THE  GIFT  OF  PRAYER
 
Three Unpublished Lectures for the Lutheran Mission Staff Retreat at Wau, Papua New Guinea, September 12-14, 1986

A.	PRAYING WITH JESUS

	A sense of spiritual frustration, coupled with the longing for spiritual fulfilment, has become common among devout Christians all over the world. Their disappointment is often precipitated by the difficulties that they experience in prayer and their personal spirituality. It is here that there is the biggest gap between the way things should be and the way they actually are. This has also been a problem for me, personally. On the one hand, I truly believe that much more is accomplished by prayer than by anything else that I do. More than anything else, I would like to be good at praying. Yet on the other hand, I must admit that I have been anything but a man of prayer.

My failure in prayer has been aggravated by much of the teaching on prayer in the church in modern times. This teaching implied that, if only I were more disciplined and methodical and more spiritual, I would succeed and become a spiritual dynamo. But no matter how hard I tried it just did not work for me. I was thrown back on my own resources which, as always, proved to be inadequate. Yet over the years I have also been helped by other more realistic writers, who used the Scriptures to teach me something about the gift of prayer, and the power to pray. Little by little, God has used the school of hard knocks to join me with Jesus in his praying and to rely on the prompting of his Holy Spirit, rather than my own resources in my spiritual life. I now no longer regard prayer as an obligation, a duty that I must fulfil, but as something that is given to me, something that I receive from the triune God. The main thing in prayer is a receptive heart that takes in what God offers to it. 

I am convinced that the experience of frustration and failure is far more important to our development as people of prayer than is allowed in popular Christianity, with its teaching of methods, and its guarantees of success from the correct application from certain basic Biblical principles. I therefore don't wish to come across to you as a self-appointed expert in prayer, but rather as a struggling dunce who has learnt some rather obvious lessons from bitter experience. Like some second-rate Jacob, who won his greatest spiritual victory when he was defeated by God, I would like to share with you the fruits of my defeats to encourage you to keep on persevering in prayer.

1.  The Privilege of Prayer.

After Jesus had instituted his Holy Supper on the night before his death and had settled an argument among his status-conscious disciples about their ranking in his kingdom, he had this to say in Luke 22:28-30:
You have stayed with me all through my trials; and just as my Father has given me the right to rule, so I will give you the same right. You will eat and drink at my table in my kingdom and you will sit on thrones to rule over the twelve tribes of Israel.
We too have that privilege and responsibility. We are, if you like, all members of Christ's royal cabinet, ministers in his heavenly administration. We reign with him here on earth (Eph 2:6; Rev 5:10).

Our prayer is part and parcel of our work in Christ's heavenly administration of his Father's realm. Through our union with Jesus we have access to the Father's presence and have become coworkers with him (1 Cor 3:9). We are privy to his deliberations and share in his decisions. Since we are the friends of Christ, who know his heavenly Father’s policy, his will and his method of working, we can work together with him (John 15:14-15). He has chosen us to make our recommendations to him about the implementation of his policy here on earth. By our prayers we work with him in the administration of God's grace.

Now none of this is possible if everything in the universe has already been set in cement. That is not the view of the Bible. It clearly rejects the notion of a closed universe. It is true that God does not change his gracious purpose to save the human race. But this does not mean that he has already fixed the blueprint for the course of human history and the course of each person’s life. Moses dared to pray because he believed that he could change the fate of his people by changing God's decision to destroy them (Exod 32:9-13). And he succeeded in doing just this (Exod 32:14). In fact, the Bible frequently speaks of God changing his mind in keeping with his unchanging grace (Ps 106:45; Jer 18:8; 26:3,13,19; Jon 4:2). We therefore can work together with God to determine the future of the world. The outcome of present events will be different, if we pray rightly. We can help to change the world by prayer. When we pray for others we may therefore be doing far more for the wellbeing of the human race than the greatest statesmen with all their political activity.

In a sermon on John 14:13-14 Luther is most eloquent in his teaching about the privilege of prayer. He associates it with the gift of the Holy Spirit and our priestly status as believers. As children of God with access to the Father's grace we have all we need for ourselves. We can therefore exercise our 'true office and function' by mediating that grace to others through prayer for them. In this way we will 'become gods and will be saviours of the world.'

2.  The Divine Gift of Prayer.

Humanly speaking, our appointment to the ministry of prayer is not a privilege, but an impossible task. We are required to undertake a supernatural tak that goes way beyond our natural capacities. Jesus therefore coupled the privilege of prayer with the gift of prayer to his disciples. This is something that needs particular emphasis in the present climate of religiosity. The ability to pray does not stem from human knowledge, performance and persistence; it is God’s doing, a product of the triune God.

This comes out most clearly for me in Luke 11:1-13 where Jesus answers the request of his disciples to teach them how to pray. There he emphasises that prayer is a gift in three different ways. First, Jesus teaches us how to pray. Like the disciples we are all dunderheads and dunces, when it come to the business of praying. We can't pray and don't know how to pray properly. Since we can't teach ourselves to pray, we need to be taught by Jesus. He is the only expert in prayer. Apart from his coaching, we won't be able to pray.

Secondly, he teaches us how to pray by giving us his own prayer, the Lord's Prayer. Now this is quite remarkable and rather unexpected. He doesn't set us to work by ourselves with some instructions on the theory and practice of prayer, like some modern teacher of spirituality. No, he gets us to join in with him and impersonate him as he prays to his heavenly Father. That's something like playing a part of a fictional person on the stage. We assume the identity of that person. We have our part to play and our lines to say. But in this case we don't just assume an imaginary character; we identify ourselves with Jesus and him with us; we take on his character and adopt his status. Since we are his disciples he gives us much more than a set prayer that is to be the model for all our prayers; he gives us his own status as God's Son and allows us to share in all the privileges of his unique relationship with his heavenly Father. By including us in his prayer, he includes us in his fellowship with his Father.

Yet it does not stop there, but gets even better than that. The prayer that he gives us to pray together with him is really his prayer for us. In it he does not just address God as his own Father, but as our Father; he goes so far as to pray for our daily bread, our forgiveness, and our protection in temptation. He therefore identifies himself with us and attends to our needs so that we can identify ourselves with him and receive his blessings. He swaps places with us, so that we can be where he is before God the Father (John 12:26; 17:24). So then, when Jesus teaches us to pray, he gives himself and his intercession to us. Luther says, rather picturesquely, that Jesus piggy-backs us into his Father's presence; we ascend 'in his skin and on his back.'

Thirdly, by praying we receive what we need from our heavenly Father. Like beggars before God, we bring nothing to him in our prayers but ourselves and our troubles. We don't come to contribute anything to God; we come to receive all that we need from him. Like the man with the unexpected visitor in Luke 11:7-8, we have nothing to give to any human being, let alone to God. Jesus therefore gives us his own prayer, so that we can receive the full range of what we need spiritually and physically from our heavenly Father, as is summed up by its seven petitions. Most importantly, we receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, when we join with Jesus in making our requests to his heavenly Father.

The reference to the gift of the Holy Spirit is rather unexpected in Luke 11:13. By it Jesus reminds us that the gift of prayer is connected with the gift of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of prayer, the Spirit of grace and supplication (Zech 12:10). Even though people were created for prayer, it does not come naturally to fallen humanity. It is part of God's new creation by his life-giving Spirit. Both in our worship (Gal. 3:3; cf. John 4:23) and in our praying (Eph. 6:18; cf. Romans 8:15; Gal. 4:6), we need to be led by the Holy Spirit. So to overcome our inability to pray properly, Christ not only gives us his prayer; he also gives us the power to address his heavenly Father as his dear children by pouring out his Spirit in our hearts. The Spirit then helps to articulate our hidden needs and prompts us in what we say. Since we don't know how to pray, he takes over from us and intercedes within us by getting us to pour out our hearts to God (Rom 8:26-27). When we pray we don't just join in with Jesus who carries us along with himself; we go along with the Holy Spirit who moves within us and leads us with Jesus to God the Father.

