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Intercession from The Prayer Course by Pete Grieg

The hinge of human history is the bended knee. When God’s people intercede, God intervenes.

Intercession is about asking God for needs of other people. In fact, the definition of intercession is intervening or mediating between two parties as equal friend of both.

Adam & Eve said “Not your will but my will” then they took of the fruit that God had forbade them eat. When we pray “Not my will but yours”, we release His blessing in our lives.

To intercede for others, we can take these four practical steps:

1. Get Informed: Engage with the facts—understand the needs of a neighbor. Ask a friend how you can pray for them.
2. Get Inspired: Engage God’s Word. What is God saying to you about this particular person or situation?
3. Get Indignant: Allow the things that break God’s heart to break your own heart too.
4. Get In Synch: Make sure you’re in synch with other Christians. Engage the saints. This is a more powerful way to pray with others. As Jesus said, “Where two or more are gathered, there I am in their midst.”

In considering prayers for others, Pete Greig notes, “Our free wills are powerful; they can release or restrict the purposes of God.”

 

The Prayer that Turns the World Upside Down by Dr. R. Albert Mohler, Jr.

A Radical & Revolutionary Prayer

The Lord’s Prayer is doctrinally robust, theologically deep, and anything but serene. The Lord’s Prayer is anything but tame. Regrettably, our familiarity often blinds us from seeing just how radical, even subversive, this prayer is. It is for those who hold firmly that Jesus Christ has inaugurated a kingdom, has risen from the dead, reigns at the right hand of God, and is coming again to judge the living and the dead. The Lord’s Prayer is for revolutionaries, for men and women who want to see the kingdoms of this world give way to the kingdom of our Lord.

 

What is the Kingdom of God?

In the nineteenth century, classic dispensationalism taught that the kingdom was a purely future reality, inaugurated at the millennial reign of Christ.

Among these attempts at explaining the kingdom of God, Augustine’s City of God has proven the most helpful and the most in line with the teachings of Scripture.

Augustine employed the metaphor of a city, a polis, to describe the kingdom of God and the kingdoms of this world. Augustine suggested that the Christian must understand that there are two cities in the world. The first city is the City of God. This city is God’s not merely because he resides there but because his character and authority define it. There, God’s sovereign authority is unmitigated and unconditional. Thus in the City of God, everything is exactly as God would have it to be. The longing of every Christian is to live in that city.

Unlike the City of God, the City of Man is characterized by selfishness, ungodliness, conflict, and strife. The city of Man is temporary—both conditioned and created. Christians are citizens of a kingdom that will one day arrive in consummate glory. Our hope is not that the governments of this world will transform into the kingdom of God, but that the kingdom of God will come from heaven to earth in power and glory.

In the twentieth century a number of faithful evangelical scholars such as George Eldon Ladd reinvigorated our understanding of the kingdom. As Ladd and others pointed out, the kingdom of God is essentially the end-of-history, or eschatological, vision of the Old Testament.

The kingdom arrived with the coming of Christ, who urged his hearers to repent because the “kingdom of God is at hand.” Christians are now part of that kingdom.

Graeme Goldsworthy has defined the kingdom of God as “God’s people in God’s place under God’s rule and blessing.” Each of these features is present in the earliest manifestation of God’s kingdom in the garden of Eden. God’s people, Adam and Eve, live in God’s place, the garden of Eden, under God’s rule and blessing. The fall completely disrupts the kingdom.

 

The Coming Kingdom

According to Scripture, how does the kingdom of God come from heaven to earth?

Jesus’ kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36). Political power and cultural influence are not unimportant, but they can never change the hearts of sinners nor provide the forgiveness of sins.

The Bible teaches that God’s kingdom only comes as God’s people preach God’s Word, which, coupled with God’s Spirit, produces life and obedience.

 

The Reign and Rule of God: Your Will Be Done

Jesus then tells them to pray, “Your will be done.”

The “will of God” can be used in two different ways. First, Scripture can speak of God’s will of decree, or what we would call God’s sovereign will. It refers to his absolute, sovereign rule over all things. The only reason anything exists is because God has willed it to exist.

Second, Scripture uses the phrase “will of God” to refer to God’s commandments. Theologians also refer to this use of the “will of God” as God’s revealed will. The revealed will of God speaks to what God expects of his human creatures.

