Both now and before the pandemic, I have spent most of my Friday nights with the youth in my church, providing a sweet time of transition from the hustle and bustle of the week into the Sabbath. On the rare occasion where this gets canceled, however, I like to drop in on the group that is so faithful that no holiday or pandemic seems to keep them from doing the vitally important business of intercessory prayer.
This prayer team is mostly made up of older members, and they take this business seriously. They systematically pray through lists of the sick, of those in the armed forces, of those in church leadership, of educators, of first responders, of those suffering financial difficulties, and more. They maintain 12-16 lists that each have quite a few names. The lists are routinely updated and followed up on. This may sound frighteningly labor-intensive, and it is. Praying for other people is hard work that demands just as much intentionality and strategy as going to war. In fact, a popular Christian movie, War Room, discusses prayer much in this way. Unlike actual battles, prayer costs nothing financially, but can be quite costly in terms of time and emotional investment. I would consider it well worth it, though, perhaps because I owe my very life to the intercessory prayers of other people. My grandmother is in the habit of praying for me every night, and I am fairly certain that this prayer sent an angel to keep my friends and me from being run over by a tram when we were on holiday in Germany during our year abroad. We had just finished an evening at the opera (you can get tickets for less than the cost of a movie in America if you know how), and we were cheerfully looking up at the opera house, unaware that we were standing in the tracks. A man yelled, in American English, “Get out of the way!” and we stepped forward just in time for the train to whoosh past us. We turned to thank him, and there was no sign of anyone in the immediate area. Prayer works, even when, like my grandmother, you don’t even know the specifics of what it needs to do. Praying for others demands even more patience, though, than praying for ourselves. When we pray for our own needs, we can adjust our choices as we pray to come into greater alignment with God’s will. When we pray for others, He still respects human choice and there can be many, many delays until the matter is accomplished. George Mueller, who famously built an enormous orphanage on no other business plan than the power of prayer, died with one person whose salvation he had prayed for remaining unconverted. Years after Mueller’s death, they finally made that choice. What matters here is persistence. While lists may feel mechanical, they are valuable in that they allow us to focus, remember, and follow up on needs. If you are just starting out, you are probably not ready for the voluminous lists of my church’s prayer team, but a good place to start is to pray regularly for the people closest to you. Pray for your household, your family, your closest friends, your co-workers--if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t like lists and writing things down, it could be a valuable exercise just to think through the people you interacted with during the day and pray for them before you go to bed. Some have even mastered the habit of praying for the people they see as they go about their day. I will never forget a weekend I once spent in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, which contains the poorest people in the city, including a sizable homeless population. After interacting with these people on the street and then seeing the contrast when interacting with the wealthiest in the financial district, I was overwhelmed by the diverse needs I had seen. I prayed for that city and its people, and was amazed by a sense of how much God cares for each soul that lives there. He seemed glad that I had chosen to care about these anonymous faces, and I felt His presence there in the most run-down, sketchy, mildly unsafe part of the city. When we pray for others, we learn to love them better. In learning to love them better, we get more in touch with the God who loves all. Prayer for others is not just a service we do for other people, but one of the most sacred acts of worship we can do towards God Himself. He who made us in His image longs for us to recognize that image in other people by taking a genuine interest in their well-being. Each time we pray for another person, we get just a little bit closer to God’s own heart and become a little bit more like Him.
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AuthorJillian Lutes is the youth pastor at West Covina Hills Seventh-day Adventist Church. Archives
May 2020
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