The Power Of Intercession

So Delilah said to Samson, “Please tell me where your great strength lies, and how you might be bound, that one could subdue you. “Judges 16:6.

It is the question we fain would have answered of the men who of old, and in later times, as intercessors for others, have had power with God, and have prevailed. More than one, who has desired to give himself to this ministry, has wondered that he has found it so difficult to rejoice in it, to persevere, and prevail. Let us study the lives of the leaders and heroes of the prayer world; maybe some of the elements of their success will be discovered by us.

A true intercessor is a man who knows that God knows of him and that his heart and life are wholly given up to God and His Glory. This is the only condition on which an offer at the court of an earthly sovereign could expect to exert much influence. Moses, Elijah, Daniel, and Paul prove that it is so in the spiritual world. Our blessed Lord is Himself the proof of it. He did not save us by intercession, but by self-sacrifice. His power of intercession roots in His sacrifice: it claims and receives what the sacrifice won. As we have it so clearly put in the last words of Isaiah 53: “He poured out his soul to death and was numbered with the transgressors, yet he bore the sin of many, and” study this in connection with the whole chapter of which it is the crown “and makes intercession for the transgressors.” He first gave himself up to the will of God.

There he won the power to influence and guide that will. He gave Himself for sinners in all-consuming love, and so He won the power to intercede for them. There is no other path for us. It is the man who seeks to enter personally into death with Christ, and gives himself wholly for God and men, who will dare to be bold like Moses or Elijah, who will persevere like Daniel or Paul. Whole- hearted devotion and obedience to God are the first marks of an intercessor.

You complain that you do not feel able to pray and ask how you may be fitted to do so. You speak much of the feebleness of your faith in God and love to souls, and delight in prayer. The man who is to have power in intercession must cease these complaints- he must know that he has a nature perfectly adapted to the work. An apple tree is only expected to bear apples because it has the apple nature within it.

“For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works.” The eye was created to see: how beautifully fitted it is for its work! You are created in Christ to pray.

It is your very nature as a child of God; the Spirit has been sent into your heart- what to do? To cry Abba Father, to draw your heart up in child-like prayer. The Holy Spirit prays in us with groanings that cannot be uttered, with a divine power that our minds and feelings cannot understand. Learn, if you would be an intercessor, to give the Holy Spirit much greater honor than is generally done. Believe that He is praying within you, and then be strong and of good courage. As you pray, be still before God to believe and yield to this wonderful power of prayer within you.

But there is so much conscious sinfulness and defect in our prayer? True, but have you not learned what it is to pray in the name of Christ?

Does the name not mean living power? Do you not know that you are in Christ and him in you? That your whole life is hidden and bound up in His? And His whole life is hidden and working in you? The man who is to intercede in power must be very clear that not in thought and reckoning only, but in the most actual, living, divine reality, Christ and he are one in the work of intercession. He appears before God clothed with the name and the nature, the righteousness and worthiness, the image and spirit and life of Christ. Do not spend your chief time in prayer in reiterating your petition, but humbly, quietly, and confidently claiming your place in Christ, your perfect union with Him, and your access to God in Him. It is the man who comes to God in Christ, bringing to the Father that Christ in whom He delights, as his life and his law and only trust who will have the power to intercede.

Intercession is preeminently a work of faith. Not the faith that tries only to believe the prayer will be heard, but the faith that is at home amid heavenly realities. A faith that does not trouble about one’s own nothingness and feebleness, because it is living in Christ. A faith that does not make its hope depend upon its feelings, but upon the faithfulness of the Three-One God, in what each person has undertaken to do in prayer. A faith that has overcome the world, and sacrifices the visible to be wholly free for the spiritual and heavenly, and eternal to take possession of it. A faith that knows that it is heard and receives what it asks, and therefore quietly and deliberately perseveres in its supplication till the answer come. The true intercessor must be a man of faith.

The intercessor must be a messenger-one who holds himself ready, who earnestly offers himself personally to receive the answer and to dispense it. Praying and working go together. Think of Moses-his boldness in pleading with God for the people was no greater than his pleading with the people for God. We see the same in Elijah- the urgency of his prayer in secret is equaled by his jealousy for God in public, as he witnessed the sin of the nation.

Let intercession be always accompanied, not so much, by more diligent work, as by the meek and humble waiting on God to receive His grace and spirit, and to know more definitely what and how He would have us to work.

It is one thing, it is a great thing, to begin to take up the work of intercession- the drawing down to earth of the blessings which heaven has for its every need. It is a greater thing as an intercessor to personally receive that blessing, and go out from God’s face, knowing that we have secured something that we can impart. May God make us all whole-hearted, believing, blessing-bearing intercessors.