He cannot be speaking of God’s sovereign will because God’s will is already done in heaven as it is on earth. As the Psalmist wrote, “Whatever the Lord pleases, he does, in heaven and here on earth, in the seas and all deeps” (Psalm 135:6). Jesus is clearly referring to God’s revealed will. He is asking the Father to reshape the hearts of every single person that God is obeyed and glorified by men on earth as the angels obey and glorify God in heaven.

In the petition, “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” Jesus is further explaining what it looks like for God’s kingdom to come from heaven to earth.

Praying “your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” also reorients our own sense of personal autonomy and sense of control over our own lives and situations. This petition causes us to forfeit all our personal claims of lordship and sovereignty over our lives. This petition expresses a humble resignation to and desire for the reign and rule of God.

As J.I. Packer noted, “Here more clearly than anywhere the purpose of prayer becomes plain: not to make God do my will (which is practicing magic), but to bring my will into line with his (which is what it means to practice true religion).”

 

What Are We Really Asking?

By praying “your kingdom come,” Jesus teaches us that we are ultimately meant to value God’s agenda, not our own. By making God’s kingdom paramount in our hearts, we are setting aside our own paltry attempts at personal glory to pursue the glory of King Jesus.

Christians too often fall prey to the temptation—as old as the Roman emperor Constantine—that we can bring about the kingdom of God by political force or some other sociological means. But God’s kingdom is not of this world. As Jesus teaches us in this prayer, we are dependent on God and God alone to bring the kingdom to every heart and every corner of the earth. We cannot manufacture God’s kingdom by our own efforts.

This is indeed a radical prayer. We must not take this petition lightly.

 

A Layman Looks at the Lord’s Prayer by W. Phillip Keller

The phrases “the Kingdom of God,” or, “the Kingdom of heaven” were frequently uppermost in the thoughts and teachings of Jesus. He makes it a very pointed petition to God, His Father: “Thy Kingdom come!”

Even in the time of Jesus, His most ardent followers had real difficulty in comprehending the Kingdom of God.

At one point Jesus went to the trouble to explain clearly that the Kingdom of God was more than an institution of physical composition but was also a structure that could not be apprehended with one’s ordinary finite faculties.

As Luke 17:20-21 puts it, “Being asked by the Pharisees when the Kingdom of God was coming. He answered, ‘The Kingdom of God does not so come that you can stealthily watch for it. Nor will they say, ‘See here!’ or ‘See there!’—for the Kingdom of God is within you!”

In some measure, it is true to say that the Kingdom of God, even to this day, baffles people.

When Jesus uttered this simple request to His Father, “Thy kingdom come,” He was not only thinking of the Messianic kingdom but also implied that He was inviting Him to establish His Kingship in the hearts and lives of men. In fact, when any human being utters this prayer, if it is done in sincerity, it conveys the request to have divine sovereignty, God’s government, set up in a human life.

We are asking God’s Kingship to become paramount, His sovereignty to become supreme in our personal, private lives as well as in the ages to come.

What our Lord is saying in this prayer is, “You, oh God, our Father, who art Ruler of heaven and earth, whose authority is utterly paramount throughout the universe, come and establish Your sovereignty as well in the hearts of us men on earth, and eventually upon the earth itself.”

When I pray, “Thy kingdom come,” I am willing to relinquish the rule of my own life, to give up governing my own affairs, to abstain from making my own decisions in order to allow God, by His indwelling Spirit, to decide for me what I shall do.

Paul emphasized this concept in 1 Corinthians 3:16:

The basic difference between a defeated, dismal Christian and a victorious vibrant Christian lies in whether or not God, by His Spirit, controls the life. If He has there taken up sovereignty as well as residence in the soul, establishing a bit of the Kingdom of God in this human heart, that person will know the presence of God, which will transform his entire being.

When there steals over our spirits an acute awareness that God does in fact choose to reside within us, it is not nearly so difficult to vacate the throne of our own lives in His favor. We find it is a joy to pay deference to Him. As with David, we can say:

 

If indeed the Kingdom of God is within me, then I shall make it my business to see that nothing enters there to harm or offend my Sovereign, the Spirit of the living God.

What I eat, what I drink will be checked with care. I shall not be a glutton or a drunkard. I will not permit narcotics, drugs, simulants, sedatives, or other harmful materials to enter my body unnecessarily and thus pollute the temple of the Most High.

