We are not stronger than them. Sometimes we forget that, as if prayer is of no use and we have to do something directly. But prayer is more powerful than any activity in which we can engage. It is the greatest power the church has.
You remember Queen Mary of Scotland once said that she was not afraid of the army of Scotland, but she was afraid of the prayers of John Knox. When John Knox was on his knees, Queen Mary trembled. How powerful is prayer!
This is a power that we fail to exercise. We forget to exercise it, and we do not exercise it. But we are exhorted to use that power. Only in this manner will we be able to maintain the balance of being in the world and yet not of the world.
Only in prayer are we able to control the situation and environment around us. We do not touch them directly. We go through the throne and let the throne touch it. I believe it is far better.
Under this principle, that is the way we should pray. Number one, we really should pray for all men, for those in authority. This is the way that we are able to restrain evil before its time, and able to stand for the will of God to be accomplished in this world, whether nationally, internationally, or even locally.
I do believe that the Lord wants us to use that power, and to use it in the right way. We are not directly involved with the world system because we are not of the world. Yet God has put us here with a purpose, and the way to fulfil that purpose is basically the ministry of prayer.
Since what has happened just recently, probably the Lord is reminding us that we really need to pray for those in authority. We need to pray that they will be used by God to do God’s will and to provide us with a right environment, that we may continue to live and grow in life and godliness.
In a sense, we are very thankful to the Lord that we are still free to worship and free to meet. But, as a matter of fact, this country, so far as a proper environment is concerned, is not really a good environment. Even though we are still free outwardly, our environment is not conducive. It is very difficult to live a godly life.
We really need to pray that the Lord will control the government and all the decisions of the government, that evil will be restrained, and that God will continue to give us an opportunity to live in a way that will please Him, and also the opportunity to bring the gospel to all men. I think we have a responsibility to do that, and we should.
That is why we feel that, probably tonight, before we pray, we should review this passage and consider our power, as Paul said, powerful before God, in our relationship with this world.
Will you please turn to Luke 18. Luke 18, verse 1 through verse 8.
And He spake a parable unto them to the end that they ought always to pray, and not to faint;
saying, There was in a city a judge, who feared not God, and regarded not man:
and there was a widow in that city; and she came oft unto him, saying, Avenge me of mine adversary.
And he would not for a while: but afterward he said within himself, Though I fear not God, nor regard man;
yet because this widow troubleth me, I will avenge her, lest she wear me out by her continual coming.
And the Lord said, Hear what the unrighteous judge saith.
And shall not God avenge His elect, that cry to Him day and night, and yet He is long-suffering over them?
I say unto you, that He will avenge them speedily.
Nevertheless when the Son of man cometh, shall He find faith on the earth?
We find here that the lesson our Lord tries to teach His disciples is that we should always pray and not faint—or, to put it another way, we should always pray and not give up.
Oftentimes, we pray, but we do not continue to pray. We pray, but we give up very quickly.
I think there are several reasons. One reason is that we pray without burden. If we pray without burden, we pray casually, and we forget quickly.
Number two, we may have a concept that if we pray more than once, it shows a lack of faith. But here you find that the contrary is the truth.
The Lord said, “When He shall come, shall He indeed find faith on the earth?” The faith here is this widow’s persistent and continual prayer. She would not give up. She prayed, asked, and kept on asking until she got the answer.
Now, it is true that if you pray once and get the answer, you do not need to pray a second time. If you pray more, you may lose your faith. That is true. But, on the other hand, if you pray and have not received the answer yet, you should continue in prayer, and that is a sign of faith—in other words, believing that the Lord will eventually answer you.
I think this is very important, not only in our private prayer, but also when we come together to pray. This is an important principle.
When the church gathers to pray, she takes up burdens from the Lord. Some burdens may be discharged in one session, but other burdens may continue, perhaps for years. For this reason, we have to continue to pray.
You cannot pray more than once for anything with which you are not burdened. If you have no burden, the utmost you can do is just pray once. But if you are really burdened, praying more than once is not a monotonous routine thing, because it is a real exercise.
I think one reason why we sometimes find a lack of result in prayer, if I may put it that way, is because we do not always pray. We give up too quickly.
If you read the Word, you will find, for instance, Abraham. When he prayed for the city of Sodom, he did not pray once. How many times did he pray? He prayed and prayed, and prayed and prayed. He interceded six times. He did not give up.
You remember our Lord in the garden of Gethsemane. He prayed three times, and there He got the answer. The same thing you find with Paul. He prayed for the thorn in his flesh, and he prayed three times until he got the answer.
So, I think it is important for us to know that when we gather together to pray, there are things for which we have to pray always and not give up. We have to continue until we get the answer.
