Learning To Pray: 2. Beginning To Learn About Intercession...

So, about eight years into my Christian walk, I’d finally begun to understand that I was able to have a relationship with Jesus that was two way. I also realised that more important to him than world evangelism or world poverty at that time in my walk was my relationship with him. This obviously didn’t mean that I believed I was the centre of the Universe or thought of myself too highly at all – remember he had graced me with a great lack of worth and self esteem – but simply that if I was to help take the land for Jesus outside, I needed to let him take the inner land inside me too. Considering this now I think that’s where so many of us are deceived. We feel that we have no right to ask Jesus to heal and deliver us when there is so much out there in need of healing and deliverance, so we stagger on as best we can trying to be the hands and feet of the Lord in a corrupt world, but not allowing him to do the inner work of transforming us into the likeness of His son. Believe me if it really is Jesus we are going for then he’s not likely to allow us to become overly self absorbed or introspective!

Anyway, I was now accustomed to ask the Holy Spirit to use any circumstance to speak to me, heal and deliver me. I was content to find God in the smallness of everyday – that probably brought the most needy prayer as I was still struggling to be wife, mother, housewife; but God had other ways of equipping me too. Going off to conferences were quite a departure from my small life that filled me with anticipation. They were like concentrated God times. At one particular conference – a dance one – I had my first taste of “intercession” – something I’d never heard of before.

There was a lot of prayer for Ireland at the time as the peace process in Northern Ireland was beginning in earnest. I spent the first 17 years of my life there so I felt some affinity. In the middle of this service a young girl started to walk around waving a white flag and I felt overwhelmed by a feeling of rage towards her. (Good job she was so young as it would have been too outrageous even for me to have ripped the flag from her hands.) This feeling of rejection – which I identified it as after some thought was so massive I realised that it couldn't have come from just me – although rejection was a thing I knew well and had had much prayer for. I began to think that maybe what I was feeling was somehow related to the Northern Irish people and that this feeling needed to submit to the simple childlike act of offering a white flag. I cried a lot and then got up off the floor somewhat embarrassed, but thinking that the tears were for more than just me. After that I began praying for Ireland a little – the first time ever that I’d prayed for more than just my immediate needs.

At the next conference the following year I was annoyed that a bedraggled women was standing infront of the overhead screen and I couldn’t see the words to worship properly. I prayed for this bag lady to have some healing – preferably out of my line of vision. The next day I went to a seminar on intercession – keen to understand more of what had happened the previous year – and met the bag lady again as she was leading the seminar. So begins the humbling! I discovered from her that Intercessors were just ordinary people leading ordinary lives that God could use to pray for big things. The lady shared how during the break up of apartheid in South Africa tiny groups met in sitting rooms around Britain to pray for God’s intervention, in unity with stadiums full of praying Christians in South Africa. She firmly believed that it was prayer that halted the expected blood bath as blacks came out of centuries of oppression in the country, and prayer that made the transition of power without civil war.

So I guess that the Holy Spirit who I had been allowing to change me was beginning to introduce me to the possibility that He could be allowed to change much bigger stuff than just me and that He could use me to do some of this – not just physically – after all I was unlikely to be called to stop civil war in another country – but spiritually, through the effect of my prayer – the same prayer that I knew was effective in changing me.

Karen Pilkington

2007-03-19