Intercessors for Desperate Times

Chapter 2

Intercessors For Desperate Times

These are desperate times, particularly in the church; or dare we say because of the church. Desperate times demand desperate means for solutions and only desperate men will go to desperate means to bring forth such solutions. In the kingdom of God, particularly, desperate means are necessary to offer any hope for the continually deteriorating condition of the church. The desperate means being called for by God today is the same one it has always been through the ages: intercession. And the desperate men He is calling forth today are those called to intercede. Intercession. Intercessors. The desperate needs of our time.

To be desperate in this sense does not infer despair or hopelessness. Nor does it connote panic in time of chaos. There is no panic on the part of God, nor ought there to be in any of His servants. God knows what He must do and those who answer His call know what they must do. God has and will continue to call and equip His desperate servants for desperate tasks in desperate times. Such is this time.

The desperate man of God is totally abandoned to God and His purposes. This man takes no thought for his own life or well-being or earthly comfort. For him there is no tomorrow for which to save himself. Elijah was such a man, Abraham, Moses, Jeremiah, Daniel, Ezekiel, Paul, Livingstone, Nee, and Howells. The desperate men are those who cry, “For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” These dare to proclaim, “Far be it from me to glory save in the cross of Jesus Christ my Lord”—men who are consumed not with God’s blessing—but with God; not with God’s provisions—but with God; not with God’s comfort and care—but with God; not with how much God uses him—but with God; not with how others appreciate his ministry—but with God; not on how successful he is judged to be—but with God; not with a place of honor—but with God! God alone! God Himself, for Himself! No one and no thing—but God! This is the desperate man of God.

The Intercessor Desperate Times

Such are willing to lose all—even their life—if only God’s perfect way might be realized. Such are willing to be humbled, to lose their reputation and standing even with their own brethren if necessary (and it almost always is necessary), that God might have His way on the earth; willing, though never free from the hurt and pain that always accompanies such willingness and obedience; willing, all the while knowing that such willingness does not guarantee immunity from persecution and absolute death to one’s flesh, great stress to one’s spirit and extreme testing of one’s relationship with God. Such are the desperate men of God. These are the ones (if God could only find one!) God looks for today. Only such a man will do.

Intercession is the intervention of God’s desperate men on God’s behalf for people and situations in this world. Isaiah wrote of God looking for intercessors who would cry out to Him for the condition of His people, but He could find none: “He saw that there was no man, and wondered that there was no one to intervene” (Isaiah 59:6). God is looking for men to intervene, to stand in the gap for matters crucial to His compassionate desires for men and this world. “I looked, but there was no one to help; I was appalled, but there was no one to uphold; so my own arm brought me victory, and my wrath upheld me” (Isaiah 63:5). Years later in Ezekiel’s time God was still looking: “And I sought for a man among them who should build up the wall and stand in the breach before me for the land, that I should not destroy it; but I found none” (Ezekiel 22:30).

God’s intercessors are those who stand in the gap—between God and men, God and society, God and the church, God and the nations—to usher in God’s mercy and to forestall the coming of His wrath, thus opening the way to repentance for men and pointing them in the way of grace as known in Jesus Christ. The intercessor is the one called to beseech God for mercy instead of wrath, and the fact that intercessors are sought out by God at particular times is a clear indication of His impending wrath should the condition not be corrected. In the passage in Isaiah 63 it is revealed that God’s desire was to show mercy to Israel if only He could find one to cry out to Him. He could not find such a one and so He intervened Himself—with wrath. The Ezekiel passage makes it perfectly clear that if He could find only one to stand in the breach before Him, “for the land,” He would not destroy it. He could not find such a one and so the land was destroyed. Intercession can thus be understood as God’s final effort to avert His wrath and judgment from coming upon otherwise hopeless situations and/or people. The intercessor, therefore, holds in his ministry the balances of life and death for people and for nations.

Intercession is not something one grows into. It is what one is! You cannot hope to one day “grow up” to be an intercessor in God’s kingdom. It is what you are. You always have been and you always will be. Nothing anyone does or desires can make them an intercessor. Only God makes intercessors, and the way He makes them is to call them and appoint them. You either are or you are not. Just as one is either an apostle or not, a prophet or not, a preacher or not—one is an intercessor, or not. This does not mean there will not be years of preparation in the life of the intercessor. There certainly will be that. But it will not be a training to become an intercessor, it will be a training because you are an intercessor, and must be emptied of self to fully realize your calling and appointment.