I like those words in Isaiah 62. In Isaiah 62, you find in verses 6 and 7:
I have set watchmen upon thy walls, O Jerusalem;
they shall never hold their peace day nor night:
ye that are the Lord’s remembrancers, take ye no rest,
and give Him no rest, till He establish,
and till He make Jerusalem a praise in the earth.
In the beginning of this chapter it says:
For Zion’s sake will I not hold My peace,
and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest,
until her righteousness go forth as brightness,
and her salvation as a lamp that burneth.
In other words, here you find God revealing His mind, showing us what He wants and what He wants to do. Then, in verse 6, for this reason He sets watchmen upon the wall.
When we come together to pray, we are as watchmen set upon the walls of Jerusalem. As watchmen, He expects us not to hold our peace day and night, not to be silent, but to give Him no rest—to bother Him, if you will—until He makes Jerusalem a city of praise, because that is what He wants.
This is what the church ought to do. The Lord has a mind, a will, a purpose, and a work that He wants to do, and He sets us as watchmen upon the wall. It is important for us to keep no silence and give Him no rest.
That is the way God works, and that is the reason why we come together to pray.
In Luke 18, you find a widow. Of course, we know that this widow is a type of the church. So far as the church in the world is concerned, the church is like a widow because our Lord is absent today, and we are left here as a widow—in other words, helpless and oppressed by our enemy.
The adversary here is Satan, the adversary of God and of man. We are in this world harassed, oppressed, attacked, assaulted, and tempted by the enemy. The enemy is trying to frustrate us, trying to do everything to keep us from fulfilling God’s purpose.
We are being oppressed, and we have only one recourse: we have to go to our Judge. He is a Judge.
The Lord used this unjust judge to bring out the righteous Judge, our God. It is a contrast. He uses a contrast to bring out all the more what our God, our Father, will do for us.
This judge has no respect for man and does not fear God. He refused to avenge the widow. But the widow would not give up. She came and came and came, annoying him until he was so harassed that he said, “Well, I will do it so she will not bother me anymore.”
Now the Lord said, “How much more shall your Father, our God, avenge His elect?” It is a contrast, but it brings out the force of it. The lesson is that we have to keep on praying and not give up. That is faith, and with this faith we will get the answer.
I hope that we will not feel restless when the same things are mentioned in prayer. Now, some things you may pray about and the burden is gone; you do not need to go back again. That is true. But there are other things that the church has to keep on praying about and not give up until the Lord answers. May the Lord help us.
Isaiah 59:16.
And He saw that there was no man,
and wondered that there was no intercessor:
therefore His own arm brought salvation unto Him;
and His righteousness, it upheld Him.
And Ezekiel 22:30.
And I sought for a man among them,
that should build up the wall, and stand in the gap before Me for the land,
that I should not destroy it;
but I found none.
In Isaiah, we find that the Lord is going to do something for His people. He is going to save them, deliver them, and bless them. But before He does it, He looks for a man—an intercessor.
His arm is not short that He cannot save, but He is waiting for someone with intercessory prayer to release His arm.
Then, in Ezekiel, you find that the Lord is going to destroy the land. But that is not His heart’s desire. He has to do it because there are certain conditions that require His judgment. Yet He is very reluctant to do that.
Again, you find that He is looking for someone who will make up the fence and stand in the breach. If He can find someone, He will spare the land. But unfortunately, there is no one.
In these two cases, you can see that whether the Lord is to save or to destroy, He is looking for an intercessor.
An intercessor is not one who twists God’s arm to make Him do what He does not want to do. An intercessor is one who releases the arm of God. An intercessor is not one who prays against God’s heart; an intercessor opens God’s heart to His people.
An intercessor is a person who identifies himself with God and, at the same time, identifies himself with God’s people.
Identification is the first qualification of an intercessor. If we cannot identify ourselves with God, we cannot intercede. If we cannot identify ourselves with God’s people, again we cannot be intercessors.
You find that, in spirit, all the intercessors in Scripture identify both with God and with men. On the one hand, you have to stand with God, and yet, on the other hand, you stand with men.
An intercessor is not merely a mediator, but he does identify with those for whom he intercedes. Intercessory prayer is making up the fence and also standing in the breach.
Through intercessory prayer, repentance and a broken and contrite spirit are produced. This is making up the fence and standing in the breach.
There is one case that is very typical. When you read the book of Nehemiah, you find that the walls of Jerusalem were broken down, full of breaches and full of gaps. There was no separation and no protection, and the people of God suffered affliction.
The task of Nehemiah was to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. Especially when you read Nehemiah 3, you find that it was not a job for one person. God used Nehemiah, but he had to arouse the remnant who were in the promised land to work together.
Each rebuilt a section of the wall. In other words, each stood in a breach. By working together, the walls were joined, and finally the separation was complete and the protection was established.
As we come together to pray, brothers and sisters, I do feel that we do not just come to attend a prayer meeting. We come to work. Intercessory prayer is work.
