The Intercessor’s Agenda

The Intercessor’s Agenda

Remember your servants Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. You bound yourself with an oath to them. Exodus 32:13

MOSES WAS PRESENTED WITH A DILEMMA. The people who had just followed him out of Egypt had also just fallen into idolatry by worshiping a golden calf. God told Moses he would destroy the Israelites and establish Moses as a new nation. But Moses reminded God of his promises, confessed their sin, and asked for his forgiveness, focusing his intercession on God’s glory. He recognized the priority of God’s purposes, and “the LORD changed his mind” (verse 14).

Did God really change his plans based on Moses’ prayer? Perhaps in the sense that he let Moses’ prayer shift the trajectory of the people’s rebellion. But God had provoked that prayer in the first place with his daring proposal, and Moses didn’t take the bait. He affirmed what God had wanted to do all along, refused to accept a self-serving alternative, and embraced solidarity with this flawed but chosen people—exactly the kind of responses God has always looked for in human leaders.

Our intercession should have the same characteristics. It should be rooted in God’s stated plans and promises, identify with the people he has chosen and is calling into his purposes, resist the temptation for self-promotion, and be anchored in the ultimate purpose of glorifying God in his work and ways. God will often put praying people in situations that test these qualities, and he honors those who adhere to them with answers. He rewards intercessors when they are interceding with the right agenda.

We can’t do that unless we know God’s agenda. We have to understand something of his purposes in this world in order to pray for them. We need a broad awareness of the characteristics of his Kingdom in order to pray the big-picture prayers he is looking for. We must immerse ourselves in new ways of thinking if we are going to pray for his Kingdom to come. And we must root ourselves in his promises to have the faith that he will fulfill them. An intercessor’s agenda isn’t complicated, but it will stretch us. And it plays a significant role in God’s work in this world.

We are never more like Christ than in prayers of intercession.