A little while ago, I attended an “Art for
the Soul” retreat at St Clements, at Galong.
It’s run by one of the Nuns up there.
It was a very refreshing experience.
I found that I was the only little Protestant amongst a whole pond full
of Catholics.
That didn’t bother
me.
During the course of one of the
sessions, this lovely Nun said to me “Catholics always concentrate on
suffering;
we often look at our faith
through a perspective of suffering”.
And
she thought it was time their denomination could be a little more hopeful and
concentrate on the resurrection. As she was speaking, I thought that we
Protestants have been the other way round; we tend to look at our faith from a
resurrection perspective. And that’s a good thing, but sometimes I think we
don’t allow room for lamentation in our worship.
We have both Job and Bartimaeus in our
readings this morning, and they were both well acquainted with lamentation.
So it might be that we will find the whole
book of Job a bit confronting.
Our
reading today comes from the very last chapter;
the “good” one where Job is recompensed for all his suffering.
We are tempted to think that’s all there is
to it, but I’m convinced there is such a wealth of wisdom in the book of Job,
and I have to thank a sermon from that long-ago preacher Charles Spurgeon for
drawing my attention to verse 8;
the one
in which God says “My servant Job will pray for you and I will accept his
prayer and not deal with you according to your folly.
So, it’s actually
intercessory prayer I want us to think about this morning. What brought Job to
the point of praying for his friends, when he himself was so desperate and
despairing?
I want to observe some
points about intercession for others and then some ideas of who we should pray
for.
The book of Job is played out against the
fact that the devil makes a wager with God.
The devil says “I bet if you take away all his good fortune, he’ll
curse you”.
And God sys “You’re on”.
God consenting to such a wager is, in itself,
hard to fathom. The book goes on to speak of Job’s terrible plight, his
discourse with God and with his friends.
But in this final chapter, he says to God “I spoke of things I didn’t
know or understand;
my ears have heard
you now and my eyes have seen you. Speak and I will listen”.
We might interpret that as Job saying “I’ve
been an ignorant prat on these matters and tried to tell you, Almighty God, what
to do and how to rule the world.
I’m
sorry for my arrogant presumption”
Job
has been on a very difficult spiritual journey. So really, in our readings
today, we have blind Bartimaeus in the gospel receiving physical sight, and we
have Job, receiving spiritual sight.
But look at verse 10 “after Job prayed for
his friends, the Lord restored his fortunes and gave him twice as much as he
had before”.
Now it would be very
dangerous to assume from this that “oh well, I’m in trouble, I’ll pray for my
friends and God will intervene”.
I don’t
think that’s how it is at all.
It
doesn’t mean that if we pray for others, God will make fortune smile on us. In
the context of Job, it seemed more like a sign that God had called off the
wager. The King James Version of Verse 10 says “And the Lord turned the
captivity of Job, when he prayed for his friends”.
God brought good from bad, even though Job
was ruined without reason.
God was in
control and always had a plan in mind.
God always knew the end from the beginning and everything in between. I
believe a lot of the wisdom and sense in this story hinges on Job’s journey to
spiritual humility, and of gaining a different vision of who God is, despite our
ideas of what’s fair and what’s unfair. It’s also about making sure we are not
like Job’s friends; about whom God says “they have not spoken of me what is
right, like my servant Job has”;
a flaky
lot of hypocrites and religious posturers, they were.
Know everything;
know nothing;
that’s them.
It’s Job’s prayer which stops God from
dealing with them according to their folly.
That’s a very powerful outcome of all Job’s distress.
And it’s the trouble and resultant refining
of Job’s already upright character which ensures that this power will be put to
good use.
That’s a long way to answering
why God allowed the sorrows in the 1
st place
So, if we follow Job’s example, we will pray
for those who sleight and misunderstand us.
To be an
intercessor, we need to realize a few things:
1. Intercessional prayers, in the light of the book of
Job, seem to work better if we have been though trials. We are fitted for God’s purpose through
trials. It’s no mistake that Job could
pray for his friends even after his own life had been decimated. Job knew what suffering felt like; knew in the end that he had been a touch
arrogant. Through our own grief, we develop
the ability to walk in the shoes of others who are grieving. It gives us compassion and empathy and it’s
from this storehouse we can then pray for others and really petition God’s
heart.
2. Intercession for others is a spiritual journey not a
means to an end. Job’s suffering took him on a journey of self-discovery and an
awareness of God in a very personal way.