All this has a very practical application for me. When I am at the end of my tether I cry out to Jesus, like a beggar, with the words: "Lord, have mercy!” I cry out, like a speechless infant to its mother who knows what it needs far better than the baby itself. Sometimes, I just hand myself over to him, with no words at all, and let him carry me along. I don't try to pray by myself in a disciplined way, but let the Holy Spirit to take over from me. Remarkably, he does take over from me until I am composed enough to speak for myself.

Prayer then is a gift of the Triune God; it involves us with the three persons of the Holy Trinity. What we do when we pray depends entirely on what the Son gives us in his word, and on what the Spirit does with us through our faith in Christ. Our ability to pray does not therefore come from us, but from faith in Jesus Christ, faith that receives the gift of prayer. Luther stressed this God-given side of prayer. He says:
Our prayer, as our own work, would not amount to anything or accomplish anything; but what makes it amount to something is the fact that it proceeds on the basis of His commandment and promise. For that reason it may well be regarded as a sacrament and as a divine work rather than a work of our own.

3.  The Divine Foundation of Prayer

Christian prayer depends on human participation in the life and activity of the Triune God. It does not depend on the development of any innate human spiritual capacities, but on the grace of God to his dependent children. It is quite simply prayer in the name of Jesus.

The sense of this deceptively simple formula is best explained by Jesus himself in John 16:23-28. When we pray in the name of Jesus we base our prayers on the intercession and mediation of Jesus. The whole of his life from his coming to earth to his return to the Father was an act of intercession on our behalf (Heb 5:7). What's more, he still intercedes with us as our risen Lord (Heb 7:25). He is our Jacob's ladder (John 1:51), our heavenly escalator that lifts us up to his Father. When we pray in the name of Jesus we therefore base our prayers on his great achievements for us, rather than on anything that we may have accomplished. His perfection compensates for our failure and covers up our inadequacy, like the spell check on my computer. 

When we pray in the name of Jesus we impersonate him. Jesus said that after his resurrection he wouldn't have to pray for us any longer (John 16:23,24,26). By this he meant that he wouldn't be a third party standing between his Father and us, but because we were so closely united with him in faith that he lived in us through our love of him, our prayers would be his prayers. This means that we can now approach our heavenly Father as if we were Jesus himself and claim all his blessings for ourselves. It also means that our heavenly Father regards and treats us just like his beloved Son. He loves us and hears us as he loves and hears his Son. We are, in fact, as inseparable from Jesus as the head is from the rest of the body. God the Father does not consider us as we are in ourselves any more, but only as we are in Jesus.

No one I know has drawn out the implications of these words as wonderfully as Luther once did in his sermon on John 16:27. This is what he says:
We already have Christ's prayer, in which He interceded for us with the Father. This he offered up once, but it is eternally in force, and because of it our prayers are pleasing before God and heard. If I believe this, I am justified in saying: "I know that my heavenly Father is heartily glad to hear all my prayers, inasmuch as I have Christ, this Saviour in my heart. Christ prayed for me and for this reason my prayers are acceptable through His." Accordingly, we must weave our praying into His. He is forever the Mediator for all men. Through Him we come to God. In Him we must incorporate and envelop all our prayers and all that we do. As St Paul declares (Rom 13:14), we must put on Christ; and everything must be done in Him (1 Cor 10:31) if it is pleasing to God.
But all this is said to Christians for the purpose of giving them the boldness and the confidence to rely on this Man and to pray with complete assurance; for we hear that in this way He unites us with Himself, puts us on a par with Him, and merges our praying into His and His into ours.… What greater honour could be paid us than this, that our faith in Christ entitles us to be called His brethren and coheirs, that our prayer is to be like His, that there is really no difference except that our prayers must originate in Him and be spoken in His name if they are to be acceptable and if He is  to bestow this inheritance and glory on us. Aside from this, He makes us equal to Himself in all things; His and our prayer must be one, just as His body is ours and His members are ours.
So when we pray in the name of Jesus we pray together with him; through him we come to the Father. We swap places with him. As he took on our humanity with all its troubles we share in his sonship with all its blessings for ourselves. We rely on his solidarity with us. He is therefore the divine foundation for our prayer as well as the answer to all our prayers.

4.  The Divine Power of Prayer.

If the lust for political power leads to corruption, the lust for spiritual power all too readily leads to damnation. I am therefore rather reluctant to speak about the power of prayer. Yet it is true that we have access to divine power in prayer. What's more, some of the most challenging words of our Lord have to do with this touchy topic.

It could, in fact, be said that we have the gift of prayer in the name of Jesus just in order to prevent abuse of spiritual power. God's power is given to us in prayer, but not directly, like a bolt of lightning, or an atomic bomb. Rather, God gives it to us there in prayer in a safe and beneficial way. Like the insulation of high-voltage electricity, it is arranged in such a way that we can only use it safely for good purposes, without being destroyed by it. Thus, while we do receive his power by faith in prayer, we can never take hold of it and possess it for ourselves. But we need to remain in touch with Jesus if we are to draw power from him (John 15:7). The power of prayer cannot therefore be used, like sorcery, for injury to others, or even for self-promotion. We can't use it at the expense of others in ways that are contrary to God's good will.

Prayer then is the means by which God allows his people to draw on the power of the Holy Spirit for themselves and for others, the power that God makes available to us in his inspired word. It is our greatest asset, because neither we, nor the enemies of Jesus, can pervert it, or even misuse it. His enemies may indeed lay their hands on it, but the moment they do they are transformed from enemies to the friends of Jesus. By using it, we can do only good. On the other hand, contact with divine power in prayer has been so devised that the connection is automatically cut off, like a fuse in an electrical system, as soon as anybody tries to use it for ungodly purposes.

In John 14:12-14 Jesus speaks most clearly about the power of prayer. Here Jesus makes the incredible promise that we Christians not only equal, but also surpass the miracles that he performed in his earthly ministry. We continue the supernatural work of Jesus and perform the greater miracles of the new age where those who were born blind to God receive sight and those who were once dead in sin are raised to eternal life. And we accomplish this by prayer.

While we draw on the power of our risen Lord to do God’s work in prayer, the work we do will be hidden from human sight. No one will see our faith except God. No human being, and not even we ourselves, will see what we accomplish by our prayers. We won't get any credit for it from people because they won't see what we have done. Nevertheless, through our prayers we will cooperate with Christ in his work and so reveal the Father's glory to other people. When we pray for ourselves and others, we therefore continue the work of Jesus. It is, in fact, the most important work we ever do. Hallesby describes it well in these terms:
If the labour of prayer does not precede as well as accompany all of our work in the Kingdom, it will become nothing but a work of man. The work of praying is prerequisite to all other work in the Kingdom of God, for the simple reason that it is by prayer that we couple the powers of heaven to our helplessness, the powers that can turn water into wine and remove mountains in our own life and in the lives of others, the powers which can awaken those who sleep in sin and raise up the dead, the powers which can capture strongholds and make the impossible possible.

