What Is Intercessory Prayer, and How Do I Practise It?

Question 11125.

Intercessory prayer is simply prayer offered on behalf of someone else rather than for yourself, and I have come to believe it is one of the most underrated disciplines in ordinary Christian life. We tend to think of prayer as a private conversation about our own needs, and it certainly includes that. But Scripture keeps putting other people’s names in our mouths before God: Abraham pleading for Sodom, Moses standing in the breach for Israel, Paul constantly telling his churches he is praying for them by name.

I want to walk through what intercessory prayer actually is, why it matters so much, and how you can begin practising it in a way that becomes a normal, sustainable part of your week rather than a guilty afterthought squeezed in once in a while.

What Intercessory Prayer Actually Means

The word intercession comes from a Latin root meaning to go between, and that is exactly the picture Scripture gives us: someone standing between God and another person, pleading on that person’s behalf. Paul urges that intercession be made for all people, including kings and those in high positions (1 Timothy 2:1-2), which tells us straight away that intercessory prayer is not limited to people we like or people close to us. It reaches outward, deliberately, to people we might never otherwise think to pray for.

This is different from simply mentioning someone in passing during your own prayer time. It is a deliberate act of standing before God specifically for another person’s sake, bringing their need, their soul, their circumstances before him with real attention and real persistence.

The Biblical Pattern of Intercessory Prayer

Abraham’s bargaining with God over Sodom is one of the earliest and most striking pictures of intercessory prayer in Scripture. He pleads repeatedly, will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked, working the number down from fifty righteous people to just ten (Genesis 18:22-33), not because he is negotiating God down against his will but because God had already determined to let Abraham into his own reasoning and invited exactly this kind of bold, persistent pleading.

Moses does something similar and more dramatic still after the golden calf, offering to have his own name blotted out of God’s book rather than see Israel destroyed (Exodus 32:31-32). Job is told to pray for his three unhelpful, wrongly accusing friends before his own fortunes are restored (Job 42:8-10), which must have cost him something real given how much those friends had just put him through. Paul tells the Ephesians, the Colossians, the Philippians, and the Thessalonians, again and again across his letters, that he is praying for them without ceasing. This kind of praying runs right through the whole of Scripture as a normal, expected feature of a life devoted to God.

Jesus Himself Intercedes for Us

Perhaps the most encouraging truth about intercessory prayer is that it is not just something we are commanded to do for others. It is something Jesus himself is doing for us right now. Hebrews tells us he always lives to make intercession for those who draw near to God through him (Hebrews 7:25), and Paul says the same of Christ, seated at God’s right hand, interceding for us (Romans 8:34). Even the Holy Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words when we do not know what to pray (Romans 8:26).

So when you take up this kind of praying for someone else, you are joining a work that both the Son and the Spirit are already doing continuously on your own behalf. You are not inventing a new spiritual discipline out of nothing. You are stepping into a pattern woven into the very life of the Godhead.

Why Intercessory Prayer Matters So Much

I think this discipline matters for at least two reasons that are easy to overlook. First, it is one of the clearest, most concrete expressions of genuinely loving your neighbour. It costs you nothing but time and attention, and yet it is one of the few things you can do for someone facing a trial you cannot fix, a distance you cannot close, or a heart you cannot change. When you cannot act, you can still intercede.

Second, praying earnestly for someone else changes the one praying almost as much as it changes anything about the situation prayed for. Carrying another person’s burden regularly before God softens a hard heart, deepens compassion, and pulls your attention away from the endless loop of your own concerns. I have never met a genuinely intercessory Christian who was also a self-absorbed one. The two do not seem to grow together.

How to Begin Practising Intercessory Prayer

Start small and specific rather than vague and sweeping. Praying in general terms for the world, or the church, or missionaries everywhere, is not wrong, but it rarely sustains itself for long because it has nothing concrete to hold onto. Choose a handful of specific people, your spouse, your children, a struggling friend, your minister, a colleague going through something genuinely hard right now, and bring their actual situation before God by name, in detail, rather than in vague generalities.

A simple, sustainable, repeatable pattern helps enormously here, far more than good intentions alone ever will. Some Christians keep a written or digital list they work through across the week rather than trying to hold everyone in mind every single day, an approach I explore further in whether keeping a prayer list is wise. Others pray through their contacts as situations come to mind throughout the day, turning a text message, a phone call, or a piece of news into an immediate, brief prayer rather than saving it for a formal prayer time that may never actually arrive.

Intercessory Prayer for the Church and Its Leaders

Paul does not only ask for intercessory prayer for himself in a general sense. He asks specifically that prayer be made for boldness to keep proclaiming the gospel, and for open doors for the message (Ephesians 6:19-20; Colossians 4:3). Church history is full of movements that trace real, documented turning points back to specific, sustained seasons of such prayer offered by ordinary believers, often unnamed, on behalf of a preacher or a mission they never lived to see the full fruit of.

I would encourage every congregation to build intercessory prayer for its own leaders and its own outreach into its regular rhythm rather than treating it as an optional extra reserved for a crisis. Pray by name for your minister, your elders, your missionaries, and the specific opportunities your own church currently has to make Christ known. This kind of praying is not generic goodwill. It is targeted, informed, ongoing partnership in the actual work God has given your own church to do.

Praying for People Who Frustrate You

The hardest and perhaps most spiritually significant form of intercessory prayer is praying for people who have wronged you or whom you find genuinely difficult. Jesus is explicit about this: pray for those who persecute you (Matthew 5:44). This is not a suggestion for the spiritually advanced. It is a direct command for every believer, and I find it one of the most reliable ways to loosen bitterness’s grip on my own heart, because it is very difficult to keep nursing resentment against someone you are sincerely asking God to bless.

Try naming the specific person and the specific frustration honestly before God, then asking him to work genuine, lasting good in their life, rather than simply asking him to change their behaviour toward you. That shift, from praying for my own comfort to praying for their actual good, is where intercessory prayer starts to do its deepest work in your own heart as well as theirs.

So, now what?

So, now what should you do this week? Choose three people. Write their names somewhere you will actually see them. Bring each one before God specifically, by name, with their real circumstances in view, rather than a vague blessing tacked onto the end of your own requests.

Remember, as you do, that you are not carrying this alone. Jesus is interceding for you at this very moment, and the Spirit is interceding through you even when your own words fail. Intercessory prayer is not a burden added to your spiritual life. It is an invitation into the very work Christ himself is already doing.

And do not measure this discipline by how it feels in the moment. Most intercession is quiet, unremarkable, and produces nothing you can see or point to at the time. Abraham never saw Sodom spared. Many of the believers who prayed hardest for revivals they had heard rumours of never lived to see the answer arrive. Faithfulness in this, as in so much of the Christian life, is measured by obedience offered in secret, not by visible results delivered on our own timetable.

“Consequently, he is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them.”

Hebrews 7:25 (ESV)