Laboring in Prayer: Part 2

Welcome to another Thursday UNFILTERED blog post, the only blog that believes the person who invented autocorrect should burn in hello.

In Part 1 of this series, I discussed why Paul sometimes calls prayer “labor” and “work.” If you missed it, you can read it here.

This article is the second and last in the series, and I’ll be addressing a related question: “If God is sovereign and knows all our needs and the needs of others before we ask (Matthew 6:8), why does intercession matter at all? Why bother with the labor that intercession demands? God already knows all needs and He’s all-powerful, so why petition and intercede?”

This is an insightful question. Here’s my answer to it.

Prayer is God’s power-sharing device. This takes us back to the Eternal Purpose. God created humans to rule the earth with Him as His vice-regents on the planet.

If you’re new to my work, check out this page for what the Eternal Purpose of God is all about.

It’s the heartbeat of all my work. It also happens to be the most important topic and major theme of all Scripture, yet ironically, it’s the least spoken about today. (Regrettably, I can count on one hand the people who have a public platform and speak on the Eternal Purpose today.)

Co-Laborers with God

Spiritual luminaries like John Wesley, Andrew Murray, and E.M. Bounds have made the statement that God does nothing apart from the believing prayers of His people (or words to that effect).

In response to the above question, laboring in prayer is not about informing God of something He doesn’t know, or persuading a reluctant God to act.

Rather, the work of intercession is joining God in bringing about His will. As Watchman Nee once put it, “Our prayers lay the track down on which God’s power can come. Like a mighty locomotive, His power is irresistible, but it cannot reach us without rails.”

God set up the world in such a way that He has made us His “co-laborers” (1 Corinthians 3:9; 2 Corinthians 6:1; Mark 16:20). Yes, we are co-laborers with Him. That co-working manifests itself in both prayer and action.

At this moment, the Almighty could snap His fingers and bring about His will in every dimension of the physical world if He so desired. But instead, He’s chosen to use the likes of us—His people, namely, the ekklesia—to carry out His will and overcome His enemy. (I’ve dealt with this concept in detail in books like Insurgence and Jesus Now.)

The “work” of intercessory prayer is the spiritual labor of holding another soul before God with sustained, self-forgetful love.

The labor is real because the love is real, and sustained love for others—especially in their absence and without seeing visible results—is one of the hardest things a human being can do.

The Role of God’s Will

One of the first steps of effective prayer is to find out what God’s will is in a given situation. The Scriptures, properly understood, provide us with that information. And so does the Holy Spirit, who indwells all true believers and still speaks, guides, and leads.

Consequently, prayer in the Bible is asking God to do what He has already promised and/or what He wills. That means prayer is a form of wrestling our own desires, fears, and perceptions into conformity with God’s prior action, character, and promises.

That interior realignment of letting Scripture and the Spirit reshape our asking is His work on us, not our work on God.

In this regard, effective prayer not only transforms the physical world; it transforms us.

Also, God’s answers are sometimes unrecognizable at first. They come in forms we didn’t expect, through doors we weren’t watching, and in seasons we almost gave up on.

The disciples on the Emmaus road were in despair, and the answer to everything they had hoped for was walking right beside them yet they did not know it.

In short, God has chosen prayer as a means of bringing His will about in the world. It’s not that He cannot act without our prayers. Rather, He has established prayer as part of His plan of accomplishing His purpose in the physical world.

This makes prayer a ministry task. Or as Watchman Nee called it, “the prayer ministry of the church.”

As I shared last week, in the coming days I plan to drop new messages on the different kinds of prayer from a seminar I gave for ministers and spiritual leaders.

Those talks will appear on the Christ is All podcast in several months (God willing). You can subscribe now if you haven’t already. All the 260+ episodes are for all Christians in all church types. They include conference messages, interviews, monologues, and some spoof shows. Thanks to so many of you, the podcast has had over 2 million downloads. That’s remarkable given that we’ve never paid a  red cent on promotions or advertisements.

Until next time.

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