“What would it take for you to come and minister here?” she asked.
I responded by saying, “I already heard the word of God for it. Let’s set the date, and I’ll come!”
Communication is the foundation for all relationships, even with God. He’s the Word, which means by His very nature, He is always speaking. Prayer begins by hearing His voice and then trusting He still speaks to us today.
Respond with Your Own Voice
We have been focused on God’s speaking part in prayer. But do you know He is interested in also hearing from you? Mark Virkler, author of Dialogue with God, says that prayer is two-way communication. It is a dialogue, not a monologue. Not only does God speak to you, but also He waits for your voice and responds to it. In fact, E. M. Bounds, that great nineteenth-century theologian who taught much on prayer during his lifetime, wrote, “God has of His own motion placed Himself under the law of prayer, and has obligated Himself to answer the prayers of men.”1
One of the most powerful and difficult truths to digest is that we have tremendous influence with God. Many people excuse themselves from the exercise of prayer, citing the sovereignty of God in all matters. Others cannot fathom that God would consider our thoughts and opinions because, after all, we lack wisdom and fail often. But God, in His sovereignty, restrains Himself from action until He’s heard our voice in prayer. Not only will He respond to our prayers, but also He responds immeasurably more than all we can ask or imagine (see Ephesians 3:20).
For example, the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah fell into terrible sin and depravity. God heard the cries of their victims, and those cries were deafening (see Genesis 18:20 MESSAGE). He was compelled to act. But before He did, He consulted with Abraham. Think of that! God refused to destroy two cities until He consulted with a man on the earth. Abraham then negotiated to develop the criterion by which God could spare those cities: If God could find ten righteous ones, then He would not destroy them. Most of us know the way the story ends—that God did not find the ten and consequently destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah in fire—but let us not lose sight of the incredible moment when God consulted with a man concerning what to do.
Then there is the Syrophoenician woman who found Jesus in the city of Tyre and begged Him to heal her daughter of demon possession (see Mark 7:24–30). Jesus was under clear orders from His Father to minister first to the Jews. Like Abraham, however, the woman demonstrated influence and tremendous faith such that Jesus could not contain His response and released her daughter from the unclean spirit.
Jesus said, “If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you” (John 15:7). Did He say what I thought He said? We can ask whatever we wish? Yes, we can! Answered prayer becomes the rule and not the exception for those who abide in Christ and are immersed in His Word.
Furthermore, we shape our future by what we ask God to do. James instructs us, “You do not have because you do not ask God” (James 4:2). We need to be brave and bring our big ask to God so He can respond with a big yes.
Participate in God’s Work
As we begin to ask—and ask big—our asking expands beyond our needs and into the needs of others. You see, although God has restricted Himself to our prayers, He continues to watch over people and the affairs of earth, looking for opportunities to show His mercy and goodness.
Take a look at what this passage from Ezekiel says: “I looked for someone among them who would build up the wall and stand before me in the gap on behalf of the land so I would not have to destroy it” (Ezekiel 22:30). Do you know what this means? It means that when God wants to intervene, He will look for a man or a woman who will hear His voice and invite Him, through prayer, to work favorably on behalf of another.
This kind of prayer is called intercession. To intercede means “to speak to someone in order to defend or help another person.” In this case, we are speaking to God on behalf of someone else, asking Him to help them in some way.
Here is an example. When I was in college and living with my parents, I was driving home late one night when I felt the urge to pray for a young relative. I began to pray in my prayer language with a fierce militancy. The Holy Spirit seemed to take the lead as I made a firm command out loud, not knowing why.
“Get your hands off of her!” I shouted into the air. “In the name of Jesus, I forbid you, Satan, from harming her!”
A week later, my relative and her friend were dropped off at a skating rink by her friend’s father. They were about thirteen or fourteen years old. The father, who was not a Christian, went all the way home and then changed his mind, thinking he should go back and check on the girls. When he did, the girls were missing from the skating rink. (Keep in mind this was long before cell phones and text messaging. When someone went missing, you had no way to locate them electronically.) On a hunch, the father waited until the end of the session, only to observe the girls being dropped off at a distance from the facility by two adult males. The girls were then confronted and questioned, but the details of that incident were never communicated. What I do know is that God saw a problem and intervened through an intercessor. Whatever was taking place or was going to take place never happened.
This pattern of intercession began to appear more and more in my life. The Holy Spirit would alert me, usually through a strong impression in my heart, that someone I knew needed prayer. It became normal for this to happen in the middle of the night, too. I also noticed the images of faces—people I knew—appearing in my mind over and over. It took me a while to connect the dots, but eventually I realized it was happening for the purpose of intercession.
Has this been your experience? Have you been prompted in your spirit to pray for others, even waking in the middle of the night with an intense urge to do so? Have you later learned the effect your prayers may have had? If so, you are likely walking in the anointing of an intercessor, and God places great value on your ministry of prayer.
