The Ministry of Intercession is Andrew Murray’s plea — subtitled “A Plea for More Prayer” — for the church to recover the lost work of praying for others. Written as a companion to With Christ in the School of Prayer, it is the fuller, more searching book of the two: where the earlier volume taught believers how to pray, this one presses the question of why we pray so little, and calls Christians into the specific labour of intercession — standing before God on behalf of the world, the church, and the souls around us. If you want an honest diagnosis of prayerlessness and a warm, practical path back to a praying life, this study guide will help you read Murray with a full text open in front of you here on Ochorus.
What the book is, and Murray’s burden
Murray wrote out of grief. Attending convention after convention across South Africa, he heard the same confession everywhere: we pray too little — and worse, a quiet despair that nothing could change it. He opens the book by naming that lack plainly, refusing to soften it into a mere technique problem. Prayerlessness, for Murray, is a spiritual disease of the whole church, and intercession is its cure. He anchors the burden in Scripture’s own lament, quoting Isaiah 59:16 — that God “saw that there was no man, and wondered that there was no intercessor” — and James 4:2, “Ye have not, because ye ask not.” The tragedy is not that God withholds, but that His people do not ask.
His conviction is that intercession is not an optional extra for the specially devout, but the ordained channel through which God has chosen to bless the earth. He states it as a settled law of the spiritual world:
Between our Impotence and God’s Omnipotence intercession is the blessed link.
Andrew Murray
That single sentence carries the whole book. We are weak; God is almighty; and prayer is the appointed bridge between the two. To neglect it is to leave the bridge unused while both the need and the supply stand ready. Murray is careful, though, not to leave the reader crushed. He treats the confession of prayerlessness not as grounds for shame but as the doorway to change: the very fact that God wonders there is no intercessor (Isaiah 59:16) proves how much He longs to find one. The burden of the book, in other words, is finally a hopeful one — an open invitation dressed as a lament.
How The Ministry of Intercession is structured
The book moves in fifteen chapters, opening with a dedication and introduction and closing with a set of practical notes and a scheme of prayer. It is not an abstract treatise; each chapter takes up a text of Scripture and preaches it, then ends with a short prayer that turns the teaching Godward. Murray designed it to be lived, not merely read.
The path runs roughly in three movements. First comes the diagnosis: The Lack of Prayer and The Ministration of the Spirit and Prayer expose the problem and locate its remedy in the Holy Spirit. Then comes the school itself — A Model of Intercession, Because of His Importunity, The Life That Can Pray, and the searching chapter Restraining Prayer — Is It Sin? — where Murray teaches the how and the cost of persevering prayer. Chapters on The Secret of Effectual Prayer, The Spirit of Supplication, In the Name of Christ, and Paul a Pattern of Prayer ground the practice in Christ and in apostolic example. The book crests in its final two chapters, God Seeks Intercessors and The Coming Revival, where the whole plea gathers into a summons: God is searching for people who will stand in the gap, and revival waits on the other side of their prayers.
The central themes
Intercession is the church’s real work
For Murray, praying for others is not preparation for the church’s work — it is the church’s work, the source from which every other ministry draws its power. He reads Isaiah 62:6-7, God’s watchmen upon the walls of Jerusalem who “keep not silence” and give Him “no rest,” as a picture of the intercessor’s calling: to hold on until God answers. And he presses the point with a bluntness that stings:
Lack of intercession is one of the chief causes of lack of blessing.
Andrew Murray
Where the church is powerless, Murray will not let us blame the age, the culture, or the hardness of hearts before we have first looked at our prayerlessness. The barren field is very often an unprayed-for field.
Boldness and importunity in prayer
One of the book’s great gifts is its rehabilitation of persistence. Taking up the parable of the friend at midnight in Luke 11:5-8 — where the sleeper rises, not out of friendship, but “because of his importunity” — Murray argues that God actually welcomes a holy boldness that will not take an easy no. This is not manipulating a reluctant God; it is answering His own invitation. He reminds readers of the promise in Luke 11:13, that the Father will “give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him,” and teaches that importunate prayer is faith refusing to let go until the promise is fulfilled. The intercessor, standing between the hungry soul and the God who has bread, has nowhere else to turn — and so he keeps knocking.
