Giver Blessing 9: Intercession
Beloved, I call your spirit to attention, and I invite the Giver portion to come explore how God has designed you to enrich the world in your unique way.
The altar of incense represents yet another of the gifts the Giver tribe offers to the world. While every individual has both the right and the responsibility to make intercession central to their lives, the Giver tribe has historically modeled for us facets of intercession we would not otherwise know.
In the 1800s, the Giver city of New York birthed a movement of noon time prayer for businessmen. It was rather remarkable at the time for organized public intercession to be so far removed from the formal church setting. However, in God’s grand scheme of things, it was time for the Giver tribe to give the gift of legitimacy to a grass roots prayer movement rather than one orchestrated by clergy.
So they did.
Then during the first half of the 20th century, the great Welsh intercessor, Rees Howells, modeled for us how a lifestyle builds authority in intercession. God took him through one challenging experience after another, each designed to grow him.
Whether it was the death of the first person who ever came to healing through his ministry or riding in public without a hat, Rees experienced a multitude of emotionally turbulent situations from the hand of God. Each was designed to groom him for WWII.
When that global drama was at its most intense, God began to speak His will to Rees Howells and he had the earned authority to pray God’s will into reality. The most self assured rulers of nations and armies found themselves solidly controlled by the prayers of a man whose entire life had been preparation for this hour.
Much had been preached and written in previous generations about prevailing prayer. There were endless exhortations to make prayer a priority, to persist in prayer and to pray with purity of life and motive.
But the Giver gave the Body of Christ a staggeringly large gift of a life lived earning authority for intercession. This was a new paradigm. Access to world changing authority came through life’s virtue, not just purity and patient endurance.
And this profound lesson in intercession was the greater gift that the Giver gave the world, not just the changes in the war effort worldwide.
A generation later, God turned to the Giver nation of South Korea to show the world yet another paradigm. Pastor Yonggi Cho began with a handful of people whom he taught to pray. Today his congregation is famous the world over for being the largest congregation in the world.
They did it through prayer disciplines. At the time the traditional American prayer meeting was fading to oblivion, the Koreans were meeting for prayer in the early morning hours and going to the prayer mountain to intercede for days at a time. The Koreans have given the world a whole new view of intercession.
It is a good gift.
Hot on the heels of that gift, the Philippine church tapped into their Giver gift to model for the world how to form networks of intercession. During the 1990s a network of 100,000 intercessors was deemed a small network.
Using the power of modern electronic communication, massive intercessory prayer could be focused on a single issue within hours. Corporate intercession never looked that way before.
But the Filipinos were far from done. They wove together a cord of three strands, bringing the Giver’s drive for evangelism, their intercessory anointing and their business acumen together to form one of the most aggressive programs of marketplace prayer evangelism had seen so far.
Rather than intercession being primarily a place for Believers to congregate apart from the preChristians, it became the playing field for intercessors to introduce the preChristians to their God.
The world again received a new model of intercession from the hands of a Giver nation.
So we welcome you in our midst, Giver. Your tribe has not come close to exhausting the treasures of intercession that are embedded in your nature. We delight to have you in our midst, inviting you to show us a new color and flavor of world changing intercession. You are most welcome among us. We bless you in the name of our King, Jesus Christ.
Sherman Library
Corona del Mar, CA
December 16, 2008
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