The intercessor is responsible before God for those who are the object of His love, and though he cannot make people change their mind or heart toward God, his faithfulness to God and to his calling at least offer one last opportunity for people or nations to call upon the Lord. Thus, the intercessor may also be a watchman, one who warns people, through the proclamation of God’s Word, of His impending judgment.

Today, God is looking once again for such. The times warrant His search. Why does He have to look? Because not all whom He has appointed to such a task answer that call. And if He can find none to answer as Isaiah did (“Here am I.”), His own arm of wrath will be revealed for destruction, and the blood of His wrath will be upon each generation in which He could not find those willing to pay the price to stand in the gap for others.

Intercession is prayer, in part, but it is mostly living. The prayer of the intercessor springs from his life. If the life is not present, there can be no intercession. So, before we automatically think of intercession as being only prayer, or an intercessor simply as one who spends all his time in prayer, let us realize that the relationship one has with God through Jesus Christ is the key to intercession. In fact, intercession can be accomplished without prayer if God so commands it. Intercession means standing in the gap by the godliness of the life one lives, godliness being understood as unfeigned obedience and loyalty to God alone in the entirety of one’s life. To answer the call to be an intercessor means more than just saying yes with words, it means saying yes with one’s life. Without such a life there can be no intercession.

The “gap” the intercessor is called to fill exists because of Satan’s rebellion in heaven and his intrusion into the life of Adam and Eve, resulting in man’s estrangement from God. Intercession deals with these two dark realities—Satan and sin—and only the power of God in His servants is sufficient for this task.

“The prayer of a righteous man has great power in its effects” (James 5:16). Only this man and this prayer will prevail. This life carries God’s power for the freedom of men and nations. If the life of righteousness and denial of self is not being lived—the life which cannot be censured by God, the life that is without guile—then intercession cannot be effectively entered into. The life that is checkered with sin, that has lapses into unrighteousness accompanied by a rising and falling relationship with Christ, or which holds an attitude toward others that God Himself does not hold or approve of, will find it impossible to enter into the radical nature of faith and obedience which God requires of His intercessors. Perhaps such a life only evidences the call to intercession was never given to them.

The key to intercession is the life one lives in Christ, the power of Christ’s life which one allows to be his own life, leading to the loss of self-glory and credit for the glory of Christ, and for the release of the captives who unknowingly await faithful ones to intervene on their behalf.

Intercession is a matter of righteousness, not grace. In this calling, though one enters into it and continues in it by God’s grace, the completion of it to God’s satisfaction depends solely upon the relationship one maintains with God. The intercessor cannot live as he pleases and then call upon the grace of God to cover him where he has strayed off the mark. Indeed, it would be assumed that no Christian would knowingly use “grace” in such a fashion; but the intercessor cannot, or he cannot intercede. Only righteousness prevails in intercession, and not just imputed righteousness, but the effective transmission of Christ’s righteousness into righteous living. Nothing else will do. This is why God looked and looked—because He could find none such. And today He continues to look. Especially today!

The Lord’s way into lives and communities must be prepared by forerunners the likes of John, Anna, Simeon, Nehemiah, Philip, et. al. He does not just come in thin air and inhabit the atmosphere! He comes only when the way for Him has been prepared, and then He always comes in people, not in the wind. Much of our ineffectiveness and ineptness today in evangelism can be directly attributed to two false concepts: 1) Thinking God is going to swoop down upon people and change them; 2) Lack of proper soil preparation by forerunners. So many today are looking for evangelists to appear. But true evangelists cannot be sent by God until the soil is prepared. And that takes a great deal of time and sacrifice by men willing to give up all to do just that. Are there any such men? People keep waiting and praying for revival, but they are not willing to prepare the way through the sacrifice of themselves, through the loss of all things that accompanies such a sacrifice so that the intercession called for can effectively prepare the way for the Lord’s coming.

Today the wilderness is vast. Is there a voice crying out in the midst of this wilderness whose cry is backed up by a life lived in absolute obedience to God? Are God’s people really serious—to such a degree as this? “I sought for a man among them. . .”