In Mark 11:20-25 we find the most frequently quoted passage on the power of prayer. But it is also often misunderstood in two different ways. First, people isolate verses 23-24 from verse 22 in order to stress the need for confidence in prayer. They therefore misinterpret what is meant by faith. Faith is not some kind of presumptuous self-confidence that makes demands on God and expects to get what it has demanded. That would make the power of prayer dependent on our faith in ourselves rather than on our faith in God. When Jesus speaks about confident prayer he directs our attention away from ourselves to the faithfulness of God. Both the certainty of faith and the consequent power of prayer derive from God and his goodness. Secondly, people isolate verses 23-24 from verse 25 in order to urge people to be more confident in their prayers. Jesus admits that uncertain faith impairs the effectiveness of prayer. He does not, however, urge the doubter on to stronger faith as if faith depended on the willpower of the person. Rather, he gets to the root of the problem. Doubtful and uncertain prayer usually stems from the lack of forgiveness. Resentment and anger sabotage faith and prayer. That must therefore be rectified. So the power of prayer rests not only on our confidence in the grace of God, but also on our graciousness to those who have hurt us. It has nothing to do with any kind of presumptuous self-assurance and self-assertion.

5.  The Gift of Divine Rest in Prayer

Some time ago I saw two rather interesting toys. The first was a solar windmill and the second a solar torch. Both were connected to solar cells. When the windmill was exposed to the sunlight it whirled around. As for the torch, it shone uselessly in the sunshine. Those two toys illustrate for me the active and passive sides of prayer.

The active side of prayer is like the momentum of a solar windmill. It seems to be moving by itself, but it is, in fact, moved by the action of the sun upon it. This too is so with prayer. In prayer we find ourselves caught up in something that happens to us. Although we are active when we pray, our praying does not originate in us but in the Holy Spirit who is active in us because of our union with Jesus. Prayer therefore happens for us and in us when we are open and receptive to the triune God.

But the business of prayer goes deeper than mere doing. It is basically a matter of being in God's presence, because we are right with Him. Take the solar torch. It is always passive. It receives the light and so becomes lit up by it. Our prayer is a holy rest from all our own activity. In it we who labour and are heavy laden come to Jesus to share in the rest that he provides (Matt 11:28-29). We cease from our labours and enter the Sabbath of faith that enjoys the fruits of Christ's work and lets him perform his work in us (Heb 4:3,9-10). Nothing here depends on us and our performance. We don't generate anything by ourselves from our own spiritual resources, but simply rely on Jesus for everything. It is enough for us just to be with Jesus and to enjoy his presence with us.

Jeanne Baptiste Vianney, a Catholic priest from the early19th century, tells a story which describes this aspect of prayer rather well. Soon after he came to the village where he spent his active life as a priest, he noticed that a young farmer regularly spent some time daily in the village church. That was not, in itself, unusual. His devotional routine, however, was unusual in its simplicity. He would come and just sit for a while in front of the statue of Jesus. Then he would go on to his daily work. After observing him for a while, the priest plucked up enough courage to ask him what he did there in the church. The farmer replied, “Well, nothing. I look at Jesus, and he looks at me. And we are happy just to be together.”

My own activity and the obligation to perform a regular devotional routine early in my ministry created difficulties and obstacles for me in my spiritual growth. The trouble was that when I most needed to pray, I was least able to pray. When I was mentally and spiritually exhausted from the burden of pastoral responsibilities, prayer became just another demand on my overtaxed capacities. Yet when I took off time to do nothing except just to be in God's presence, I found myself strangely rested and refreshed, invigorated and even elated. I therefore begun to make the shift from vocal and mental prayer to what some teachers of spirituality have called affective and contemplative prayer. Like Mary at the feet of Jesus, I sat with him and listened to him.

As far as I can gather, this is a rather normal pattern of growth in prayer. Generally speaking, its path goes from complexity to increasing simplicity. We move from speaking to listening, from thinking to looking, from giving to receiving, from doing to being. With that comes a growing reliance on Jesus and a clearer sense of direction by the Holy Spirit. And so, by resting in Jesus and waiting for him, we come to experience the gift of prayer most powerfully and clearly.

6.  Conclusion.

Two quotations must suffice to draw together the various strands of my argument. The first
comes from Soren Kierkegaard, the great Danish Lutheran theologian. In his Christian 
Discourses he has this to say:
A man prayed and at first he thought that prayer was talking. But he became more and more quiet until in the end he realized that prayer is listening.
The second comes from John 15:5, 7 where our Lord compares us to the branches attached to him as the vine stock. He says:
I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me, and I in them, bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing...  If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you will and it will be done for you.
Prayer, then, is quite simply the result of being attentive to Jesus and abiding in him.

B.   THE  SCHOOL  OF  PRAYER

Imagine a little baby no more than a few weeks old. It is of all animals the most helpless and vulnerable at birth. It is utterly and totally dependent on its mother for nearly everything that it needs for its survival. Apart from its mother, it could exist for no more than a few days. To add to its helplessness it can't follow its mother about, like a calf with a cow, or even cling to her, like a little koala. When something is wrong, it doesn't know what is wrong. So it cannot even express its needs in words. There is only one thing that it can do for itself, when it needs something. It can bawl out aloud for its mother. But that helpless cry is, in fact, its most powerful and effective weapon in the battle for survival, as every mother knows. No matter what's the trouble, the baby simply cries out for its mother and keeps on crying until the mother discovers what's wrong and fixes it up. The mother works out whether the baby is hungry or uncomfortable, whether it has wind or has wetted its nappy. And so the baby receives help because it has cried out for help. Its helplessness teaches it to communicate with its mother in this most effective fashion.

When it comes to our relationship with God we are much like helpless babies (Matt 18:3; Mark 10:15). Apart from Jesus, we can accomplish nothing spiritually (John 15:5). Without the help of the Holy Spirit, we do not know how to pray, or what to pray for (Romans 8:26).  But unlike babies, we never outgrow our helplessness before God. We never become spiritually autonomous and self-sufficient. Our growth tends in the opposite direction. If there is one thing we discover as we grow older and gain in experience, it is that before God we are nothing but beggars, as Luther wrote on the night before he died. In the face of death and God's judgment, we can only cry out to Jesus, as beggars did in the ancient world: “Lord, have mercy!”

Yet that experience of helplessness is the best condition for our spiritual growth. As long as we can manage quite well by ourselves, we have no need to pray and so never learn to praise God. But when we have come to the end of our tether, our only hope lies in prayer. Only those who are helpless can truly pray, just as only those who have been helped by God in answer to their prayers really praise God. That's why the Norwegian theologian Olav Hallesby begins his book on Prayer with a helpful discussion on the value of helplessness. He says:
I never grow weary of emphasising our helplessness, for it is the decisive factor
not only in our prayer life, but in our whole relation to God. As long as we are 
conscious of our helplessness we shall not be overtaken by any difficulty, 
disturbed by any distress, or frightened by any hindrance. We shall expect 
nothing of ourselves and therefore bring all our difficulties and hindrances to God 
in prayer. And this means giving God the opportunity to help us in our 
helplessness by means of the miraculous powers which are at His disposal.

Helplessness and prayer belong together, just as helplessness and faith do. You can see this 
most clearly in the gospels. We find many stories there of helpless people, like blind 
Bartimaeus, and the woman with uncontrolled menstrual bleeding. In their helplessness they 
came to Jesus and asked him for the help that they had no right to expect. Each 
asked differently. Some, like Bartimaeus, were quite vocal in their requests (Mark 10:47); 
others, like the woman with the menstrual bleeding, simply touched the cloak of Jesus (Mark 
5:27,28). But no matter what their need, or how they expressed it, they all received help from 
Jesus; they were all commended for their faith. Their faith arose from their helplessness
which, in turn, led them to pray.

