The Building Blocks of Intercession

In this lesson, I'd like to envision a specific setting. Step with me into a time when you gathered around a campfire at a Christian camp. Hints of toasted marshmallows waft through the air. As discussion of the day's events die down, and the fire dims, your favorite camp counselor suggests that you go round the circle, and share some special things you've learned about God.

Here, I'd like to share some recent things God has shown me. Since we've been using "the building blocks of intercession" as a metaphor, this teaching could be called part of the "mortar" that holds it all together. We'll discuss two ingredients of that "mortar."

1. The relationship between faith and prayer.
2. The secret of "mustard-seed" faith.

Ingredient #1 - Relationship Between Faith And Prayer

Let us look at the relationship between faith and prayer.

In a previous series, we discussed a teaching that says, "if you have any doubt in your heart over a prayer request, God won't answer it." We discovered that doubts in our heads and doubts in our hearts were two different things. When the Jerusalem church prayed for Peter's freedom in Acts 12, the same peoples' doubt was evident when Peter showed up at the prayer meeting, free as a bird. The lesson: God will answer our prayers if we don't allow the doubt in our heads to drown the faith in our hearts.

Let us examine a related-reason God answered the Jerusalem church's prayers. How could people so filled with doubt receive an answer to prayer? Sometimes, need becomes stronger than doubt; and we pray despite ourselves. That's why God allows His children to face so many struggles. He uses trouble to drive doubt out of our hearts and drive us to our knees in prayer.

To God, our faith is more important than our comfort. To the Lord, faith is not an intellectual ascent to doctrinal notions. Instead, faith is a heart-felt desperation that fails to find any solution except in prayer. This touches on what James meant when he wrote: "Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing" (James 1:2-4).

I mentioned this point to help us understand God's ways. God uses the very things we avoid--facing insurmountable odds--in order to fulfill our God-given destinies. When our strength fails us, as the Lord designed the circumstances to bring about our sense of powerlessness, we have nowhere else to turn but pray. In that furnace, our heart cries drown out flesh-born doubts, and the river of faith rises inside us.

Ingredient #2 - Mustard-Seed Faith

Now, let us examine the secret of, "mustard-seed," faith.

If you haven't guessed by now, I don't believe you need to hype up your faith to get God to answer your prayers. Yet, despite that belief, I have felt like my faith didn't measure up to, "mountain-moving," faith Jesus spoke so much about.

Recently, I read a thought out of Andrew Murray's classic book on prayer, "With Christ in the School of Prayer," that confronted my thinking. It said: "Receiving or accepting an answer to prayer is just like receiving or accepting Christ" (Whitaker House, p. 85).

For days, that single sentence hung in my mind; I didn't forget it like some teachings I read or hear over the week. Andrew Murray made the statement in connection to the, "mountain-moving," verses that, as a person who prays, always bothered me. I'd like to repeat the verses here for our discussion:

"And He said to them, "Because of the littleness of your faith; for truly I say to you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you" (Matthew 17:20).

"And Jesus answered saying to them, 'Have faith in God. Truly I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, 'Be taken up and cast into the sea,' and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says is going to happen, it will be granted him. Therefore I say to you, all things for which you pray and ask, believe that you have received them, and they will be granted you'" (Mark 11:22-24).

"The apostles said to the Lord, 'Increase our faith!' And the Lord said, 'If you had faith like a mustard seed, you would say to this mulberry tree, 'Be uprooted and be planted in the sea'; and it would obey you'" (Luke 11:5-6).

These verses bother me, because Jesus said it only took faith the size of a mustard seed to move mountains. If that were so, and since it's in the Bible; then why was it so difficult for me to get such a tiny bit of faith? I felt I didn't have that level of faith, since mountains weren't diving into the oceans when I prayed.

That frustrated me.

I knew that we needed some amount of faith for God to answer our requests (Hebrews 11:1-2; 6). But I don't know how precisely much faith was needed. And like many, I felt that however much that may be, it's probably a little more than what I had.

If you feel your faith is not as strong as it ought to be, you will tend to leave the serious praying up to the people whose faith you believe is sufficient to gain an answer. We cannot continue to do something that we do not believe makes any real difference.

Then, there was Andrew Murray's statement. God didn't put two-and-two together for me all at once. The still small voice of the Lord hit me days later, as I was walking from the office where I worked, to the commuter train station. I tried to repeat the impression I felt to myself several times, until I could get to a place where I could write it down. Here's roughly how it went:

"It's not a question of whether you have enough faith. It's accepting the fact that you already have enough faith. When did you have enough faith to receive Christ? Why is it so impossible to have faith as a mustard seed? You already have it. You cannot achieve levels of faith; God leads us to new levels. It's not a matter of achieving, but accepting."

In other words, it takes no more faith to receive an answer to prayer than it did to receive Christ. It takes the same amount of faith to receive the answer to a promise, as it took to receive the promised Savior. That's mustard seed faith, because the seed is the starting place. God leads us into greater measures of faith as we mature. God started Abraham with the promise of a son when he was too old to have one. The next level of faith for Abraham was; to believe that if he sacrificed Isaac like God asked him to, God would resurrect the boy. That's why Paul said, "For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, 'BUT THE RIGHTEOUS man SHALL LIVE BY FAITH'" (Romans 1:17).

Let me draw an analogy from the classic movie "The Wizard of Oz." I am not saying that we should turn to witches or wizards or any form of the occult. But we need to have the same type of revelation that Dorothy did when she asked Glenda, the good witch of the North to help her get back to Kansas. Glenda replied, "you've had the means to go back to Kansas the whole time you've been here."

Likewise in the arena of faith, we thought we've had to have something we didn't have, and we got frustrated when we couldn't obtain it. But in actuality, we had the necessary faith the whole time.

Let's draw some inferences from this thought. I don't know about you, but I received Christ at the age of eight. I know it was a real decision, because immediately afterwards, I tried to win a dear friend to Christ, for fear that he would end up in an eternal hell. How much faith did I have as a child of eight? I don't know, because I didn't have a theology of the salvation experience down. I didn't have a working grasp of the Trinity (who does?). I didn't even know what the word, "faith," meant, except some old men called their wives, "Faith."

When I was a baby, and began to walk, I didn't know much. When I was a spiritual babe, and began to walk with Christ, I didn't know much either. All I know was, when an evangelist offered me the promise of eternal life through Christ, or burning hell without Him, the choice was easy. I received the promise of Christ at the level that I was. Since then, God has taken me to new levels. But, I had to start when I could barely take my first spiritual steps..

"For we know in part and we prophesy in part; but when the perfect comes, the partial will be done away. When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I will know fully just as I also have been fully known" (1 Corinthians 13:9-12).

Jesus called such faith, mustard seed faith, not just because of the tall plant that grew from the seed. He used the analogy, because a mustard seed was the smallest object the Jewish mind could conceive. Back then, anything tinier than the human eye could see--such as a mustard seed--was invisible; people didn't have magnifying glasses.

So, God has already given each of us the level of faith sufficient to pray and receive. Paul said as much in Romans: "For through the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think; but to think so as to have sound judgment, as God has allotted to each a measure of faith." (Romans 12:3).

This truth will take time to seep into our prayer life. Over time, the Lord will raise the bar on what He wants us to pray for: He always gives us sufficient faith to pray.

In our next module, we'll discuss how to continue in faith when a truly mountain-size pray request finds itself on your prayer list.