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The Importance of Intercessory Prayer
Marie Beirne, the chairperson of the Irish National Service Committee, recounts an event that happened last summer and the way it helped underline for her, the importance of intercession and the mysterious way that God uses it for the advance of his kingdom and the good of the world.
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The Lord has shown us that the way he wants us to intercede is simply to praise him. Thus we have a time of praise and then end with a time of specific intercessions. Sometimes we get words of knowledge that will direct us how to pray for a particular situation. There was one family, for example, which we were praying for in a certain way, and we felt God show us that we should be praying for another area of the situation. Of course the whole thing is very mysterious and I don’t think it is necessary to understand how it all works to do it. We have the example of Jesus and of Moses, to show us how important prayer and intercession is. Many times when we pray we have no idea what is achieved by our prayers, but sometimes God can give us little tokens to encourage us and remind us how important our prayers are.This happened over the summer at one of our sessions in quite an amazing way. There were only a few of us there that day. We arrived as normal, but I remember as we sat down and began to praise, someone to my left invited God in a strong way to come and to really take our praise and use it in whatever way he saw fit as a remedy for the ills of the world. It was very strange the way the praise manifested itself that day. We could really sense there was a special anointing. It was even just the way the people prayed. They would pray things like “We praise you for your right hand which has not lost its ancient power.” “You hold back the hand of violence.” “You foil the hand of the oppressor.” “You protect your people from the enemy and rescue us from the fowler’s snare.” Everybody seemed to be praying the same thing and yet we had never prayed like that before. It was all praise and full of confidence and victory at what God was accomplishing. As we prayed in the name of Jesus against the power of evil, we all felt we were in some kind of mysterious spiritual battle, which we didn’t totally understand but which God was allowing us to participate in. Then as suddenly as it had erupted, after 45 minutes, it stopped, and we all sat in silence. In a way I can’t explain I felt that whatever needed to be done had been accomplished. It was almost like giving birth. We all had a great sense of joy as we sat in this silence. Often one doesn’t know the result of one’s prayers, but this time I felt God prompting me to tell the others, that we would see on the news what we had been praying for. Thus that evening I switched on the news, but there seemed nothing appropriate. A few days later, however, I had this urge to turn on the radio and heard about the big hijack attempt of ten planes from London to the US that had been foiled. Finnola, another member of the group, rang me when she had heard the news to say that she felt that this was maybe what we had been praying for. I’m sure God inspired lots of other people to pray for this as well. But it was a wonderful confirmation and encouragement to us, to keep up our prayers. As Christians I strongly believe that intercessory prayer is an integral part of the vocation that God has given to us, to be a priestly people and to pray for the world that his kingdom come.
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As
well as having a weekly prayer group in Mohill on Wednesday nights,
a few years ago we started an early morning intercessory group. This
came about because at the time we were doing an early morning novena
for Pentecost. When it was finished we didn’t want it to die so
we decided to continue to meet on Friday mornings for intercessory prayer
between 7am and 8 am. It has never been a very big group and ranges
in numbers from about a dozen people to five or six, depending on the
weather and the time of year. It has been a great blessing to us all
however, and God has used it to teach us a lot about the importance
of intercession. We start each session with a decade of the rosary to
get us warmed up, as it can often be hard to be out of bed at that time.
The key, however, is praise.