Standing in the Gap - Intercessory Prayer

Sermon March 29, 2009
Week 5 of the series "When God's People Pray"

As we come to the end of our Lenten emphasis on prayer, we look at a very important kind of prayer called intercessory prayer – the prayers that we say on behalf of someone else. These are very important prayers. In Paul’s letter to Timothy, he urges people to pray for one another. It is the first thing they should do: First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions and thanksgivings be made for everyone. 1 Timothy 2:1 We are to pray for everyone.

In our video study, Rev. Cymbala compares intercessory prayer to reaching out to God with one hand and to another person with the other. Maxie Dunham, former editor of the Upper Room, calls it "Standing in the Gap." There are times we are here and it seems like God is way out there. We need someone to "Stand in the Gap" in order for us to be able to be open to receiving God’s love and power. So people intercede for others. Some times we are the ones needing the intercession and some times we are the ones doing the intercession.

Intercessory prayer can be very powerful. In the video, Rev. Cymbala tells about the first time that they had started what they call a "Prayer Band" at his church. The prayer band was a group of people who gathered in a room near the sanctuary to pray for the pastor during the service. He said that as he walked by the room, he heard someone say, "Protect Rev. Cymbala. Keep him safe." He said that he remembered thinking, "Why are they praying for my protection. I’m not going anywhere. Why would I need protection." The service went fine, but at the end, while he had his eyes closed because he was praying, someone pulled out a loaded gun and started down the aisle with the gun pointed at him. I’m not going to tell you the end of the story, you’ll have to go to the small groups to find out what happened. (9::30) ( At 11:00 I’ll continue with: He had no clue what was happening because his eyes were closed. But there were several ushers and his wife who didn’t have their eyes closed. They were beginning to panic, but everything happened so quickly that people seem paralyzed. Then the guy came up across the platform where Jim was standing with his eyes shut. His wife called his name twice, but he didn’t hear it over the music. It wasn’t until he was startled by a loud bang on the pulpit that he looked at the pulpit and saw a gun laying there. The guy had been moved by the sermon so that he was giving up the gun. But that’s not what it looked like to anyone else. And who knows what would have happened if people had rushed at him, because the gun was loaded. But everything was fine.) But the bottom line is that Rev. Cymbala felt that the protection the prayer band was praying for him was very instrumental in his safety.

Now, I’ve never had anything that dramatic happen to me during worship, but I remember a time that I know I was truly helped by intercessory prayer before a service. It was about 11 or 12 years ago in October. It was the weekend that my License to Preach Class was here for the weekend. All of the classes I’ve taught over the years have been wonderful, except this one. It was a fairly large class with a wide diversity of people. I usually like diversity, but in this class, diversity meant conflict with a capital C. They fought about everything, and I was usually in the middle. If I said one thing, the conservative part of the class would take issue with me. If I said another thing, the liberal part of the class would take me to task. I’ve never had a class that was so resistant to my great ideas! Plus, I had been rather hard on several of them when I graded their sermons. Anyway, it had been quite a stressful weekend. Back in those days, we had 3 services and I let them tell their call stories at the first two services, then I preached at the 11:00 service. After the service, they then would evaluate the service and my preaching. The idea was for them to see how the things I was teaching them to do actually took shape on a Sunday morning. Well, there had been some problems in the first two services and now it was my turn to preach. I had practiced at 6 a.m. but that seemed like a long time ago. As I sat in my office looking over my sermon, I couldn’t remember and focus at all. I was feeling really down, thinking, "This is going to be a disaster." Just then there was a knock on the door. I didn’t want to see anyone, but I said, "Come in" automatically. In bopped Erin Wyer. She was in the 4^th or 5^th grade then. She was her perky little self as she said, "Good Morning, Rev. Diana." Then she looked at me. I must have had a pained look on my face because she said right away, "What’s the matter?" I said, "Oh, I haven’t had a very good morning so far and I’m having trouble remembering my sermon. I can’t seem to focus." She said, "Is there anything I can do to help?" I said rather half heartedly. "Oh, you can pray for me." At that point, she turned right around and ran out of the room. The children’s choir was assembling outside my door because they were going to sing at the beginning of the service. So Erin went into action. She called everyone together and said, "Everybody, gather around. Rev. Diana has a headache. (I didn’t really, but that’s how she perceived it) and we’ve got to pray for her. Everybody hold hands. We all need to pray. So there in the crowded hallway with people walking by, my children started to pray for me. I could hear them say things like: Surround her with love. Heal her headache. Help her to remember her sermon. Give her strength. One after another said wonderful little prayers for me. It was incredible! As I listened to them pray, there was an amazing calm and peace that came over me. There had been a definite gap between me and God, but those kids stood in the gap and God’s power rushed into me.