Like those people, we don't learn to pray in seminars or at conferences, but in the school of life, the university of hard knocks. Since that is so, the growing sense of bewilderment and helplessness that is found everywhere among Christians is perhaps an omen of potential spiritual revival and growth.

1.	 In the Whale's Belly.

Much popular literature on the Christian life and prayer seems rather one-sided to me. It reads as if we lived in the best of possible worlds where God's rule was largely unchallenged. We read much about victory, triumph and peace, but little about struggle, failure and conflict. These writers dwell on the fruits of the Spirit, such as love, joy, patience, kindness, and so on as if they held total sway in the Christian's life. The impression is given that once people have faith in Christ they escape the troubles of the world and lead blissful sunny lives free from all that ails most people. You have to go a long way before you discover that we must undergo many trials before we enter the kingdom of God (Acts 14:22).

The work of Merlin Carothers illustrates the approach which makes me so uneasy. He has written two popular books, Prison to Praise  and Power to Praise. Now there is much that is good in these books. His emphasis on the role of praise is excellent. But his central thesis is wrong. In Thessalonians 4:18 St. Paul urges us ‘to give thanks in all circumstances.’ Carothers concludes from this that we should thank God ‘for all circumstances.’ That includes all our troubles and disasters. The diligent application of ‘the principle of praise in all circumstances’ is for him the key that revolutionises the lives of those who employ it. It releases ‘a supernatural, divine force,’ a power ‘that changes them.’ He says:
The more we pray and cry to God to help us, the more the circumstances seem to pile up. The turning point cannot come until we begin to praise God for our situation instead of crying for Him to take it all away.
There is therefore a shift in his work from the truth that God brings good out of evil for those who love him (Rom 8:28) to the unwarranted conclusion that God works evil for the good of those who love him. The reality of evil is thus denied and petitionary prayer is belittled. But at least he gets his readers to face their troubles.

Things get worse when we move from edifying literature to the conversation of Christians like us. We are usually quite ready to talk about our successes, but are rather reluctant to mention our failures. It is as if everything unpleasant and incriminating has been censored from the stories of our lives. From my experience, this tendency to gloss over failure is sadly common among pastors and Church workers. Even when my life is in an utter mess, I am still prone to justify myself professionally to my peers by referring to the successful areas of my ministry. It is as if we observe a secret taboo against failure. Now that may stem from a healthy reluctance to burden others with our problems, as well as a natural defence against the possibility of disparagement. But it could, equally well, come from an unhealthy attempt to avoid hurt and deny loss, in the hope that what remains unmentioned will cease to exist.

This conscious and unconscious whitewashing, this censoring of experience, has certain inevitable negative effects on us and the Church. First, it can create an air of unreality and make-belief that confirms religious sceptics in their scepticism and confuses new disciples in their naivety. Secondly, it stops people from facing reality together with God and so short-circuits the process of spiritual growth. Thirdly, it creates intolerable tensions within the honest struggler who notices the disparity between his own obvious deficiencies and the apparent triumphs of others. He therefore concludes that he hasn't made the grade spiritually and may even decide that he doesn't belong to the Church, since it appears to him more of a club for a spiritual elite than a kind of Sinners' Anonymous. Fourthly, since people never mention their troubles to each other, they can't bear each other's burdens in prayer. Lastly, and worst of all, it gives Satan room to attack the Church through the evil and hurt that has not been eradicated because it has been repressed.

This censoring of experience is much like the taboo against anger in many Anglo Saxon households. Since it is wrong to get angry, the members of these families never get angry with each other, even when they are hurt and feel angry inside. This anger, however, is not dispelled by the prohibition against it; it is merely repressed and entrenched more deeply than ever before. Such people never learn how to get rid of their anger in a socially accepted way. Instead, they cease to show their feelings and withhold affection from each other. They commit a kind of emotional suicide.

As a Christian I know that I shouldn't harbour doubts about God's goodness, nor should I feel hostile to the people around me. But I do. And I don't receive much help from the church in dealing with the fact that I do. Where can I turn when I feel that God has betrayed and abandoned me? How can I get rid of my bitterness, anger, rage and even hatred towards those people who have humiliated and hurt me? What can I do with the guilt and shame I feel about my failure to be the kind of person I should be? What hope is there for me if I am overcome by depression and threatened with a nervous breakdown? People seem to think that such experiences and feelings are out of place in the life of a Christian. And so we deny these troubles and hope that they will go away. The pity of it is that by this very stratagem of denial we miss out on the best opportunities for spiritual growth. The person who avoids his own troubles may, in fact, avoid God.

That's not the approach recommended by the Bible. Take the Psalms, the prayer book of Israel, the best handbook of Christian spirituality. The Hebrew scribes called the Psalter the Book of Praises. You would therefore expect psalms of praise and thanksgiving to predominate. But that is not the case. Most of the psalms are, in fact, either individual or national complaints. These complaints are brutally frank and honest. There is nothing escapist about them. In them God’s people confront their troubles fairly and squarely together with God. Out of that confrontation comes petition and praise. It is significant that the Church had traditionally been embarrassed by these very psalms and has used them least in its teaching and worship.

The psalms of complaint show us how prayer is learnt by people who face up to their troubles with God. They consist of certain stock elements that are combined in various ways. First, there is the address of God. He is usually invoked by his holy name and addressed in what follows. This is, in fact, the decisive element that prevents the complaint from becoming a self-indulgent act of rebellion, or a mawkish exercise in self-pity. The invocation of God's name involves him inextricably in that person's trouble.

Secondly, there is the complaint itself that is so often full of raw anger and sore hostility. This element tends to predominate. The complaint usually goes in three directions. In many cases the psalmist describes his distress in vivid imagery, which is, nevertheless, general enough to suit any circumstance from sickness to social disgrace. In this section he may, as is appropriate, also either confess his guilt or protest his innocence. This focus on trouble shifts rather readily to a description of the injuries sustained at the hand of his enemies, and from there to a graphic description of the enemies themselves in all their demonic malevolence. Lastly, the complaint is also often directed against God himself for his dereliction of duty. It is not as if God has caused the evil that has come upon the psalmist, though it may come upon him as an act of judgment by God. Rather, the psalmist usually complains that despite all his promises, God has either abandoned him, or else decided to do nothing to help him in his dire need. God has failed to keep his promises.

