What is intercessory prayer?

Question 11052.

Intercessory prayer is simply praying for somebody who is not you. That definition sounds almost disappointingly plain, and yet the practice behind it runs through Scripture from Abraham on the road to Sodom right up to Jesus at the right hand of the Father.

It is one of the most ordinary things a believer does and one of the most extraordinary privileges we have been given. I want to look at what it is, who does it, and what it costs.

The shape of intercessory prayer in Scripture

The picture the Bible gives is of someone standing between. Abraham stands between the LORD and Sodom, bargaining downward from fifty righteous men to ten. Moses stands between God and a nation that has just made a golden calf and asks to be blotted out of the book rather than see them destroyed.

That is intercessory prayer at full stretch. It is not a polite mention of somebody’s name at the end of a list. It is taking a position on their behalf and refusing to move.

The Greek word enteuxis, used in 1 Timothy 2:1, carries the sense of an approach to a person of standing in order to make a petition for another. Paul urges that such prayers be made for all people, including kings and those in high positions.

Samuel goes further still and calls it sin to stop. When the people of Israel begged him to keep praying for them, he answered that far be it from him to sin against the LORD by ceasing to pray for them. Intercessory prayer, on that reckoning, is not an optional extra for the keen.

Jesus is the great intercessor

Everything we do in intercessory prayer is derivative. Jesus is the one who actually intercedes, and Hebrews 7:25 says 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.

That should reframe our praying entirely. When I pray for my wife, or for a member of my congregation, I am not initiating something. I am joining something already in progress at a level I can barely imagine.

It also explains why intercessory prayer is not a burden we carry alone. The weight is not resting on my persistence. It is resting on his standing before the Father, which never wavers.

There is a further comfort here. His intercession does not depend on his mood or his memory, and he never forgets a name. When I go to bed having forgotten to pray for someone I promised to pray for, the situation is not lost, because the great intercessor was already on it.

The Spirit intercedes too

Romans tells us the Spirit helps us in our weakness, because we do not know what to pray for as we ought, and he intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. That is a mercy for anyone who has sat with a situation so tangled they had no idea what to ask.

So intercessory prayer happens on three levels at once. The Son intercedes at the Father’s right hand, the Spirit intercedes within us, and we stumble along in the middle doing our best with the words we have.

I have written more on this in what the Spirit does in prayer and intercession, because it takes an enormous amount of anxiety out of praying for others.

Notice too that the Spirit’s help is given precisely at the point of weakness rather than strength. The person who feels least equipped to pray for others is not disqualified. That feeling is arguably the qualification, because it drives us to lean on the help God has already provided.

Who are we told to pray for?

The New Testament is expansive here. We are to pray for all people, for those in authority whether or not we voted for them, for labourers to be sent into the harvest, for our enemies, for the sick, for one another’s forgiveness and healing, and for those who are imprisoned as though we were in prison with them.

Paul repeatedly asks churches to pray for him, which I find quietly humbling. If an apostle needed intercessory prayer to speak boldly, the notion that any of us has outgrown it is nonsense.

Notice how much of that list points outward. A prayer life that never leaves the family circle has not yet learned what intercessory prayer is for.

Jesus prayed for Peter before Peter failed, telling him that he had prayed that his faith may not fail. That is intercessory prayer working upstream of a crisis rather than mopping up after it, and it is a model worth copying with the people we love.

What intercessory prayer is not

It is not a technique for bending God to a preferred outcome. Intercession within Scripture is always shaped by God’s revealed character and purposes, and Abraham’s boldness at Sodom rests entirely on his conviction that the Judge of all the earth will do right.

It is not the preserve of specially gifted people either. There are believers with a marked burden for prayer, and I thank God for them, but intercessory prayer is the family business and every child is in it.

Nor is it a substitute for action. Praying for the hungry man while ignoring the food in your own cupboard is not intercession, it is evasion. James has fairly pointed things to say about that.

It is also not a performance. Praying for others in a meeting can quietly become a way of preaching at them, or of letting the room know how spiritual we are. The moment intercession has a human audience in mind, something has gone wrong with it.

The cost of standing in the gap

Ezekiel records God looking for a man to stand in the gap before him on behalf of the land, and finding none. That verse has never stopped bothering me. The gap is real, the need is real, and the shortage is not of power but of people willing to stand there.

Real intercessory prayer costs time and it costs feeling. You cannot pray seriously for someone without beginning to carry something of their situation, and that is precisely the point. Epaphras is described as always struggling on behalf of the Colossians in his prayers, and the word used is the one you would use of an athlete straining.

That is why intercession tends to change the one praying as much as the one prayed for. You cannot hold someone before God week after week and remain indifferent to them.

Paul speaks of his unceasing anguish for his kinsmen according to the flesh, and says he could wish himself accursed for their sake. You do not write a sentence like that unless something has broken open in you. That is the far end of intercessory prayer, and most of us have not been there.

How to actually do it

Keep it concrete. Vague praying produces vague faith, so ask for particular things and then watch for particular answers. Praying Scripture over a person is the simplest way to keep your requests anchored to what God has actually promised.

Keep a written list, and keep it short enough to actually use. I have watched people build a prayer list so vast that it collapses under its own weight within a fortnight. Better a modest list prayed through faithfully than a magnificent one abandoned by February.

Keep it sustained. Most of the intercession in Scripture is repeated rather than one off, and there is no shame in praying the same request for years. Monica prayed for Augustine for decades before anything visible happened.

And keep it honest about the outcome. Not every request receives the answer we wanted, which I have addressed in why prayers go unanswered. Intercession is not a guarantee of outcomes. It is an act of love that entrusts the outcome to a God who loves the person more than we do.

Finally, pray with others where you can. Something happens in shared intercession that does not happen alone, which is why the early church gathered to pray while Peter was in prison rather than praying separately at home. The answer came so quickly they could hardly believe it.

So, now what?

Pick three people this week and pray for them by name, daily, with something specific in mind. Intercessory prayer that stays general tends to evaporate, and three real people prayed for properly is worth more than a list of thirty read out once.

Tell them you are praying, if it is appropriate. It is a gift to know somebody is standing before God for you, and it also has the useful effect of keeping you honest about whether you actually did it.

Then start listening for the names God puts in front of you. Some of the most fruitful praying I have ever done began with a person I had no particular reason to think about. Who has God put on your heart that nobody else may be praying for?

“First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people.”

1 Timothy 2:1, ESV