor human being and sinner in need of grace. Then everything in him that repels us falls away; we see him in all his destruction and need. His need and his sin become so heavy and oppressive that we feel them as our own, and we can do nothing else but pray: Lord, do Thou, Thou alone, deal with him according to Thy severity and Thy goodness. To make intercession means to grant our brother the same right that we have received, namely, to stand before Christ and share in His mercy.
-From Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer-

* What requests did Paul make for his Ephesian friends (Ephesians 1:17-21)? Pause a moment. You are writing a letter to a friend for whom you pray fairly regularly. What will you tell him? “I do pray for you, Jack. I’m asking God to bless you and to lead you. I really pray. I pray He’ll bless you richly.”
What do the words mean? What does bless mean? Is the word an excuse on your part for not being specific? Is it too much trouble to think out a specific request? It is easier, of course, if Jack is sick or if Jack’s girlfriend has just been killed in a car accident. You can get your teeth into prayer under such circumstances. But if nothing dramatic is happening to Jack and if he’s a Christian who’s getting along reasonably well in his Christian walk, how are you supposed to pray? Bless comes in handy. You probably use it at different times to mean such things as, “Do whatever is best for Jack and make things work out for him. Make him a better Christian in some way or another. Make him happy,” and so on.
Are these the things god wants for Jack? What does God want? Remember, God has His own goals for Jack’s life. God will share those goals with you if you are willing to get involved with Him in a partnership of prayer. You may need to begin praying something like this, “Lord, I don’t know how to pray for Jack. I thank you for bringing him to yourself. I know you have been working in his life. What is it he most needs? What are your trying to do in him?” God still has the initiative in Jack’s life. Play it God’s way. That is what partnership in prayer is all about.
-From Daring to Draw Near by John White-

* The thought of our fellowship in the intercession of Jesus reminds us of what He has taught us more than once before, how all these wonderful prayer-promises have as their aim and justification, the glory of God in the manifestation of His kingdom and the salvation of sinners. As long as we only or chiefly pray for ourselves, the promises of the last night must remain a sealed book to us. It is to the fruit bearing branches of the Vine; it is to disciples sent into the world as the Father sent Him, to live for perishing men; it is to His faithful servants and intimate friends who take up the work He leaves behind, who have like their Lord become as the seed-corn, losing its life to multiply it manifold — it is to such that the promises are given. Let us each find out what the work is, and who the souls are entrusted to our special prayers; let us make our intercession for them our life of fellowship with God, and we shall not only find the promises of power in prayer made true to us, but we shall then first begin to realize how our abiding in Christ and His abiding in us make us share in His own joy of blessing and saving men.
-From With Christ in the School of Prayer
by Andrew Murray-

* Prayer does not occur in the heart of a man who thinks God will do it all or who supposes he himself can do nothing. Prayer is a willingness to admit we can do something even if not everything and that, although nothing is done without God, God does nothing without us. So often in our theology of prayer we have articulated half-truths. We have emphasized the vertical dimension of prayer and neglected its horizontal character. We have used prayer to make too much of God, too little of ourselves. We have turned away from life in the foolish notion that one could, thereby, discover the God of life. We have judged the value of prayer by the amount of time given to it rather than by its intensity.
-From Dawn Without Darkness
by Anthony Padovano-

* Today I imagined my inner self as a place crowded with pins and needles. How could I receive anyone in my prayer when there is no real place for them to be free and relaxed? When I am still so full of preoccupations, jealousies, angry feelings, anyone who enters will get hurt. I had a very vivid realization that I must create some free space in my innermost self so that I may indeed invite others to enter and be healed. To pray for others means to offer others a hospitable place where I can really listen to their needs and pains. Compassion, therefore, calls for self-scrutiny that can lead to inner gentleness.
If I could have a gentle “interiority” — a heart of flesh and not of stone, a room with some spots on which one might walk barefooted — then God and my fellow humans could meet each other there. Then the center of my heart can become the place where God can hear the prayer for my neighbors and embrace them with his love.
-From The Genesee Diary
by Henri J. Nouwen-

* A final characteristic of the prayer of the heart is that it includes all our concerns. When we enter with our mind into our heart and there stand in the presence of God, then all our mental preoccupations become prayer. The power of the prayer of the heart is precisely that through it all that which is on our mind becomes prayer.
When we say to people, “I will pray for you,” we make a very important commitment. The sad thing is that this remark often remains nothing but a well-meant expression of concern. But when we learn to descend with our mind into our heart, then all those who have become part of our lives are led into the healing presence of God and touched by him in the very center of our being. We are speaking here about a mystery for which words are inadequate. It is the mystery that the heart, which is the center of our being, is transformed by God into his own heart, a heart large enough to embrace the entire universe. Through prayer we can carry in our heart all human pain and sorrow, all conflicts and agonies, all torture and war, all hunger, loneliness, and misery, not because of some great psychological or emotional capacity, but because God’s heart has become one with ours.
Here we catch sight of the meaning of Jesus’ words, “Take my yoke and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. Yes, my yoke is easy and my burden light” (Matthew 11:29-30). Jesus invites us to accept his burden, which is the burden of the whole world, a burden that includes human suffering in all times and places. But this divine burden is light, and we can carry it when our heart has been transformed into the gentle and humble heart of our Lord.
-From The Way of the Heart by
Henri J. Nouwen-