These complaints bear close study, for they are the seedbed of prayer. In them God’s people get emotional with God and dump on him. They pour out the bitterness of their hearts to God and argue angrily with him. They refuse to accept disaster as the proper condition for God's people and so protest vehemently against it. There is in them no calm resignation in the face of adversity. These complaints turn on the disparity between God's promises of protection and the actual experience of abandonment by him. By their vivid portrayal of trouble, they appeal to God’s reputed compassion. They appeal to God's justice in the face of injustice, to God’s grace in the face of his wrath. Contrary to the evidence of experience, they assume that God is still involved with his people in their trouble and irrevocably committed to them. They take God at his word and refuse to shut up, until he intervenes and deals with the trouble. They are, in fact, an under-utilised pastoral and devotional resource. There is much we can learn from them about the art of protesting to God about the misery and injustice that surrounds us

Thirdly, there is the prayer for help, addressed to God. This can come in three ways. It can consist of a prayer against the enemies of the psalmist. These imprecations are couched in the form of a wish, rather than request. In them the psalmist, who had previously voiced his anger at his humiliation, his experience of injustice, voices his desire for vengeance and hands over his injury to God to act on his behalf. He thereby gives up the right to avenge himself upon his enemies. Then once he has handed the matter over to God he no longer has the right to pay back his enemies. Since these imprecations upset the moral sensibility of Christians, they have rarely been used in the church, because, it is argued, Christ has directed us to forgive our enemies and pray for them (Matt 5:43-48). But I wonder whether something important may not be lost if we discard them completely and refuse to use them. Christians may not be able to get rid of their deep-seated hostility against those who have injured them, to combat the compulsion to take revenge, and to counter the rule of injustice in the world. After all, even the New Testament teaches God's people that they may ask him to vindicate them (Luke 18:7) and avenge them (Rev. 6:10). The prayer for help may also contain an act of intercession for the righteous. Like the prayer against the enemies, it is couched in the form of a wish. Lastly, the prayer contains a plea for help from God, a petition for charity, or mercy, or vindication, or deliverance from the heavenly King. In the plea the psalmist hands over his trouble to God and asks him for help. The basis for the plea is quite simple. God has promised to help his people who call on him in their need. So, since the psalmist is in dire straits, God is bound to come to the aid of his servant, like a kinsman with a needy member of his clan. The psalmist therefore makes his troubles God's troubles by his prayers against his enemies and his pleas for help.

Fourthly, there is the element of praise. We come across such verses of praise in the psalm or at its end. No matter how terrible his condition may be, the psalmist never stops praising God. More surprisingly, he anticipates God's deliverance in his thanksgiving for what God will yet do, rather than for what he has done. The psalmist also promises to praise God after his deliverance and to tell the members of the liturgical community about God's help for him in his trouble. This often includes a call to them to join him in his praises. The person who has been alienated from the congregation by his troubles is therefore reintegrated into it by joining with it in its praises. Deliverance results in the confirmation of his faith and leads to renewed praise. This part of the psalm expresses the profound truth that we learn to praise God through the experience of trouble. The worse the trouble, the greater the deliverance and the richer the subsequent praise.

Fifthly, they sometimes include short confessions of faith. These are based on God's character as expressed in his name, God's saving deeds in the history of his people, and his promises to them. They function in two ways. On the one hand, they motivate and guide the psalmist in his complaints about his troubles, his prayers against his enemies, and his pleas for help. On the other hand, they affirm the faith of the psalmist that has been tested and confirmed by his experience of adversity.

These psalms show us how prayer is learnt in the school of experience. They map out the pattern of prayer and praise which arises out of the interaction between faith in God's grace and the experience of trouble. In them we find a cycle of complaint and praise. This cycle begins with the experience of trouble and then moves on to complaint to God about it; to prayer against one’s enemies and petition for help for ourselves and for all the righteous; to the promise of renewed praise and thanksgiving for deliverance; to witness to others and confession of faith in God’s goodness and praise of God. By entering this cycle with our complaints to God, we discover the depths of our need and the heights of his grace.

There is a rather curious and yet profound feature in the book of Jonah. As you may remember, Jonah prayed a psalm in the belly of the whale. Earlier, when the storm was engulfing the boat and the heathen crew cried out to their gods as well as the Lord (1:5,14), Jonah had not prayed, even when urged to do so by the crew (1:6). But then, in the whale's belly, in Sheol the realm of the dead, he prayed a prayer of thanksgiving for deliverance (2:2-9). Only then did he begin to appreciate God and to praise him. Like him, we too learn to pray and to praise in the belly of the whale with the help of the complaints in the Psalter.

2.  Prayer, Meditation and Temptation

By the late medieval period the teaching of meditation and prayer in the monasteries and schools had taken on a relatively set form. This pattern has continued, with minor variations, in the Catholic Church and in most churches to the present. Luther learnt it and practised it in the monastery. It helped to shape his spiritual development.

This pattern of prayer consisted of four basic elements. It began with the reading of Sacred Scriptures. Each priest and monk was required to read the lessons set for each day. The most important of these were the psalms. Luther therefore got to know them very well from this practice of chanting them daily. Then came meditation. There were many different approaches to this, but they all involved deep and persistent reflection on some short portion of Scripture. This, in turn, led to either vocal or silent prayer. Its content was prompted and inspired by the previous reading and meditation. The fourth element was contemplation. It differed from the other three in that it was given and experienced, rather than practised and achieved. God himself infused the state of contemplation in the heart of people when they were ready to receive it. It involved the experience of union with the risen Lord Jesus. There was some dispute among the different schools of theology as to whether this was an intellectual, affective, imaginative, or volitional matter. But they all agreed that in contemplation a person experienced the mystical marriage, the union of the soul with Christ. Many monks and Luther himself sought this experience as avidly as some modern Christians crave the so-called baptism of the Holy Spirit.

In 1539 Luther outlined his method for the study of theology in the Preface to his German Writings. In it he takes issue with this traditional pattern of prayer and recommends a threefold approach. Unlike the traditional pattern, these are not three stages in our ascent to God, but three aspects of our devotional life, three dimensions of our involvement with the triune God in prayer, the God who, by the incarnation of his Son, has descended to join us where we are. What he says there has helped me more in the practice of prayer than anything else I have ever learnt.

In contrast to the traditional pattern, Luther begins with prayer to God the Father through Jesus for the gift of the Holy Spirit to enlighten and guide him in his devotions. He begins in this way because there is no room for human performance in God's presence. Prayer is not a ladder by which we climb up into heaven. Rather, God comes down to us and meets us where we are here on earth through Christ and his word. Everything must come from Christ and be given by him. Hence Luther 'desires the real Master of the Scriptures himself in order that he may not tackle them with his reason and make himself their master.' 

Then comes the practice of meditation on the Spirit-filled Scriptures. This combines the traditional elements of reading and reflection. Luther recommends that we speak the words from the Bible out aloud to ourselves. We must reflect on and ponder the external word, reading and rereading it, repeating it aloud, so that it can act on the whole person and not be manipulated by the intellect.  Like a sweet medicinal herb, the word needs to be rubbed vigorously, if we are to savour its fragrance and experience its healing powers. Behind this advice lies his profound conviction about the power of God's word, and the Holy Spirit in that word, which transforms its lover and 'imparts its qualities to the soul,' like fire with red hot iron. Meditation focuses on the words of the Bible, because God does not give 'his Spirit apart from the external word.' Through it the Holy Spirit comes to us, pervades us, and sets our souls alight. He preaches Christ in the human heart and gives ‘rich and enlightening thoughts.' The Holy Spirit doesn't just preach to us, but empowers us to respond appropriately to God in prayer. By meditation on God’s word we are filled with his Holy Spirit.

The last part in Luther's pattern of prayer is temptation, trial, spiritual warfare, Satan’s attacks on us. This term includes all forms of physical, social, spiritual hardship, the experience of frustration, the many things that attack us and threaten our faith in God. This surprising element represents Luther's most radical departure from the medieval pattern, as well as his richest legacy to Christian spirituality. Temptation, then, replaces contemplation as the result of meditation and prayer. Behind this lies Luther's theology of the cross. We do not know Christ through the experience of heavenly union with him, but through the experience of suffering with him in the fulfilment of our worldly vocation. We therefore experience the crucified and risen Christ here on earth in our everyday lives, through his word, in hardship, contradiction, conflict, and humiliation.

