Many have wondered, “How am I to be related to the Apostle, to the elders and the prophets over me? What is the right and proper relationship?” We know we are to live with a faith of our own and not by the faith of the Apostle or of the elders alone, yet this does not give the whole picture. There must be a foundational aspect of faith. The Apostle Paul in the New Testament did not cease to pray and intercede for the people, and with every remembrance of them there was nothing but prayer in his heart (Philippians 1:3–7). He must have sensed that he had a very vital part in their being sustained.
I believe there is a way in which we must come to accept divine order and then not make an issue of it. It is like learning the touch system of the typewriter—it has to become a thorough part of you until it is almost an unconscious thing within, and then you go ahead. Otherwise you are always consciously thinking, “I have to be submissive,” and you seek confirmation concerning things you do not need to. In some cases we can exercise more initiative ourselves and just believe, because that unconscious submission is already there. In typing, when you hit a wrong key, something jars you. You didn’t do it intentionally but the knowledge is there; you hit a wrong key. As you take the initiative of being led by the Spirit of the Lord, you will soon have a check of the Holy Spirit to guide you. This probably is one of the most vital developments that can come forth in your maturity.
In connection with submission, you have to constantly exercise more and more initiative of faith yourself. Submission takes on all the colors of the spectrum at different times in your Christian experience. You come into the Walk and submission becomes such a total thing to you that you wouldn’t want to breathe unless someone said, “This is confirmation: breathe in, breathe out.” But as you go along, it is like a little child; after awhile the restraints are lifted somewhat in regard to the development of initiative. We are all dependent upon each other far more than we know, but we must come to such an almost unconscious, complete awareness of submission that we do not hesitate to go ahead.
Another thing you must remember in your relationship to the Apostle: do not use some word he gives to twist God’s arm or secure what you want. I wonder how often people come to get just a little word, then they go and say the Apostle said something I didn’t really say. It lost something in translation! There should be intervention into the impasses that are created, but we should not use a word from the Lord as a substitute for believing God and exercising faith.
We have had directives on intercession; we have had the main guidelines, and now we need to encourage and strengthen ourselves. The Lord said enough would happen in a week that formerly happened in a month, but I didn’t anticipate a month’s battle in one week! But we are forging ahead into some good things. What we really need now is to be lifted up and anointed afresh to pray.
Be determined to unload everything that oppresses and bothers you, especially the wipeouts that come through a feeling of, “Oh, everything is wrong; the heavens are falling down.” Remember the child’s story of “Chicken Little”? An acorn fell on the chicken’s head, and soon the whole barnyard was alerted that the heavens were falling down! Well, I want to encourage you that the heavens aren’t falling down; they are just being rent, loosed from their moorings, getting ready to pass away with a great noise (II Peter 3:10).
One thing you must say about the warfare, you feel a lot better when it quits hurting! But go through it; keep praying and seeking the Lord. You don’t want anything to distract you, nor to get wiped out on a personal level, but you want a fresh anointing and a fresh inspiration to pray and intercede. The enemy will try to push the battle onto a personal level and wipe you out. We need to take dominion over it and refuse to be distrubed or to accept it on a personal level. We refuse to allow the enemy to pick the area and place and time of conflict. The Lord gave us things to pray and believe for, and we are moving into them in the name of the Lord. It is time to hear from the Lord and know exactly what He wants in us, in the churches, what He wants us to support, and what He wants us to modify. We will get confirmation and approval that we are on the right path.
Lord, we lay it all before You, like Abraham laid the sacrifices on the altar, and we want You to shoo away the buzzards that are trying to interfere with what we are trying to present to You. We are not going to be wiped out, we are not discouraged, we will keep right on saying, “Here it is, Lord; we lay before You everything that we are and everything we are called to do, and to be.” In the name of the Lord, we strengthen our hands and prophesy strength to one another; we prophesy a release to one another to move ahead. Amen. Let a double portion of this prayer be applied to me and to the elders.
Let’s get the guidelines to move as a body of people in what God is doing. There is a real deep intercession coming. What is to be the outcome? I couldn’t predict it completely but we are coming into the realm of authority and of judgment. The Body is closing ranks, and there is a lot of personal heart-searching, saying, “Lord, is it I?” All of this is a good portent of great victories—and we are in them now.
Everything has its reality in the realm of spirit before we see it manifest in the natural realm. We are coming into the victory and the unity and the intercession. The Lord proclaimed a new level, and we were actually in it when the Feast of Tabernacles started. The Lord laid it out, and since that time we have continued to move into it. But we prayed, “Lord, don’t let it take a year to get us into the manifestation of it. We don’t want to say at the next Feast of Tabernacles, “Now it is all being fulfilled.” We intended to see it done and to walk in it immediately. We believed God and He has honored our faith; we are walking in it and will keep on moving.
Your need of help from the Apostle or the elders will vary; it will change. When a child is small, it is “Mama, I’m hungry.” What he eats is prescribed for him. The mother gives him the bread and puts peanut butter and honey on it. After a while he starts to get into it. “No, you can’t do it by yourself, big brother will help you.” So big brother and he mess it all up, but they get it done. As the little child grows, he knows where he can get the peanut butter by himself. Then he has to be cautioned when to get the peanut butter and when to leave it alone, when he can get in the cookie jar and when he can’t. Later, he learns how to bring in a neighborhood kid and get him some peanut butter! The scene is always changing. It isn’t that you are always dependent to get ministry, but you learn where it is, and you go and get it yourself. Then you learn to give it to others. It is all an orderly thing, and a matter of maturity and progress as we learn to help each other.