It is the hardest work of all kinds of work. It is the time when we come together as one—not just one man, but many as one—and we try to stand in whatever breach we find and try to make up the fence.
We sympathize with God, with what His will may be and where His heart lies. Sometimes God has to do something, but that is not what He wants to do. We have to stand with God’s heart instead of with God’s judgment, in a sense.
At other times, God wants to do something, but He is bound. We need to stand with God to release His arm, to release His hand. As we come together, that is what we intend to do. We come together as intercessors.
We want to identify ourselves with God—with His heart and with His will.
Of course, we know that His heart and His arm are primarily related to His people. They do touch upon the whole world, as you find in Isaiah, but primarily and basically, it is His people, because God’s heart is with His people. He wants to bless; He does not want to judge.
This is where we have to stand. We stand together, identifying ourselves with God’s heart and with His arm in relation to His people. At the same time, we are His people, so we identify ourselves with God’s people.
We confess whatever sins there are, acknowledging that there are many breaches and many gaps. We do not try to point fingers at anybody else, but identify ourselves with them, just as you find Daniel. Though personally he was not involved in the same sin, in spirit he identified himself with the children of Israel. That is intercession.
The first qualification of intercessory prayer is identification. The second is agony.
Intercessory prayer is very costly. It is not merely that we touch upon something and whether God hears us or not really does not matter. We can pray for one thing, forget it right away, and just leave it. That is not intercessory prayer.
Intercessory prayer is agonizing. This is not something that you try to work out outwardly. Some people may take up a feeling that we need to agonize before God, so they groan a lot, and it almost becomes a habit. That is not the point.
The agony is not something outward. The agony is the agony of the heart. In other words, you identify yourself with God and His people to such an extent that you cannot help but feel deeply touched.
You sympathize with God, and you sympathize with God’s people. Because of that, there is deeply a burden within you, and that is agony.
You find that Paul, in Colossians, spoke of how he strove even for those whom he had never seen. Why? Because he identified himself with God concerning those Colossian believers, and he agonized and strove in prayer for them.
He prayed that God might deliver them from all the distractions and all the deceptions in which they were involved, and really bring them back to God’s purpose. This is the second qualification of an intercessor. If we do not know how to bear a burden to the extent of agonizing before God, then we are short of intercessory prayer.
Then, of course, thirdly, intercessory prayer is authority. Intercessory prayer is different from ordinary prayer because it is authoritative prayer.
After you have really entered into the burden of the Lord concerning His people and have come to know His mind and His will, then it is time that you exercise authority before God over whatever condition or situation it may be.
These are the three primary qualifications of intercessory prayer: identification, agony, and authority.
If this is the case, then our Wednesday night prayer time is a very serious time. In other words, we cannot just come and play. When we come, we really want to give ourselves to the Lord and to His people, to intercede for God’s people according to God’s will.
It is a tremendous thing. The scope of intercession is universal. It is not limited just to us locally. Of course, God has put us here, and that should be our burden, because the principle is always from Jerusalem to Judea, to Samaria, and to the uttermost part of the earth.
No doubt, we need to take up the burden for local issues, but we need to go beyond the local because God’s interest is universal. What the Lord is looking for is people who will stand in the breach, who will make up the fence, and who will intercede according to Him.
I remember when I was a boy, in a grade-school English reader, there was a story. I cannot remember the whole story, but I remember faintly a story about a little schoolboy.
One day after school he was going home. You know, in Holland, the land is beneath the level of the sea, so they have to build dikes all around to keep the sea away.
As that boy was returning home, he noticed that in the dike he passed by there was a hole, a small hole, and water began to seep through.
This boy knew the consequences. It may begin so little, but if it is not stopped, it may break the dike and flood the whole country. So this boy put his little fist into that hole to stop it.
I forgot the result. I forgot that because it was when I was in grade school. But it was a story that I could not forget—I mean, that part, standing in the gap.
I think, in a very vivid way, it represents what God expects us to be. God wants us to stand in the gap. Here is a gap, and you stand there to fill the gap so that the enemy is not able to come in like a flood. That is the intercessor. Intercessory prayer is doing that kind of work, and God is looking for people like that.
If you look at the world situation, the situation of the church in general, the local situation, the fellowship, or different individuals, you can see so many breaches, so many gaps, and so much ground through which the enemy can come in like a flood.
How much God is looking for intercessors! He said that He wondered that there was no intercessor. Now, God can never be surprised because He knows everything beforehand, but sometimes He does wonder. He wonders, “Why not? Why not?”
More and more, I feel that our time on Wednesday is such a tremendous time. I feel that we need to see it more seriously. We cannot just come and say a few prayers and that is it. God is expecting so much at such a time.
May the Lord help us to really be willing to give ourselves to the Lord and let Him make us intercessors. This is what I would like to share with you, brothers and sisters, tonight.