Intercession is a beautiful and powerful extension of Christ’s ministry on earth. The Bible says He is our great High Priest who forever lives to intercede for us (see Hebrews 7:25). I take great comfort in knowing Jesus prays for me, both of His own accord and through like-minded men and women on the earth who are called as intercessors.
As an intercessor, I gradually grew in knowledge and skill in handling the spirit realm within the context of intercession. You can grow in this knowledge and skill, too. I often felt, and still do, that the spirit realm was more real than the natural realm, as it affects everything we do. I also developed a keen awareness that, as the Scripture teaches, we are not wrestling with flesh and blood and for that reason must handle everything with prayer (see Ephesians 6:12).
What I did not realize—and what you may not realize, either, for yourself—was that I was being prepared for intercession of a kind that was much greater than I could have imagined. That preparation is part of the process of prayer, too. Let me tell you more about what I mean.
Let God Prepare You
In college, I participated in the InterVarsity ministry and was asked to be in a leadership role and teach a Bible study. The only problem was that I did not know the Bible. But there was another young man on the team who committed to teaching a campus Bible study. He was really smart, and I would attend his group, take notes and then teach his notes to my group. His name was Ron Eivaz—and we’ve partnered in the Word and in ministry ever since.
Halfway through our education, Ron and I left California to finish our degrees at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma. While we were there, the Holy Spirit spoke to both of us. He told us we would return to California and pastor the church we had left behind.
We had attended Bethel Temple in Turlock, California, now Harvest Christian Center, which is a historic Assembly of God church. I had gone to that church for a few years and had decided to never go back. It was legalistic, full of strife and politics, and a turnaround looked impossible. Although I would not resist a cl
ear directive from God, I hoped it would not work out. My husband shared the same sentiment. This was not going to be easy.
Upon our graduation, this church was the only door of ministry open to us. Ron accepted the offered position of associate pastor, and we served as best we could within that context. We were grieved as we watched our pastor fight internal wars left and right. He finally gave up and left to go minister elsewhere. Then, just as the Holy Spirit had said, the church board turned to my husband for leadership, and Ron became the senior pastor at just 27 years old.
We realized soon enough we were not wrestling with flesh and blood, but with diabolical powers that wanted control of the church. Again, I had been prepared well in intercession by that point, but this was a whole new challenge. Over time, the spiritual challenges grew fierce and went beyond the paradigm of anyone I knew. Once more, I was on my own to navigate a unique spiritual climate and figure out how to see spiritual breakthrough in this context through intercession.
Become a House for the Nations
Knowing that prayer was the key to everything, we began an all-church weekly prayer service. It was sparsely attended at first, but God can do a lot with a little. This prayer service was the needed spark to begin the transformation. Slowly but surely, the church began to shift. Renewal came to the church, the people revived, and the church began to live and bring life to the city and to the nations.
Now, I say that God prepared me for an intercession of a kind much greater than I had ever imagined. What I mean by that is that He took me beyond the personal to the corporate. He brought me to a place of leading our church into great acts of intercession on behalf of our church and then our city—and He may desire the same for you.
We know God cares about these things. How do we know? Because Jesus entered the temple courts one day, eyes blazing with anger, and removed by force the greedy merchandisers misusing the temple for personal gain. “It is written,” He said to them, “‘My house will be called a house of prayer’” (Matthew 21:13).
We can no doubt sympathize with Jesus going after all those merchandisers, but why did He make prayer the point of it all? It is because nothing happens outside of prayer. Watchman Nee said, “In heaven, God’s power is unlimited. But on earth, God’s power is manifested to the degree that the church prays.”2 The prophet Isaiah also foretold the assignment of the modern-day Church, saying the Church would become a house of prayer for all nations (see Isaiah 56:7).
God cannot move in cities, let alone nations, outside of the cooperation of His Church. The Body of Christ, which is the Church, must agree with the Head, which is Jesus, before this can take place. Where does the Body come into agreement with the Head and thus become empowered for the assignment? In the place of prayer.
Back at our church, we continued to pray weekly. Then one night, the Holy Spirit invaded the prayer service in a unique way. Ron and I had just returned home from a conference at the International Church of Las Vegas. While there, we had received a special prayer of impartation for greater ministry from the conference speakers.
We came home and attended our prayer service as normal—but that night was far from normal. The atmosphere of the room was electric. You could sense the activity of God, and it charged the atmosphere. During the church services the next day, there was a genuine move of the Holy Spirit for the first time since we began ministering there. People flooded the altars, tears streaming down their faces, all of them wanting more of the power of God. This was the beginning of renewal in our church.
We continued to pray together and watched the church transform proportionately. Over time, we added additional prayer services, noticing the connection between the quantity of prayer and the increase in ministry effectiveness. New salvations, miraculous healings and deliverances, and a growing influence in the city became normal.