These desperate times dictate that God’s people must be brutally honest about the situation today. We cannot lie to ourselves to protect our churches, our theologies, our religious heritage or our spiritual pride. Certain admissions of reality must come from our lips as evidence that we see as God sees. Certain confessions must be wrought which can only come through agonizing with God, and must pour forth from our hearts if we are ever going to enter fully into the will of God for the church and for society at this time. If we are not honest and refuse to face reality, we will be unable to intercede.

We must admit and we must confess, by the Spirit of God, that we are at the end of an era. The church, as we know it, is ineffective, innocuous, insipid and incredulous. Christ is through with this church. This is the reality we must face today. You may disagree, even citing good reasons for such disagreement,but you do so at the risk of missing God.

One of the great sins of the church in this era is that of trying to be positive about everything. The enemy has sown tares of positivity into God’s field of truth and now the lie has taken root which declares that only that which is positive is true, only that which is positive is faith, only that which is positive is Christian, only that which is encouraging is edifying. The reason for this sowing by the enemy is to totally neutralize the word of God, specifically the prophetic word of God. When once people are convinced that only those speaking positively are God’s spokesmen, then the prophet is emasculated, rendered impotent, and the word of God is lost. This is what has happened in our time. We have been witnesses to one of the smoothest heists in church history. God’s word has been stolen, and the irony is that the majority of God’s people are applauding!

In the meantime most will go on deceiving themselves into thinking they know the truth and that the church is, “just fine, thank you”. They will go on believing that as long as you remain positive and thankful for what is instead of aching for what God wants, everything will be fine. And the prophets will continue to die from stonings, true apostles will be charged as false, and the devil’s charade in the church will be applauded as from God. All this because God’s people are unwilling to walk in the narrow way, to acknowledge truth to their own loss, to follow Christ to the exclusion of security and comfort. The agony of the narrow way has been dismissed as unreal, negative, and too costly.

Paul described the church as being Christ’s body, “the fullness of him who fills all in all.” Why do we settle for less than this and then act as if we are in the will of God? How do we justify being a part of churches that have no intention of being “the fullness of him,” and then thank God that there are at least a few in these churches who love Him?

If the church you are a part of is not “the fullness of him,” then is it at least anguishing to become that? Is the word of God being proclaimed that God will settle for nothing less than the fullness of His Son? Are cries and groanings going up to heaven toward that end? If not, then you would be advised to seek out such a people, for how can you continue to live in a situation where truth has perished?

If you are with a people who have settled down in the world and compromised the truth for the sake of their life-style, and yet insist they are following Christ, then you are accepting hypocrites as being pleasing to God and you are making excuses for them. But you say, “It is not for me to judge them or anyone.” But I say, “What has this to do with judgment?” This has nothing to do with judgment and everything to do with truth, reality, pleasing God, desiring to see His will done, crying out for His honor to be established. This is the cry of the desperate ones, the intercessors, in this day.

Those who sit in their churches giving thanks that at least a few of their companions love Jesus are in direct opposition to the will of God. Give thanks when God’s will is being thwarted by the majority? Give thanks when the majority is in outright rebellion against God by refusing to present themselves as a living sacrifice? Give thanks when a false gospel is accepted as true and when the true word of God is denounced as false?

In this age it is a sin to be spiritual. Those who want to lag accuse those who want to run after Christ of being too lofty in their thinking, to condescending toward others. Those who want to slosh around in their own concepts of spirituality always pull down those who aspire to truth and spiritual reality. Those who will not obey are the accusers. Those who insist on being positive about un-truth and negative about truth are those who judge the true followers of Christ. “If you are the son of God. . . .” The Tempter is still with us.

When the people of God evidence little or no discernment between spirit and flesh, truth and untruth, righteousness and unrighteousness, the word of God and the word of man, the church of Jesus Christ and the church of man—when such discernment has been lost (it is a legitimate question as to whether or not it was ever a possession), that is a telltale sign we are at the end of an era. This is where we find ourselves today.

This decade will be the most telling of all for this age. If God’s people will answer the call to intercede, to lay down the indifferent things that divide them; if we will be truly humbled before one another; if we will separate ourselves from the world long enough to pray for it; if we will allow God to implement His kind of evangelism; if we will be concerned for only one thing—the increase of Christ, and if we will agonize to that end, joining ranks with one another instead of opposing one another, then there is hope. If we will not do this, there is no hope to see anything other than what we presently have.