When we travel thus, close to a suffering so great, we can’t do it
without depending on God, we get to know our place in God’s world; we discover there are things we cannot
control; we realize how much more there
is to life than just what we plan and want for ourselves. We are so vulnerable, so helpless, so
wretched we no longer have control over these forces of pain and we lean on the
very heart of God to give us strength. We are, if we allow it, brought close to
God’s character; the very divinity of
God; we transcend our suffering and
begin to see others the way God sees them.
We put off ourselves and rely on God.
When self takes a back seat in this way, we surpass our suffering and
God’s spirit himself mingles himself with our spirit and we are transformed to
be more like him. Jesus himself intercedes
for others - and we too, from our nobler, ego-reduced viewpoint, want to pray
for them too.
3.
Notice God doesn’t punish Job even though he has
questioned and despaired. His is an honest
response to anguish and God is not displeased by that. His dialogue of despair with God, is part of
the journey. We must conclude from this
that when we cry out to God with honest questions, this is not a bad thing – it’s
when God is there with us, even though, at the time He might seem silent. After all, we are still speaking to God – we are
still in relationship with God. Something
happens in that calm candle flame of our own spirit, when, in the midst of
grief or bewilderment, God’s spirit begins to burn with our own. It’s a very sacred, mystical transference of
the divine nature.
4. Intercession requires grace; the experience of God’s grace to us, which we
use to intercede for others. We see them
as flawed like us, and loved by God, like us.
Mercy and compassion are the big sisters of intercession.
5.
It’s a sign of spiritual health and healing, and
victory in spite of trouble. If we are finally
at peace enough with what God has allowed for us, we can embrace praying for
others. We have travelled a long way in
our efforts to grapple with awful circumstances and are still trusting God.
Strength and power are ours when we pray from this vantage point. This leads me
to my next point:
6. There is power in our prayers.
Prayers of righteous people can change
things.
These verses in
Hebrews 12
spring to mind: “No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later
on, however, it produces a harvest of
righteousness
and peace for those who have been trained by it”.
There is something amazing which happens when
a righteous saint of God, who has stood firm through trial, then prays for
others.
. The prayer of the righteous
doesn’t mean we have to be perfectly good.
It means we need to walk in the light of Christ’s spirit which will tell
us where we err and prompt us to confess it to Him.
It’s our confession and reliance on Him by
faith which makes us righteous, not our outward behaviour
7.
There is Christ’s example, and even from the cross he
prayed “Father forgive them because they don’t know what they are doing”. We
have to ask in the name of the High Priest Jesus, who once for all sacrificed
for us, as in Hebrews reading. We have
to have a relationship with Him, the great Redeemer. And because he suffered,
he is our greatest example of the power of intercessory prayer.
Who then should we
pray for? Praying for people who get on our nerves is hard;
praying for those who have sleighted us but without
intent or malice is harder;
praying for
people who have gone out of their way to mistreat or hurt is just because they
can, is very difficult indeed.
We can
pray for:
1
For those lost to the gospel. They are all around
us. We can use the nightly news to pray
for those who are so in need of the redemptive power of God, not just for their
personal salvation, but for the enrichment of our society too.
2
We can pray Our friends who are proud of their
religiousness; those who are
insensitive, haughty. Those who have
wronged us. How do we pray for people like this? How did Job do it? I’ll tell you how I do it. I say to God “I
don’t feel like praying for this person, but because you require it, I will”. To
be sure, it’s a very wooden, uninvolved prayer at first. But when we pray in
this way over time, gradually we ourselves are changed and we find we can
actually pray for those who have wronged us, with forgiveness and goodwill in
our hearts.
3
Our friends who are ill, or sorely tried, dispirited, or who are
battling temptation. Apparently, Internet
porn is the fastest growing industry on the worldwide web. If we know people, even Christians, who are
trapped in this, our prayers of intercession could be the means of setting them
free.
4
The wider community.
We are out in the world every day;
we can intercede for people in our own circle of friends and
workmates; we can intercede for people
in the most dire and degraded situations.
We can pray as we see them from our cars or in the street, or on the
news. We can petition God’s heart on their behalf and He can set in place, the
means to answer those prayers.
5
We can pray for very evil people; people who have gone beyond just selfishness
– people who use others for their own gratuitous power. Organised crime, violent dictators, and
malevolent military forces. Our prayers can break forces of evil and summon the
angel host to rescue others.
6 And finally, we can pray that what we give in financial
ways to help others will be multiplied millions of times, so that all can be
fed.
So, if you feel
yourself in the dark vale of trouble or affliction this morning, take heart,
because God always has a plan, and will always bring us through, with the tree
of our soul laden with much fruit. Some
of that bounty will be the ability to intercede on behalf of others and know
that God hears and answers our prayers. Amen.