I don’t remember what I preached, but I remember it felt good as I was doing it... AND the evaluation class that we had after the service was the only class where there was no arguments. They all agreed they had encountered God in the service! Intercessory prayer can do amazing things!

There are some guidelines that make for great intercessory prayer. My kids were following them even though they didn’t know it. Jesus gave us these guidelines in a story that he told his disciples. They asked him to teach them to pray. So he gave them the model prayer that we know as the Lord’s Prayer. Then to help them understand some important things about prayer, he told them this parable - Luke 11:

To fully understand this story, you need to know about the customs of the Middle East culture in Jesus’ time. The custom was that when guests came into your home you had to provide them with food. It was an honor and a privilege to be a good host. In the scripture story that Jesus told, there was an unexpected guest. And the main character in the parable wanted to be a good host. Here was his friend who arrived at midnight. He, of course, let him in, but he wanted to do even more. He wanted to be a good host. He wanted to give him something to eat. You get the sense that it wasn’t just because it was the proper thing to do, the guy really wanted to give his friend something to eat. He had a Giving Spirit. But here it was midnight and he didn’t have any food. The market wouldn’t be open until the morning. And here his friend is ... hungry at midnight. Now our first reaction is, couldn’t his friend wait until the morning for food? Having a roof over your head for the night seems like it would have been enough. But the host is Aware of the Acute Need of his guest. He knows his guest needs food and he needs it NOW. This awareness of the acute need makes this situation quite urgent. It can’t wait until the morning. His friend needs to be fed now. So the host goes to his neighbor and persistently knocks on his neighbors door and asks him to loan him some bread so he can give it to his friend who is in need. We know that the hero of our story is Persistent because the scripture says that it’s not just because the neighbor likes the guy that he gets up and gets the bread for the unexpected guest. It’s because of his persistence. That means that he didn’t just timidly knock at the door and whisper: Could you give me some bread for my guests? No, he was persistent. He asked over and over and over again and he wouldn’t go away until he got what he wanted. Jesus told this story to the disciples when they asked him to teach them to pray. Jesus gave them some sample words which we call the Lord’s prayer, then he gave them this story to help them understand important qualities that need to go along with prayer. We need to have a Giving Spirit. We need to be Aware of the Acute need around us. And we need Persistence. When these qualities are manifested in our prayers, then the next verses are true as well.

After Jesus told this story, Luke says that Jesus says these words: (the same words that we read last week from the Gospel of Matthew) "So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you. (Luke 11:9) Both Matthew and Luke quote Jesus in the exact same way. Ask... and God will give you ... or your friend ...what is needed.

So there you have the important qualities for standing in the GAP. The children’s choir exhibited all of them. Certainly, Erin had that Giving Spirit. . "What can I do to help?" she asked. She was Aware of the Acute need I had. As soon as she looked at me, she knew something was wrong. She responded to the request with urgency. I asked her to pray for me, she knew it had to be right now! And being the little organizer that she was, she rallied the troops. They prayed. Persistently they prayed. They weren’t worried about repeating the same request. There were lots of prayers that sounded the same. Surround her with love. Heal her headache. They weren’t worried about sounding redundant or repeating what someone else said. If someone else said it, great... I’ll say it too. Remember how I told you about my nervousness in praying aloud at a prayer meeting in Monroe. I didn’t want to repeat what someone else had said. That was silly on my part. I guess I didn’t know this parable. The guy didn’t ask for bread once. He didn’t find a new and different request each time he knocked. He made the request repeatedly. As a matter of fact, the more you repeat the words, the more they come from your heart. Persistence in Prayer is a great thing. God’s time table is different from ours. It takes time to deal with people who have free will and with natural forces of nature. But eventually, God’s kingdom will come and God’s Will will be done as we pray in the Lord’s Prayer.