A praying church is a powerful church, and prayer keeps a church in the center of God’s will. When a church commits itself to prayer, it encounters the supernatural realm in many dimensions. We had learned this through our commitment to pray together in dedicated prayer services each week. Our next journey would be to learn our spiritual authority not only as individuals, but also as a church—and that began with knowing who is in charge.
Kingdom Prayer Principles
Prayer is our lifeline for victory.
Every person’s journey in prayer is as unique as they are.
Prayer begins with the voice of God, and God still speaks.
You have influence with God, and He is waiting for your voice.
To intercede means to pray and intervene in favor of another.
God will prepare you for greater intercession.
The Church is a house of prayer for all nations because God restricts Himself to the faith of the Church.
Thoughts for Reflection
Prayer is a journey in relationship with God and deepens over time. How have you seen this to be true in your life?
We all have an instinct to pray. How have you experienced this instinct?
Are you aware of the voice of God in your life? How has prayer deepened this awareness?
How would you describe the difference between personal prayer and intercessory prayer? Do you intercede for others?
Have you noticed an increase of spiritual experiences in your life in connection with prayer? Are your experiences positive or negative?
It’s common to experience a measure of demonic pushback in prayer. Do you feel a sense of victory when it happens?
Does your church have life-giving and effective prayer services? If not, could you create a solution?
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Who’s in Charge?
Ron and I were young pastors, but we had a distinct advantage over the previous pastors who had come from the outside. Since we had attended the church as parishioners, we knew the power structures controlling it from within. But incoming senior leaders, one by one, had been left blindsided and defeated, not knowing what they were up against. The pastor before us, for example, tried desperately to navigate the power web, only to end up in the hospital with stress illnesses. For the sake of his physical and emotional health, he had to go minister somewhere else. Elite parishioners, motivated by power and self-interest, were in charge of the church, not the pastors. Pastors wanting to survive our church were either forced to give away their leadership or forced to leave.
Cindy Jacobs, of Generals International, once described how demonic powers stand behind an earthly structure or leader to accomplish their evil intentions. She explained in an article that this was the nature of a “strongman.” She then noted how a strongman needs to be overcome by a stronger One, referring to Jesus, and that this is accomplished through the prayers and intercession of the Church.1 (See Luke 11:21–22.)
In the matter of our church, we discerned quickly that we were dealing with much more than a group of controlling personalities. We were dealing with a strongman—a demonic spirit, to be exact.
How did we make that connection? Two powerful factions in the church had a perplexing habit of placing memorial plaques to deceased relatives in key areas in and around the facilities. We had plaques on walls, shelves, chairs, tables, hymnals and the list goes on. This made the church feel more like a shrine to the dead rather than a life-giving worship center. It also caused a hindrance to making needed facility upgrades. Discussions about remodeling were stalled or rebuffed because that wall or that closet, for example, had been dedicated to someone’s memory. The last straw was when one of the factions donated money to build a kitchen inside the church and then named the kitchen after their family name! They were not even dead yet, but the customary plaque was already hanging on the wall, a symbol that sealed their power on that part of the building.
I cannot remember where I read it, but around that time I was looking through a book that described some Scandinavian occult practices from the “old country.” It caught my interest, as I am part Scandinavian and it was the dominant ethnicity of our
church at that time. What struck me was its reference to ancestral worship and how it had mixed in with Christianity centuries ago in Europe. The description was strangely familiar to our present situation. I knew we were dealing with some type of witchcraft in the church, but I did not have a name for it because it was happening in a Christian context. I brought the information from the book to my husband and a few others so we could pray and strategically act.
Now, Jesus instructed us to bind things in the spirit realm that work against God’s Kingdom (see Matthew 16:19; 18:18). To bind something means “to tie it up,” and we accomplish that by making a specific command with our words (see Mark 11:23–24). Therefore, using our words, we forbade the spirit of ancestral worship from operating in our church, in Jesus’ name, and then asked the Lord to send His Holy Spirit to rule and reign instead.
Things did not change overnight, but we persisted in prayer. Eventually, some board members felt impressed by the Holy Spirit to begin removing the plaques from around the church, including the infamous kitchen plaque, until none remained. This process took a few years, but this time there was very little resistance. Each time we removed a plaque, we could feel power being reassigned to its proper place. Power structures were losing their influence, and those involved began exiting the church. The strongman was being dismantled.
These factions had divided this church for an astonishing fifty years before the spirit behind them was broken. The church almost died before things turned around. The pastors before us kept falling into the same trap. They would try to solve the problems relationally without knowing how to deal with them spiritually. They needed to recognize a spiritual strongman was at work and then to show that spirit who was in charge.
The Intercessors Handbook Page 3