The same applies to my mind and emotions. I shall carefully monitor the material I read and the television shows I watch, lest my soul be distorted by the impressions received through my eyes.

In the area of my innermost mind, will, and spirit, I shall see to it that no subversive ideas, suggestions, attitudes or human philosophies contrary to Christ’s teachings and commands will infiltrate my life. The Kingdom of God is within me.

Paul tells us very plainly in his letter to the church at Rome, “For the kingdom of God is not meat and drink; but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost” (Romans 14:17).

The righteousness referred to here is that state of right living which embraces attitudes, conduct, and relationships with God, others, and myself.

In the same way, the peace which we enjoy in God’s Kingdom surpasses any sort of mere outward tranquility. It is that deep, delightful serenity of soul characteristic of God’s presence. It is based upon being at peace with God, at peace with others, and at peace with ourselves.

Finally, the joy which is a hallmark of God’s Kingdom is not a state of happiness dependent on changing circumstances or on what is happening around us. It is, rather, a serene, stable spirit known only to those who enjoy the presence of God’s person within their lives.

 

The Lord and His Prayer by N.T. Wright

What are we praying for when we pray for God’s Kingdom to come?

The second main petition in the Lord’s Prayer—“Thy Kingdom Come”—rules out any idea that the Kingdom of God is a purely heavenly (that is, “otherworldly”) reality.

Jesus spoke and acted as if evil’s long reign would finally be defeated through his own work. Isaiah’s Kingdom-message promised defeat for the evil regime, which had enslaved God’s people.

Isaiah’s prophecy (Isaiah 40-55) sets out the promise of the Kingship of God; the Servant-songs, within it, set out a job description for how the promise is to be realized. Jesus volunteered for the job. This, he believed, was how evil would be defeated.

“Thy Kingdom Come”—this prayer, astonishingly, was answered. They thought it hadn’t been; but Easter proved them wrong. Jesus’ first followers, to their own great surprise, quickly came to believe that God’s kingdom had come, and his will had been done—in Palestine, in Jerusalem, on Calvary, and in the Easter Garden. Heaven and earth had finally dovetailed together. The prophecies had been fulfilled, though not at all int eh way they had expected.

And of course they faced the question: if the Kingdom is here, why is there still injustice? Why is there still hunger? Why is there still guilt? Why is there still evil?

Think of it like this. Jesus is the medical genius who discovered penicillin; we are doctors, ourselves being cured by the medicine, now applying it to those who need it. Jesus is the musical genius who wrote the greatest oratorio of all time; we are the musicians, captivated by his composition ourselves, who now perform it before a world full of muzak and cacophony. The Kingdom did indeed come with Jesus; but it will fully come when the world is healed, when the whole creation finally joins in the song. But it must be Jesus’ medicine; it must be Jesus’ music. And the only way to be sure of that is to pray his prayer.

What then might it mean to pray this Kingdom-prayer today?

We look immediately out upon the whole world that he made, and we see it as he sees it. Thy Kingdom Come: to pray this means seeing the world in binocular vision. See it with the love of the creator for his spectacularly beautiful creation; and see it with the deep grief of the creator for the battered and battle-scarred state in which the world now finds itself. Put those two together and bring the binocular picture into focus: the love and the grief join into the Jesus-shape, the kingdom-shape, and the shape of the cross—never was Love, dear King, never was Grief like thine!

We are praying, as Jesus was praying and acting, for the redemption of the world; for the radical defeat and uprooting of evil; and for heaven and earth to be married at last, for God to be all in all.

I used to think of this clause simply as a prayer of resignation. “Thy will be done”, with a shrug of the shoulders: what I want doesn’t matter too much; if God really wants to do something I suppose I can put up with it. No, this is the risky, crazy prayer of submission and commission, or, if you like, the prayer of subversion and conversion. It is the way we sign on, in our turn, for the work of the kingdom. It is the way we take the medicine ourselves, so that we may be strong enough to administer it to others. It is the way we retune our instruments, to play God’s oratorio for the world to sing.

If it was part of Jesus’ task to teach his followers to pray in this way, it is in a sense our task to teach the world to pray in this way. How might we get the opportunity? In Luke’s gospel, Jesus waited until his followers asked him for a prayer; and the reason they asked was because they saw what he was doing. Something tells me there’s a lesson there.