As we have gone through our Lenten Study of "When God’s People Pray," we have heard a lot of stories of people whose lives have been changed through prayer. Those of you who have gone to the small group sessions have seen several people tell their stories on the DVD. They have all been very powerful witnesses to the power of prayer. But they’ve all been about people who live in Brooklyn. I’d like to close this series with a story of someone closer home. Jimmy Thompson is our drummer at the 11:00 service. Since he’s been coming to church, he has been going through some changes in his life. It’s exciting to talk to him about them. But today, I want to tell you about the changes that he told me about in his father’s life. You see, Jimmy’s father was an alcoholic who spent much of his life drunk. He was abusive to his children and his wife. Plus, he was a bigot and racist... the Archie Bunker type ... which might be funny to watch on TV but definitely not to live with. Jimmy had a very difficult childhood because of his father’s abusiveness and alcoholism.. But his mother, who was very much a saint in Jimmy’s eyes, kept holding out hope for Jimmy’s dad. There was a brief period where he got involved in a church and changed for a little while, but then went back to his old ways. However, after Jimmy’s mother died, the preacher at a neighboring church started reaching out to Jimmy’s dad. He "stood in the gap" in lots of different ways. He prayed for him and with him. He visited him. He invited him to church. At first his dad wanted nothing to do with this preacher. There were times that he even told him off and was really nasty to him. But the preacher had that Giving spirit and an Acute awareness of the need that was in Jimmy’s father’s life. AND he was Persistent. He kept praying, He kept visiting. He kept inviting. He was standing in the GAP. And the people of his church joined him in praying. And you know what happens when God’s people pray... Amazing things happen... right?! And Jimmy’s dad was a great example of that. Jimmy, of course, had moved away, as had all his siblings. With his wife gone, his dad had no one .. Except God and this preacher and his church standing in the GAP. So eventually, he started going to church. Jimmy knew there was a change going on in his dad’s life when he would talk to him occasionally on the phone. But it wasn’t until his dad’s funeral that Jimmy realized the extent his dad had changed. One obvious thing was that the singer his dad had requested to sing at his funeral was an African American. Archie Bunker had seen the light. But even more than his movement from racism was his movement toward a life of meaning and compassion free of alcohol. As Jimmy heard his dad’s new friends talk about him, it was like they were talking about a completely different person. The transformation had been incredible. .Jimmy was sad that his mother had not been able to witness this wonderful transformation. But still Jimmy believes in his heart, his mom knows. He can feel certain of that because of an encounter Jimmy had with God after his mother had died many years before. One of the bright spots in his younger life was the song by Ray Stevens: "Everything is Beautiful." Do you remember that song? It was very popular in the 70's. Jimmy used to listen to it with his mom. It represented what they both hoped was true ... that everything would eventually work out alright because under God’s guidance the world would find a way ... even a way to survive his father’s alcoholism. Well, after his mom died, Jimmy was very sad and depressed because he missed his mother; Plus, he just felt so bad that she had had this horrible, difficult life, due in most part to his father’s alcoholism. As he was going through this dark night of the soul, an interesting thing happened. Several times the old Ray Stevens song came on the radio. That wouldn’t have been unusual in the 70's, but by this time, it was the 90's and he hadn’t heard that song on the radio for some time. After about the third or fourth time he heard it in about three weeks, he thought: God, are you trying to tell me something here? Then he put out a little fleece for God (like Gideon did in the Old Testament... you know the kind of bargain that says: God do this and I’ll do that) Well, he told God that if that song played on the radio when he went into the house, he would believe that there was a heaven and that his mother was there ... with God ... and that now , at last, she was living in peace and joy. So, he got out of the car and went into the house and turned on the radio. There was another song playing. So he went on with things, thinking he was being stupid. God wouldn’t really care about giving him some reassurance. However, when the song that was playing finished, guess what came on next? "Everything is Beautiful!" Jimmy fell on his knees in tears. Not only did he realize his mother was ok he knew God cared enough about him to give him the reassurance he needed. He hasn’t heard that song on the radio since, but it has become a very special song to him. As he told me the story, I suggested that we sing it as a conclusion to our series on prayer. For it is a great affirmation of what happens when God’s people pray ... people can become the wonderful, beautiful people that God created them to be. For as the song says... everything and everyone is beautiful.... whether it’s a starry summer night or a snow-covered winter’s day. There is none so blind as he who can not see. We must not close our minds. We must let our minds go free. For every hour that passes by we know the world gets older. It’s time to realize that beauty lies in the eyes of the beholders. We shouldn’t care about the length of his hair or the color of his skin. Don’t worry about what shows from without, but the love that lies within. We’re going to get it altogether and everything’s going to work out fine. Just take a little time to look on the good side and straighten it out in your mind.

There are people who don’t have it straight in their minds. It’s then that we are called to stand in the GAP with a Giving spirit ... Aware of the Acute need of others .... and Pray with persistence.... so that people, even people like Jimmy’s father can realize how beautiful their lives can be. As we do our part with intercessory prayer, we’ll be amazed at the ways God’s Kingdom will come on earth ... and the ways the world will find a way ... and how beautiful everyone and everything is!