The school of intercession and the life behind it
Murray insists that the power to pray flows from a particular kind of life. Drawing on John 15:7 — “If ye abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will” — he ties effectual prayer to abiding in Christ and to a heart cleansed and surrendered. The chapter Restraining Prayer — Is It Sin? is deliberately uncomfortable: Murray will not let us treat neglected prayer as a harmless weakness. And underneath it all is Christ Himself, our great intercessor, of whom Murray writes:
Intercession is the most perfect form of prayer: it is the prayer Christ ever liveth to pray on His throne.
Andrew Murray
To intercede, then, is to be drawn into the very life of the risen Lord — our prayers are not a lonely effort but a joining in with His unceasing intercession at the Father’s right hand. It is also Paul’s life: Murray offers the apostle, in Paul a Pattern of Prayer, as the model of a worker whose labours were carried on the back of ceaseless prayer for the churches. Praying rightly, Murray shows, is inseparable from praying in the name of Christ and in the power of the Spirit of supplication — themes he devotes full chapters to, so that the reader learns not only to pray more, but to pray from the ground of what Christ has already secured.
Prayer and the coming revival
The book’s final theme is its most hopeful. Murray believed the church stood on the edge of renewal, and he was certain of the door through which it would come. Reading Psalm 85:6 — “Wilt Thou not revive us again: that Thy people may rejoice in Thee?” — and Habakkuk 3:2, “O Lord, revive Thy work in the midst of the years,” he taught that revival is never engineered but always given, and always given in answer to prayer. God is not merely willing to be asked; He is actively looking for those who will ask. Ezekiel 22:30, God seeking “a man that should stand in the gap,” and John 15:16, His people appointed to “ask of the Father” and receive, become for Murray the charter of the intercessor’s hope.
It is the one power on earth that commands the power of heaven.
Andrew Murray
Who should read it
This book is for the Christian who already suspects that their prayer life is thinner than it should be — and who is tired of feeling guilty without knowing what to do. It is for pastors and ministry leaders weary of activity that bears little fruit, and for anyone tempted to fix a powerless church with better programmes before better prayer. It speaks to intercessors who quietly carry others before God and wonder whether it matters, and it will steady the discouraged who have prayed long for a soul or a situation and seen no answer yet. Because Murray writes with a preacher’s warmth rather than a scholar’s distance, no theological training is needed — only a willingness to be searched and a desire to pray more.
How to read it today
Read it slowly, one chapter at a time, with a Bible open — Murray builds every chapter on a text, and the argument lands far harder when you read Isaiah 64:7 or John 5:6 for yourself before he expounds them. Do not skip the short prayers that close each chapter; pray them aloud, and let each become the beginning of your own intercession rather than the end of your reading. A good rhythm is one chapter a day over about two weeks, or one a week for a small group, pausing to actually pray for the people and needs each chapter brings to mind. Keep a simple list of names you are carrying, and let the book turn its teaching into practice as you go. Murray never meant this to be finished quickly; he meant it to change how you pray. When it stirs a fresh hunger, its natural companions are his The Inner Chamber, on the secret place of private prayer, and Waiting on God, on the patient, trusting posture that intercession requires. Readers new to Murray may also want his classic Humility, since he roots all true prayer in a lowly, self-emptied heart.
For reflection
Use these questions on your own or with a group, letting each one lead you into prayer rather than only discussion.
- Murray reads James 4:2 — “Ye have not, because ye ask not” — as a diagnosis, not a rebuke. Where in your own life might a lack be traceable to simply not having asked?
- If “lack of intercession is one of the chief causes of lack of blessing,” what person, church, or situation are you tempted to write off that you have never seriously prayed for?
- The friend at midnight in Luke 11:5-8 prevails “because of his importunity.” What have you stopped praying for too soon, and what would it look like to take it up again?
- Murray ties effectual prayer to abiding in Christ (John 15:7). What in your daily life crowds out the fellowship with God from which real prayer flows?
- Reading Ezekiel 22:30, God still seeks someone to “stand in the gap.” Whose gap is God asking you to stand in, and what would it cost you to begin this week?
Murray’s wager is a bold one: that the greatest need of the church is not more strategy or more effort, but more prayer — and that God is only waiting to be asked. You can test it for yourself. Begin reading The Ministry of Intercession, free and in full, and let Andrew Murray teach you the ministry the church can least afford to neglect.