Here is how Luther explains the importance of temptation:
Thirdly, there is trial. This is the touchstone that teaches you not only to know and understand but also to experience how right, how true, how sweet, how lovely, how mighty, how comforting is God's Word, wisdom above all wisdom ... as soon as God's Word goes forth through you the devil will afflict you ... and teach you by his temptations to seek and to love God's Word.
Meditation therefore leads to spiritual warfare. As soon as God's word, and Christ with it, begins to penetrate a person's heart, the devil gets busy with his attacks. He does his level best to uproot the word before it can take full effect in that person's life. But these attacks prove to be counterproductive. By stripping us of our physical, social and spiritual props, Satan merely impels us to seek and love God's word more ardently than ever. He drives us to pray and forces us to cling to Christ as our only hope. We thereby draw on the power of the Holy Spirit in the face of his harassment.

Under the pressure of hardships and suffering, we experience for ourselves the power of God's word and the help of Jesus. What we believe is confirmed by our experience. Jesus and his word affect us at all levels of our being, intellectually, emotionally and physically. Intellectually, we experience the reality of God's grace and discover the truth of what we have learnt from his word. Emotionally, we are satisfied by the sweetness of God's love and enjoy the loveliness of his presence. Physically, we is invigorated and strengthened by our contact with the living God.

3.  Conclusion

In recent times tension and stress have taken their toll on many people in western world. They have been taught various methods of relaxation and meditation to overcome stress and to heal those psychosomatic maladies that come from an inability to cope with the pressures of life. And there is nothing wrong with that. I myself have used them, and I would recommend them to anybody who suffers from stress. But there has been a rather undesirable spillover from this to popular piety. Many writers on Christian spirituality urge Christians to practise various forms of meditation and contemplative prayer to achieve spiritual tranquillity and peace. If Luther is right, such practices are illusionary and perhaps even spiritually dangerous. For him the worst temptation is no temptation. Genuine Christian meditation and prayer will not necessarily lead to increasing ease and happiness, but rather to conflict and opposition. There will be peace, but it is peace in the midst of the battle. There will be joy, but it is joy that is mixed with pain. Meditation and prayer won't help us escape the trials of human existence, but rather help us cope with them together with the living God. When that happens, we will agree with St. Paul who had this to say in 2 Corinthians 12:9-10:
So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong. 

	*	*	*

C.   THE  PRACTICE  OF  INTERCESSION

a.	Intercession and the Golden Rule

Some years ago I was involved in a discussion with a year 12 Scripture class on the golden rule in Matthew 7:12: “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” As a lead into the discussion, I posed the question: “What's the very best thing that you as a Christian could ever do for another person?” Lots of different answers were given. You could defend, befriend, help that person in trouble; you could even show your love by dying for him All agreed that you wouldn't have to be a Christian to do these things. Then someone suggested that you could share your faith by telling others about Jesus. The class was uneasy about this because the person who said that was a rather heavy handed Bible basher.

Then a rather reserved girl came up with a different suggestion. She reckoned that you would do something even greater than that if you simply prayed for that person. When pressed to justify her claim, she maintained that, by praying for people in need, you gave them God’s help, rather than human help. You gave God's grace and nothing but his grace. Everything else we do is tainted by the evil in us, but not prayer. Any other help, no matter how generous, puts down those who are helped and leaves them in debt to the one who has helped them. But not prayer! When we pray for others we can do nothing evil but only good for them. We simply place them in God's hands and then withdraw. When we do that, they don't even know that we have prayed for them, unless we happen to tell them.

The class agreed with her, and we ended the lesson with a lively discussion on intercessory prayer. After the lesson, that girl's remarks stuck with me and kept me thinking for the rest of the day. I wondered whether her hunch about the connection between the golden rule and prayer was, in fact, backed up by Scripture. So, that evening I looked up the two versions of the rule, the first in Luke 6:31 and the second in Matthew 7:17. Then, there in Matthew I noticed the context of the golden rule. It comes as the conclusion of three units - the warning against the condemnation of a sinning neighbour in 7:1-5; the prohibition against desecration of a holy thing by giving it to an unclean person in 7:6; and the encouragement to pray in 7:7-11. This last unit ends with the words: "If you then who are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him." Then, at the beginning of 7:12, comes a ‘so,’ a ‘therefore,’ which links the golden rule to the words of Jesus about prayer. This, regrettably, is left out in most English translations.

The golden rule wasn't given by Jesus as a general ethical principle for all people, but as wise direction for God's children who have access to their heavenly Father through faith in him. Since I am a child of God I know that the best thing I could ever hope to receive from fellow Christians is their prayers. It's the greatest favour and kindness that they could ever show me. But the opposite is also true. By praying for God to forgive them when they sin, I show my love for them and for God. I therefore fulfil the law and the prophets when I don’t pass judgment on others but, instead, pray for them. That is my mission in life as holy person. I can ask our heavenly Father to supply others with what they lack. I can seek his grace for my sisters and brothers in Christ. I can knock at the door of my heavenly Father and usher them into his presence. So by intercession we fulfil the golden rule.

This discovery of the connection between the golden rule and prayer in Matthew 7 made me look more closely at the whole of 7:1-12. It seems to me, on reflection, that the arrangement of these four units is quite intentional. They are all interconnected. The whole section deals with the problem of our attitude to sin and failure in a Christian community. What should we do about the shortcomings and blunders of our fellow Christians. Two approaches are common. On the one hand, there is the ‘legalistic’ way. We can use God’s law to judge and condemn sinners. Jesus warns us that when this happens we pass judgement on ourselves. On the other hand, there is the ‘permissive’ way. We can be lenient and overlook the fault in the hope that the power of the holy Gospel will change that person. Jesus warns us that, where this is done, something holy is desecrated and defiled. He therefore advocates a third way, the way of intercession. The sins of our fellow Christians, their failures and mistakes, the conflicts and tensions in a Christian community, are all opportunities and occasions for intercession. Let me put it quite directly! When I fail as a pastor I don't need your condemnation, or your indulgence. What I need is your support, and you can give it best to me by your prayers.

As a fellowship of justified and forgiven sinners the Church is created and sustained by intercession. When we forget that we are all sinners, we base our assessment of ourselves and each other on our spiritual performance and so become slack in our prayers. There is, then, an inverse ratio between criticism and intercession in a Christian community. Where people no longer pray for each other, troubles arise and criticism increases in their wake. Compassion diminishes. The Church is torn apart, since the climate of criticism and condemnation prevents it from functioning as the body of Christ. But where people readily take the shortcomings of others upon themselves and so pray for them, harmony comes and encouragement increases with communal harmony. Such encouragement builds up people in the church and helps it to function properly as the body of Christ. Satan therefore stimulates criticism and condemnation of others, for the best possible moral and theological reasons, in order to diminish compassion and intercession. That's how he is best able to sabotage the life and work of the church.

b.  The Foundation for Intercession

We can intercede for others before God the Father because we are right with him and have access to his grace through his Son, our Lord Jesus Christ (Rom 5:1-2). Only those who have access to Father's presence and grace can mediate him and his grace to others. When they intercede they use their position with God, their righteousness in Christ, for the benefit of others.

The vicarious nature of intercession comes out clearly in the stories about the intercession of Moses, after the incident with the golden calf. They are found in Exodus 32~34. God there seeks the permission of Moses to destroy his people and make a new nation out of Moses (32:10). But Moses uses his standing with God to mediate between God and his people. On the one hand, since Moses has favour with God, he seeks to include his people in that favour. On the other hand, he refuses to separate himself from his people and join God in his condemnation of them. Thus he stands in solidarity with God in his grace and in solidarity with his people in their sin. He does not dissociate himself from either of them. Rather, he uses his privileged status with God for the wellbeing of his people and assumes responsibility for their sins to the point where he would be happy to be damned for them (32:32). In four stages he wins God's favour for his people by pleading with God not to destroy them (32:11-13), not to punish them as a nation (32:31-32), not to withdraw his presence from them (33:12-16), and finally to pardon their sin (34:9).