One of the worst things that can happen is when the littlest one starts screaming and yelling, “Big brother can help himself, why can’t I?” Ah, there is a big difference. Big brother knows just how to handle the sharp knife and cut off a piece of cheese, but the little baby brother can’t—he will cut off his finger. This is where we start learning to do things for each other, learning to do things because we were told, “This is what you can have.” I think more and more my role is to tell you, “Now look, I’ll open the cupboard and show you where it is; now you are to help each other feed. My role of spoon-feeding you will be less and less. We will let someone else spoon-feed the babes, but I want to open up that great big cupboard and show you goodies that you never dreamed of before! I want the Lord to make it real, and let the Holy Spirit take of all His fullness and manifest it (John 16:14). I think that this is a good illustration of where we are now in the family, as we feel the family drawing together more.
Lord, give each of us faith for our brothers and sisters. Give us faith to feed ourselves, too; not to feed ourselves junk, but to feed ourselves on a Living Word as it comes, to follow the guidelines, the present truths. When the Lord says, “This week, this is the vitamin that you need,” we take it, that week we take that vitamin. And the vitamin this week is vitamin I for intercession. We take the strength and we enter in, in the name of the Lord, and we are all taking the same thing. We open our hearts and say, “Lord, let the anointing rest upon each one of us. Let there be a faith for one another, holding up one another in faith to believe God for everything that He has set before us.”
Christ is coming forth in a many-membered Body. Take the intercession out of the realm of praying for an individual man or something on the physical plane; you are praying for the Christ that is coming forth in me as an apostle of the Kingdom. In the same manner, pray for the Christ to come forth in another as a prophet; Christ is ministering as a prophet through him. These are not human characteristics; you are not trying to perpetuate something of a fleshly nature. You are believing for the Lord to come forth and for the warfare within that temple of the Holy Spirit, where Satan is attacking that body, to be overcome. While you are doing that, you are blessing the whole Body.
If one member receives ministry, all are blessed together in it (I Corinthians 12:26). It really does work. When the battle hits one person in a certain way, a third to a half of the congregation goes through the identical thing. And when I minister to one member, people who are going through the same thing receive ministry too. Everyone receives something, because in some way, you are identified with the need that is expressed in one or two. That is why the leading of the Holy Spirit is so important; the Lord reveals that a person should be ministered to, we bring him up and the Lord gives a revelation over his need, and he becomes a symbolic illustration of what God wants to do for everyone.
You are not doing wrong to say, when you find a prophecy or a blessing over an individual, “Lord, I’ll take some of that too,” and apply it to yourself. People have asked the transcribers for a copy of someone’s prophecy, because there was a witness to their heart that they would have it too. So they start praying about it. If they appropriate it, they may walk in far more than the person over whom it was spoken. The person who received the prophecy may not regard it with such hunger and eagerness to see it work, with such faith to appropriate it, as another person who may pick it up with real faith and walk in it.
In “Silas Marner,” the old man took the little baby girl who was left at his doorstep, and years later the parents who had discarded the child wanted to take her home. He said to them, “He who turns a blessing from his door, it falls to them as take it in.” That old Yankee expression is exactly what we ought to have in our hearts today—“Lord, we take it in. Even if the other people take it, we will take it in too.”
You bless me, and you will be blessed; I bless you and I am blessed back again. The interchange in the Body becomes a fantastic revelation. We never know what it is to really love the Body and see it blessed, until we become intensely personal in our relationship with someone in the Body—to pray for them and bless them. This can lead to confusion, it can lead to problems. Intercessors can get hung up on the deep, personal nature of their interest and their burden for the one for whom they pray. But if they can handle it and let it be that intense, they can be the means of saving lives and of molding and shaping the whole course of the thing in the perfect will of the Lord. Just keep it in the way that God wants it to go. I hope I’m getting that through to you, because it is probably the only explanation that can be made for the intensity that God brings in real deep intercession.
The worship level has to be high in an intercessor, otherwise you continue to dwell on too low a spiritual level. You get so you are battling, battling, battling and you are brought down, down, down on the level. The more you worship, the higher that spiritual level is, and that is where the victory is found—in the heavenlies, seated with Christ (Ephesians 2:6). The more you worship with your intercession, the more effective you will be; the less you worship the more you will be personally battled in your intercession.
It is a responsibility. Intercession is not given as a game, nor is it some little merit badge which says, “I’m an intercessor.” Every member of the Body of Christ is to be an intercessor. There are no ministries too insignificant, or of the greatest authority, who are not intercessors. Some of the greatest intercessors are to be found among the greatest ministries. Our Lord Jesus Christ ever lives to make intercession (Hebrews 7:25). Paul continually prayed day and night for those to whom he ministered (I Thessalonians 1:2; 3:10).
Intercession is a component part of every ministry. You cannot be an elder and not be an intercessor. You cannot be a deacon or a deaconess and not be an intercessor. You cannot be a good anything—even a good janitor. Do you know why? Because spiritual warfare is involved with even sweeping the floor in the house of the Lord. If the Lord said, “I hereby commission you and give you a ministry to go down to the corner and bring back a newspaper,” you had better pray, “Lord, help me,” because there will be six dogs and a riot waiting as you go down the road! You will have to have something from God because it doesn’t happen by natural means.
When we pray for the Lord to bless a business, it is because all hell breaks loose against any Christian who tries to break in and replace mammon and the financial control that Satan has over so many things. We will see that broken only by intercession and prayer. Continually praying and believing to bless and for the will of God to be done is the way we should live, and the way we should think. Nor do we say that there are only a few intercessors. All of us are intercessors! Quickly we are to sense that and enter into it, in the name of the Lord. To be a worshiper is to be an intercessor.