10. Intecessory Prayer
"… far be it from me that I should sin against the LORD by failing to pray for you" (1 Samuel 12:23).
In Part Three of this book we looked at how we can and should pray for our needs – we have Christ's encouragement to do so. But praying for our own concerns is only part of the overall pattern of prayer we find in the words of Jesus and in the Bible as a whole. In addition to learning to pray for ourselves, we must also learn to effectively pray for the needs of others.
"Intercessory" prayer is the name often given to this kind of prayer made on behalf of others. While we offer "petitions" for ourselves, we make "intercession" for other individuals or groups of people. Intercession is asking for God's intervention or help for people who cannot themselves pray, perhaps because of illness or some other reason; those who clearly need help because of their circumstances; or those who have asked for the prayers of fellow believers on their behalf regarding some problem.
The Bible gives many examples of this kind of prayer that tell us for whom intercessory prayers were offered and show us the great range of situations in which such prayers were made. In the Old Testament In the Old Testament we see intercessory prayer being made by many of the leading servants of God, including Abraham (Genesis 18:23-33), Moses (Exodus 32:9-14), Samuel (1 Samuel 12:19-23), David (Psalm 25:22), Elijah (1 Kings 18:36-37), Daniel (Daniel 9:419), and others. Sometimes these prayers were offered for individuals, for groups of people, places, communities, cities or whole nations. A wonderful example is found in Daniel 9 which records the prophet
Daniel's intercessory prayer on behalf of the Jewish people carried captive to Babylon and for the renewal of the destroyed temple of God. If we study this prayer, we see that it utilizes many of the points found in the outline prayer given by Jesus – the Lord's Prayer.
Daniel begins his prayer with praise, saying: "…Lord, the great and awesome God, who keeps his covenant of love with those who love him and keep his commandments…" (Daniel 9:4). He continues by asking for the forgiveness of his own and his people's sins: "we have sinned and done wrong. We have been wicked and have rebelled; we have turned away from your commands and laws …" (Daniel 9:5-6). He prays for the honoring of God's name (Daniel 9:15, 19). He also asks for the help needed by the people, and for their temple in Jerusalem (Daniel 9:16-17).
Most of the other intercessory prayers of the Old Testament also include a number of these same points and remind us again that requests for others should be offered, just like requests for ourselves, with praise and acknowledgement of God's power as well as pleas for his mercy and forgiveness, where appropriate.
In the New Testament The accounts of the life of Jesus are full of examples of intercessory prayer. Not only do we find people praying to Jesus on behalf of others (Luke 7:1-10, etc.), but we also see that intercession is a central part of the character and role of Christ himself. After the resurrection, Jesus is pictured in the New Testament as the Son of God who is the ultimate intercessor, through whom every Christian's prayers are offered to God. We see this in the words of the apostle Paul to Timothy when he wrote "For there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus" (1 Timothy 2:5).
But Christ does not only act as the one who enables our prayers to go to God, he also plays a direct role in interceding for us personally. Paul tells us: "…Christ Jesus who died – more than that, who was raised to life – is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us" (Romans 8:34). The Book of Hebrews shows both aspects of Christ's intercession in saying that Jesus "… is able to save completely those who come to God through him, because he always lives to intercede for them" (Hebrews 7:25).
During his ministry Jesus urged his followers to intercede for others – as we have seen in the Lord's Prayer where the petitions are in the plural and we are instructed to pray for "our" needs rather than just "my" needs. We must never forget that throughout that guide to prayer we are shown that we should pray for the needs of others as well as for our own.
Asking in Acts If we continue in the New Testament and look at the Book of Acts, we find something very interesting. The vast majority of the prayers recorded in Acts that were made by members of the early Church were "intercessory" prayers offered for others. The Book of Acts continually speaks of prayer in the early Church, but if we set aside the scriptures that simply tell us that the early church members prayed and we look only at verses telling us what the early believers were praying, in most translations we find only two verses in Acts showing people praying for their own situations and twelve verses showing believers praying for the needs and welfare of others.
This means that of the recorded prayers in Acts, some 83% are prayers on behalf of others rather than prayers for the individual who was offering the prayer. If we have not thought about this topic before, that statistic may seem unexpected. Perhaps we would expect the ratio to be about 50/50 – prayer for others just as much as for ourselves. But the approximately 83% prayer for others we find in Acts is a powerful statement of another way of looking at prayer – as an opportunity not just to ask God for his help and favor, but even more as an opportunity to serve and help others. And the Book of Acts is not alone in taking this view.
Paul and Prayer In the writings of the apostle Paul, we find this principle confirmed. Paul speaks of prayer some fifty times in his epistles. Apart from non-specific examples, when we look at the nature of the prayers Paul mentions we find only three instances of praying for one's own needs. Seven times Paul speaks of praying generally; but in some forty of the fifty instances (80%) where he mentions specific things being prayed about, we find him speaking of praying for others or urging people to do likewise. For example, Paul tells us that he prayed constantly for the spiritual needs of other believers:
God, whom I serve in my spirit in preaching the gospel of his Son, is my witness how constantly I remember you in my prayers at all times… (Romans 1:9-10). And he urged others to continually do the same:
And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the saints (Ephesians 6:18). So the pattern we found in Acts where we are told what people were praying for is repeated in the epistles of Paul where he so frequently tells what we should be praying for. These facts should speak to us. It is not a matter of attempting to establish Christian practice through statistics. It is simply acknowledging that in the prayers recorded and commanded in the New Testament Church, the great majority – somewhere around 80% – are prayers for others. Applying the Principle That's why we can think of this fact as the 80% principle of what we ask for in prayer. It's an estimated number with no claim to being correct to the third decimal place, but it's a rounded number with a clear message. This principle does not mean we should not pray for our own needs – and in some circumstances, of course, our own needs may be urgent and take full precedence in our thoughts. But the 80% principle opens a window for us to see how the early Church saw prayer, how Paul encouraged us to pray; and it gives added meaning to Jesus' words that we pray for "us" in the plural.
We certainly don't need to feel constrained to structure our prayers to a certain percentage in a certain way, but if we are growing more and more like the One to whom we are praying, the chances are that our prayers will become increasingly full of the needs of others and reflect our concern for them. If our prayers are growing in that direction and we begin to see the needs of others as usually greater than our own needs, we can trust that God will be pleased with our prayers – perhaps 100% pleased.