Moses bases his intercession on two things. First, he rests his case on God's character as revealed in his holy name and his good reputation. In the face of God's wrath he appeals to his goodness and faithfulness, for unless God is consistently gracious and reliable, intercession is a pointless activity. Secondly, he recalls the promises which God gave to the patriarchs. In his intercession he throws these promises back into God's face and expects him to honour them.

As Christians we are even more certain of our standing with God than Moses ever was. We are united with Christ and share in his eternal priestly intercession for us (John 17; Heb. 7:25). Since he bears our sin, we share in his righteousness (2 Cor 5:21). Unlike Moses, we do not stand alone before God; we stand in the shoes of Jesus. He has turned away God's wrath and condemnation from us and the whole world by his sacrificial death. We are justified before him and have access his grace for ourselves and others (Heb 4:16). And so we too can use our position with almighty God for the benefit of others. Like Moses, we can be bold in claiming God's grace for them, because we know him and his promises; we are sure that he will hear us, if we claim for others what he has promised to us and all his people.

c.  Solidarity in Intercession

The presupposition for intercession is a sense of solidarity with others. The worst enemy of
intercession is therefore that type of modern individualism which minds its own business, 
because it regards each person as an isolated atom, an island separated from the continent of 
humanity. The more we acknowledge our ties with others, the easier it will be for us to 
understand the operation of intercession.

As Christians we all stand within two large international communities. On the one hand, there is the fellowship of sinners that includes the whole human race, all the descendants of Adam and Eve. We are part of the human family. Whether we like it or not, we cannot dissociate ourselves from our family, class, nation, and the human race. We share in the prosperity and adversity of each other. As human beings we have a common origin, existence, and destiny. We are then inextricably connected with each other on planet earth. 

On the other hand, as Christians we are members of the communion of saints, the family of God. And here is how Luther describes that community:
This is the communion of saints in which we glory. Whose heart will not be lifted up, even in the midst of great evils, when he believes the very truth ... that the blessings of all the saints are his blessings, and his evil is also theirs? Thus others bear my burden and their strength is my strength. The faith of the Church comes to the aid of my fearfulness; the chastity of others endures the temptation of my flesh; the fastings of others are my gain; the prayer of another pleads for me ... Consequently, I can actually glory in the blessings of others as though they were my very own. They are truly mine when I am grateful and joyful with the others ... By their honour my shame is now made honourable, my want is supplied by their abundance and my sins are healed by their merits. Who could then despair in his sins? Who would not rejoice in his sorrows? He no longer bears his sin and punishment, and if he does bear them he does not bear them alone, but is supported by so many holy children of God, yes by Christ.
As part of the communion of saints we share in the sins and blessings of each other. Our existence is therefore always convivial; we live with others and we live for others.

Our solidarity with others determines the vicarious character of our intercession. Since I am
a Christian I am carried along, like a stick in the river, by the prayers of others. Long before I 
could pray, my parents, my relatives, and my fellow Christians began to pray for me. Their
prayers brought me to Christ in baptism. Their prayers surrounded me as my faith was
nurtured and grew. Their prayers ministered to me at my confirmation and marriage. Their 
prayers still support me in my faith and in my work as a pastor. When I forget to pray, or
when I am unable to pray, I can float in the current of their intercession. Most of all, this 
solidarity in prayer means that I am not alone, even when I pray by myself. Luther says:
Never think that you are kneeling or standing alone. Rather think that the whole of Christendom, all devout Christians, are standing there beside you and you are standing among them in a common, united petition which God cannot disdain.
This means that any breach of solidarity, each unforgiven sin and each injury from any fellow Christian, all impair our faith and weaken the power of corporate intercession.

Since I am a Christian, I can also carry others along by my intercession for them. My prayers are therefore always made for the benefit of others. They always receive something from my prayers no matter how feeble and inadequate my efforts may be. When I pray for someone else, I use my faith for their benefit. Have you ever noticed those stories in the Gospels in which people came to Jesus to get his help for someone else. The centurion with his sick servant (Matt 8:5-13), the four men with their paralytic friend (Matt 9:1-8), the ruler with his dying daughter (Matt 9:18-30), the Canaanite woman with her demon-possessed daughter (Matt 15:21-28), the father with his epileptic son (Matt 17:14-21) - these and many others like them were intercessors. They used their faith to bring others to Jesus who could not otherwise have come to him and received his help. In many cases Jesus commends them for their faith. In one case, the case of the paralytic cripple, the point is made quite explicitly that Jesus healed someone because of the faith of his friends (Matt 9:2). So, when we pray for others, we exercise our faith in Christ on their behalf.

In intercession we don't just use our faith for others, but we also share our love with them. We give of ourselves spiritually to them. So, for example, we show love to our enemies by praying for them (Matt. 5:43-48). In John 15:12-17 Jesus connects the love that is ready to lay down its life for others with prayer for them. We therefore show our love for others and lay down our lives for them, spiritually, when we pray for them. They gain both from our faith in God the Father and from our love for them.

Our solidarity with others determines the nature of our intercession. St. Paul explains this
well in 1 Timothy 2:1-5. First, we are to pray for the needs of others. We are to act as if their 
needs are, in fact, our needs. This presupposes an awareness of the misery of the people 
around us and a sense of compassion for them in their trouble. In this I myself am guided by 
what happens to me in my daily routine. Whenever I become aware of someone's trouble, I 
take this as a pointer for me in my prayers. Secondly, we are to ask God to bless all the 
people that we interact with in our daily lives. He puts us in contact with them, so that we 
will identify with them and claim God’s gifts for them. We pray for them as if their welfare is 
ours. Thirdly, we are to plead for the sins of others. When we experience evildoing in the 
Church and corruption in the world, it is easy for us Christians to become indignant and 
judgmental about the whole messy business, as if all this evil had nothing to do with us. All 
too often the discovery of evil in others reinforces our own self-righteousness and so breaks 
our solidarity with those who sin. Instead of gossiping about them and their misdeeds, we 
should act as if their sin were our sin and plead with Almighty God for their forgiveness. My 
own rule is that whenever I feel upset about the state of the world and the mess in the Church, 
I curb my self-righteous indignation and pray for the people involved. Fourthly, we are to 
give thanks for the blessings given to others. Now this is an aspect of intercession that has 
received scant attention in recent times, but was prominent both in Judaism and the Early 
Church. They believed that the church was appointed to serve, together with the angels, as a 
single choir that voiced thanks and praise to God on behalf of the whole human race. We too 
are to act as if the blessings of others were our own possession and so thank God accordingly 
for those who cannot yet thank him for their blessings. In this we follow Jesus who leads us 
in the praise of his heavenly Father (Heb 2:12).

Our solidarity with others determines the range of our intercession. We are all members of Christ's royal priesthood. As such, he has given us spiritual responsibility for the circle of people around us. The range of our responsibility depends on our situation and vocation. Roughly speaking, the Scriptures indicate that we all have three basic areas of responsibility in which we are to exercise our spiritual vocation by the practice of intercession. The first area is our own immediate social circle - the members of our families, our friends, our work mates, our associates. Among these we have a special duty to pray for those who do not believe as well as those who are in trouble. We should also pray for our enemies. We need them in our lives as the touchstone for our love, just as they need us to mediate Christ and his forgiveness to them. The second area for intercession is the church and especially our own congregation. Its leaders, the sick, the lapsed, and those in need are singled out for special mention in the New Testament. It has often been said that we get the kind of pastors, congregations and church that we pray for. The third area for intercession is the world and its rulers (1 Tim 2:1-2). Just as we Christians benefit from good government, political stability, economic prosperity and international peace, so the world and those in authority throughout the world are helped in their work by our prayers for them. Political instability and social unrest are signals for us Christians to increase our intercession, so that matters do not get out of hand. I am convinced that we can do more for international justice and world peace by our individual and corporate prayers than by anything else we ever do. Our prayers are our greatest contribution to the welfare of the world.

