Prophetic Intercession

I love to pray. Prayer is like having an invisible phone line from us to the Father. And it's free. No long distance worries or busy signals and you don't have to leave a message on a heavenly answering machine.

As a baby Christian I used to arm myself with a list of things to pray about and while I prayed this list regularly, my communication with God was confined to a one-hour time slot. What started with great excitement and eagerness turned into a mechanical and fruitless Christian obligation. I started to realize that all I was doing was shooting off my petitions to God like bullets randomly shot into the air, with the hope that at least one of them would hit the target. It was like I did all the talking and didn't stop to listen. Somehow it felt like God was not in it and that wasn't good enough.

Nobody ever taught me about prophetic intercession. All I knew was that I wanted more and that I had this incredible yearning for God's presence even in my prayer life. I wanted to know what God was thinking about the things I prayed for so I just started talking to Him about them throughout the day instead of the standard one hour right before going to bed.

Jesus stated, in John 5:19-20, "I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by Himself; He can do only what He sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does. For the Father loves the Son and shows Him all He does. Yes, to your amazement, He will show him even greater things than these."

In this scripture, Jesus points out very clearly the interdependent relationship between the Father and the Son. Jesus did not do anything apart from the Father. For that to be accomplished there had to be a lot of communication going on between Jesus and the Father. How else would He know what the Father wanted?

The same applies to us. Let's face it, apart from God helping us, anything we produce is really worthless from a Kingdom perspective. As citizens of heaven, we look beyond this life. This means that we need God to help us understand the bigger picture and what's going on behind the scenes. Of course, we'll never understand all aspects of the bigger picture in this life because we don't have the ability to fully comprehend eternal things. However, when God reveals His heart to us about a given situation, it's amazing how different things start looking. For instance, we may pray for a particular person to be saved. Our heart is for that person to receive eternal life. God's heart is for that person to be saved, but in addition to that, also his family and his neighbors. The bigger picture is that instead of one person being saved, there may be 10 saved.

If we pray apart from God's leading, we really just pray for a fraction of what God is willing to give. We just pray what we think sounds good. But that produces nothing or very little.

I want to pray God's heart, don't you? So let's start asking God what He wants us to pray about and how. It's OK to start saying, "Hey God, I have no idea what to say and how to pray. I really need your help. Direct me, show me and help me."

God delights in us asking Him for help. He loves to help. Let's make God Lord over our prayer lives as well. 1 John 5:14 states: "This is the confidence we have in approaching God; that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. And if we know that He hears us -- whatever we ask -- we know that we have what we asked of him."

Wouldn't we want to know what God thinks about the situation we're praying about? Of course we would. After all, if we know what God agrees with, we can enter in agreement with Him and our prayers become powerful and effective intercessions. With God agreeing, He already said, "yes" to our request.

Prophetic intercession always includes God. Because of its revelatory nature, prophetic intercession is a combination of intercession and prophecy. The question is, do you have to be a prophet to be a prophetic intercessor? Let's continue looking at God's word to find out.

1 Corinthians 14:1 states: "Follow the way of love and eagerly desire spiritual gifts especially the gift of prophecy." Here we are told to "eagerly desire" the gift of prophecy. We can clearly see that God desires for the gift of prophecy to be available to all believers. It also means that we do not have to walk in the office of a prophet to receive the gift of prophecy. From this, we can conclude that prophetic intercession is equally available to all believers.

God's word instructs us in 1 Thessalonians 5:16-17: "Be joyful always. Pray continually." All believers are told to pray and not only to pray, but to pray continually. Prophecy and intercession are meant to be normal parts of a believer's life. With both of them combined we become God's powerhouse.

Prophetic intercession is also waiting on God. As we press into God, He will often show us what's going on behind the scenes. Often He reveals spiritual hindrances or gives us direction on how to pray and what to specifically focus on. 2 Peter 1:21 states: "Above all, you must understand, that no prophecy of scripture came about by the prophet's own interpretation. For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit."

The Holy Spirit carries us along. It's like a commander-in-chief who unfolds a military map specifically outlining a target to be hit by drawing lines on the document. The map reveals challenges as well as the potential of success. This is the same when we're in prophetic intercession. We're working side-by-side with our Commander-in-Chief for God's eternal purpose to be accomplished in the situations we're praying about. When God reveals His heart, He releases His compassion and love for the people through our prayers.

When I pray for a particular person I often feel what God is feeling toward them at that time. For instance, I would experience His compassion for that person or even feel what that person is going through emotionally. God sometimes lets us experience these things in our own bodies and hearts. If He does that, it is to enable us to emphasize and get serious with our intercession. Other times God will expose certain demonic strongholds. This can be compared with a heat-seeking missile that's sure to hit its target.

Prophetic intercession isn't simply praying. It is a divine connection, a revelation, an agreement between man and God based on His word or revelations received from the Holy Spirit, and then the manifestation of the answers.

Hebrews 10: 19-22 states: "Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, His body, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near to God, with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water."

Further, Hebrews 12:22-24 tells us that when we are approaching God we "have come to Mount Zion, to the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of the living God. You have come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly, to the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God, the judge of all men, to the spirits of righteous men made perfect, to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel."

Try to envision that! When we connect with our Heavenly Father through prayer, we are literally before God, surrounded by His Kingdom and everything in it. We are entering the Most Holy Place, a place that can't be entered except through the blood of Jesus Christ who sacrificed His life for us so we can have the privilege to come before our God with boldness and confidence that he hears us and welcome us.

Praying is not a chore. Praying is fun, especially when we labor side-by-side with our heavenly Father.