How do you overcome intercessory prayer challenges?
What is a challenge for the intercessor?
(An intercessor is someone who prays for another person).
Let’s let Moses count the ways.
How Moses learned to overcome intercessory prayer challenges.
Everyone who reads the Old Testament can clearly see Moses dealt with a lot of grief from the folks he led out of Egypt.
As a people, the Israelites had been in Egypt for 400 years.
Sure, they had their traditions, but they lacked a temple and by the time of Moses, they were enslaved workers.
It’s hard to know what they remembered about their past.
We certainly don’t know if they had the time, energy, or opportunity to worship the one true God.
As theologian Chad Bird points out in Unveiling Mercy: 365 Daily Devotions, the very concept “Pharoah” means a god.
The word Par’oh (“Pharoah”) is an Egyptian loanword meaning “great house.” . . . In Egyptian theology, Par’oh was the incarnation of a god. Thus when Pharoah scoffs at God and acts like a first-rate uppity deity, he’s thrown down the auntlet: this will be a theomachy, a God-fight.”
Unveiling Mercy p. 63.
After Moses took them through a “baptism” passage of the Red Sea, they spent two years in the desert learning to trust in Yaweh–or “I am who I said I am.”
Their Hebrew God-worshipping experience had been truncated. They needed to (re)learn what it meant to worship the one true God.
Moses’ intercessory prayer challenges began in the desert when the people who escaped Pharoah suddenly weren’t sure they liked the idea.
Ten: plagues and challenges
You’ll remember that Moses’ prayed for God to intervene when he approached Pharoah.
Moses and Aaron demonstrated how the One True God was more powerful that the Egypian king-god ten times.
But, once past the Red Sea, the Israelites demonstrated ten intercessory prayer challenges.
Here’s the list from Got Questions:
- Lack of faith before crossing the Red Sea (Exodus 14:11–12)
- Bitter water complaints at Marah (Exodus 15:24)
- Food complaints (no meat or vegetables!) in the Desert of Sin (Exodus 16:3)
- Greedy manna overcollection (Exodus 16:20)
- Sabbath breaking to collect manna (Exodus 16:27–29)
- Rephidim lack of water complaints (Exodus 17:2–3)
- The golden calf incident (Exodus 32:7–10)
- General complaining attitude at Taberah (Numbers 11:1–2)
- Complaints about the food menu (looking back to Egypt). (Numbers 11:4)
- Afraid to trust God and enter the Promised Land (Numbers 14:1–4)
In each of the above incidents, God was unhappy with the Israelites and their attitude. He threatened to wipe them off the face of the earth each time.
Well, how would you have responded to the irate Creator of the Universe?
Interecessory prayer is talking to God
Intercessory prayer is about establishing an intimate relationship with God that enables you to discuss anything with Him.
When we recognize God wants to communicate with us–through the Bible and through the Holy Spirit’s guidance–it becomes easier to prayer.
When we learn about God through Biblical stories and words, we learn to trust Him.
And out of that trust, an intimacy that grows, we can ask God for things with confidence He’ll answer.
Why?
Because we know what God values. We know what his Law declares true. We’re looking to please Him.
And that’s why Moses was such an exemplery intercessor.
He walked with God, trusted God, and knew God’s heart.
In Numbers 14, twelve spies returned from Caanan and ten insisted conquering the land couldn’t be done.
God got angry at that assault on His character (after all He had done, suddenly they chose not to believe He would help them?).
In fact, He “came down there.” His cloud appeared in the tabernacle of meeting.
Moses hustled in to talk with Him.
How did God respond to Moses’ intercessory prayer challenges?
Then the Lord said to Moses: “How long will these people reject Me? And how long will they not believe Me, with all the signs which I have performed among them? I will strike them with the pestilence and disinherit them, and I will make of you a nation greater and mightier than they.”
Numbers 14: 11-12 (NKJV)
Moses stood before a very angry God.
But He knew God’s character, and pointed out some basic facts the Lord told Moses:
“The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children’s children to the third and the fourth generation.
Exodus 34:6-8 (NKJV)
Moses also pointed out that if God destroyed the Israelites, “the Egyptians will say you brought the people out into the desert to kill them.”
In addition, “other nations will claim you did not have the power to keep your people alive in the desert.”
Elsewhere, God says, “Come now let us reason together.” (Isaiah 1:18).
On that day, He listened to Moses and stayed His hand.
But there was a price.
What price did Moses pay to overcome the intercessory prayer challenges?
Both Moses and the Israelites paid a high price for this incident.
Despite God telling them to go into the Promised Land, the Israelites requested the 40-day spy hunt.
Obviously, that was a poor request–though God honored it.
The result: 38 more years in the desert (they’d already been out there two years)
Moses?
He was undoubtedly tired of these unruly, ungrateful Israelites.
But Moses was the intercessor. He was the go-between God and the Israelites.
After this incident, he had to lead the people for 38 more years.
In his impatience, weariness, exhaustion, irritation with them, Moses disobeyed God.
God told Moses to strike the stone at Meribah Kadesh once for water (in Exodus 17). He struck the stone twice.
The Israelites got all the water they wanted, but God punished Moses for his disobedience and pride.
God showed Moses the promised land just before his death.
But, like the Israelites over the age of twenty on that day in Numbers, Moses never entered the Promised Land.
How do we overcome intercessory prayer challenges?
- Spend our prayer time listening and learning from the Bible, the Holy Spirit, and Jesus’ prayer examples.
- Keep our eyes, ideas, and prayers nestled in the character of God.
- Don’t be afraid to ask anything in His name that corresponds to His character as demonstrated in Scripture.
You can’t ask in faith if you don’t know the Giver.
Nor, can you ask if you don’t believe what He says.
Hebrews 3:18-19 deserves the last word for the weary prayers battling intercessory prayer challenges:
“So we see that they were not able to enter [into His rest—the promised land] because of unbelief and an unwillingness to trust in God.” Hebrews 3:19 (Amplified)
And look: Oswald Chambers gives a full explanation in the April 1 My Utmost for His Highest!
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