Our solidarity with others leads us to oppose the subversion and disruption of Satan in the Church and the world through our intercession. As long as we stand in solidarity with the human race and the communion of saints we cannot regard any human being, no matter how evil, as our spiritual enemy. Our only enemy is Satan (1 Pet 5:8-9). He is the source of all disunion and dissension. He seeks to destroy the human family, our families, and God's family.

But we do not need to attack and conquer him by ourselves, since Christ has already overcome him and has freed us from his rule (Col 1:8; 1 John 3:8). Our role in intercession is to act as sentries doing guard duty, secret agents for Christ (Eph 6:10-20). As sentries we defend holy ground, the territory which Christ has conquered. When the enemy attempts to recapture lost territory our task is to spot him and call in the champion, Christ, to ward off the attack upon that person or those people (Eph 6:18). As secret agents we invade enemy territory to discover where Satan has entrenched himself. When we discover his position in the lives of other people, or their communities, we can once again call in Jesus to rout Satan, just as infantry patrols in Vietnam used to call in the artillery and air support when they came upon the Viet Cong (Matt. 9:29). Intercessory prayer is therefore the most direct form of spiritual warfare. By our prayers we bind the powers of darkness in Christ’s name and so clear the ground for the spread of the Gospel (Eph 6:19-20). By our prayers we defend the world, the church, and our families against the inroads of Satan.

The Church has always known about the importance of prayer in spiritual warfare. No one has been more acutely aware of its value than Luther. He says:
Such (corporate) prayer is… a powerful defence against the devil and his assaults. For in it all Christendom combines its forces with one accord, and the harder it prays, the more effective it is and the sooner it is heard… it is of real benefit as a defence and barrier against the many tricks which the devil might otherwise perpetrate… thus it is certain that whatever still stands and endures, whether it is in the spiritual or in the secular realm, is being preserved by prayer.
Unfortunately, much of the modern church has forgotten this truth. The result has been a resurgence of the occult throughout the western world in many different guises. Intercessory prayer has been and still is the strongest weapon that we have here against the occult and the power of evil. It is our mightiest bulwark against Satan. When we pray for others, we join together in defending the church and the world against the powers of darkness.

d.  Methods of Intercession.

While sound teaching is essential if we are to exercise a ministry of prayer, it is also important that we do actually pray. By itself, theorising about prayer is as useless as theorising about love. What matters is to actually love some people and experience their love. So teaching about prayer is useful only if it comes from praying and improves our prayers. I would therefore like to end this paper with some suggestions about the practice of intercession. They come from my own experience and are methods that have helped me in this difficult art.

The best place to begin is with congregational worship. There we stand in the presence of the Triune God and are surrounded by all the saints. Unless I happen to be leading the service, I use four points in the service to pray for others. First, when I enter the building before the service begins, I pray for the pastor, the musicians, the whole congregation, and visitors. Secondly, I make it a practice never to go to Holy Communion just for myself. Not only do I go with some specific request for myself, but I also go for help for some other people. Thirdly, I seldom sing the hymn during distribution, but pray for my brothers and sisters as they come forward. If I notice that someone seems especially troubled, I concentrate for a while on that person. Fourthly, I take any subjective and objective distractions during the service as directives to pray for the people involved.

The next best place is our family devotions. Over the years we have settled for a relatively fixed pattern of rotation in our family prayers. Apart from a set reading coupled at times with discussion, we alternate for six days of the week between set prayers, individual prayers, and hymns sung around the piano. When we have individual prayers each person, beginning at the youngest, thanks God for something, and prays for somebody. Every Sunday night I lead in a prayer for all the members of our two families.

An excellent way of teaching people to cooperate and support each other in prayer is a prayer circle. You are, no doubt, familiar with its etiquette and dynamics. Somebody is appointed to open and close the session. Nobody speaks more than one or two sentences at a time. Silence is encouraged. I've found that this works well with young people. Many are, in fact, moved to pray for others in a prayer circle as never before. Those who have difficulty in voicing their requests find it easier to do so in this setting. Even if they don't say anything, their thoughts are often expressed by someone else in the group. In it people can easily unburden their souls and bear each other's burdens. Best of all, it introduces people to the power of silence and the value of listening in prayer.

In my own devotional life I have found two approaches most useful in the practice of intercession. I have a prayer list that I use. At present it consists of my family, the staff and students at our seminary, and the other people under my spiritual care. Besides that, in the morning and the evening I either anticipate or remember the people I will meet or have met that day. And I pray for them.

Frank Laubach promotes what he calls ‘flash prayers.’ His suggestion is that we use the moments of spare time in our day to make short single sentence prayers. While his description of his own practice is rather curious, the idea is good. Whenever I remember I not only say a silent ‘thank you’ or ‘help me,’ but I also silently mention the name of Jesus for the people that I meet and imagine him there with them. Laubach did this to the people he remembered, as well as the people he met. He says:
It is beautiful to acquire the habit of whispering "Jesus" at ever person who comes to memory. This has a splendid retroactive effect upon ourselves, for it begets love instead of the spirit of criticism. It is a good corrective for that unlovely tendency we have to disapprove of others. The more unattractive people are, the more we need to love them and pray for the ideal they can, by God's help, become.

Richard Foster mentions a related method of intercession that I myself have often practised without thinking about it. This method is really quite simple; it involves the use of your imagination to envisage what Christ promises in the New Testament. It will therefore be useful only if you are an imaginative person. All you do is imagine the presence of Jesus as in one of the stories from the gospels and then imagine him coming to the person that you pray for. This method of intercession consists in using your faith to bring a person to Jesus. You introduce someone to him in your imagination and let him take over from there.

CONCLUSION

Much more could be said about intercession and prayer. I would, however, like to end with two quotations. The first is a word of encouragement that comes from Andrew Murray, a great teacher on prayer. In his book The Ministry of Intercession, which, by the way, is the best book I know on the topic, he has this to say:
In intercession our King upon the throne finds His highest glory; in it we shall find our highest glory too. Through it, He continues His saving work, and can do nothing without it; through it alone we can do our work, and nothing avails without it. In it, He ever receives from the Father the Holy Spirit and all spiritual blessings to impart; in it we too are called to receive in ourselves the fullness of God's Spirit, with the power to impart spiritual blessing to others. The power of the Church truly to bless rests on intercession - asking and receiving heavenly gifts to carry to men.

Let me douse undue enthusiasm and damp down unrealistic expectations about prayer by ending with this sober warning from one of the desert fathers, a man called Agathon:
The brethren also asked him, 'Amongst all good works, which requires the greatest effort?' He answered, 'Forgive me, but I think there is no labour greater than that of prayer to God. For every time a man wants to pray, his enemies, the demons, want to prevent him, for they know that it is only by turning him from prayer that they can hinder his journey. Whatever good work a man undertakes, if he perseveres in it, he will attain rest. But prayer is warfare to the last breath.
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John W. Kleinig
Luther Seminary
Adelaide, South Australia
Revised Easter, 2003