“Confess your faults one to another and pray one for another, that ye may be healed. The effectual, fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.”—James v. 16.
Let our last article touch once more the key of love wherein the article preceding that of prayer was set. To speak of the Spirit’s work in our prayers, omitting *the intercession of the saints,*betrays a lack of understanding concerning the Spirit of all grace.
Prayer for others is quite different from prayer for ourselves. The latter is indeed lawful; God even commands us “in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving to make our requests known unto God.” Yet it may contain refined egoism even tho it be followed by thanksgiving; hence to prayer is added *intercession,*that in prayer the breath of love may quench gently, yet effectually, remaining egoism, and lead us to the still holier prayer for the heavenly King and His Kingdom.
Christ prays for us, but the Bride must also pray for her heavenly Bridegroom. David’s prayer for Solomon points beyond Solomon to the Messiah: “Give the King Thy judgments, O God” (Psalm lxxii. 1). In the Twentieth and Sixty-first Psalms the same thought is expressed. However, this is not a prayer for His Person (for as such He is glorified already), but for the coming of His Kingdom, for the extending of His Name to the ends of the earth, for the gathering in of the souls of His elect.
In the Lord’s Prayer, this most holy petition stands even in the foreground; for when we pray, “Hallowed be Thy name, Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done,” (Luke xi. 2) we are inspired, not by love for self or for others, but by love for Him who is in heaven. It is true, we realize that the fulfilling of that prayer is most desirable for others and ourselves; still it is the love for God that stands here in the
foreground. It is the summary of prayereminently fitting the summary of the law: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God.” (Matt. xxii. 37) This is the first and great *commandment.*Then, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” (Matt. xxii. 39) And so in our prayer: first, for the cause of God, this is the first and great *petition;*then, prayer for the neighbor as for ourselves. Our prayeris the test of our relation to the first and great commandment.
And what is the work of the Holy Spirit in the prayer of intercession?
It is necessary here, for a clear understanding, to distinguish between a twofold intercession:(1) there is a prayer for the things that pertain to the body of Christ; and (2) another for the things that do not belong to that body, according to our impression and conception of the matter.
Prayer for kings, and for all that are in authority, does not concern the things that pertain to the body of Christ; neither does the prayer for our enemies, nor that for the place of our habitation, for country, army, and navy, for a bountiful harvest, for deliverance from pestilence, for trade and commerce, etc. All these pertain to the naturallife, and to persons, whether saints or sinners, in their relation to the life of creation, and not to the Kingdom of Grace. But our prayer does concern the body of Christ, when we pray for the coming of the Lord, for a fresh anointing of the priests of God, for their being clothed upon with salvation, for success in the work of missions, for a baptism of the Holy Spirit, for strength in conflict, for forgiveness of sin, for the salvation of our loved ones, for the effectual conversion of the baptized seed of the Church. The first intercession has reference to the realm of nature, the second to the Kingdom of Grace. Hence in each of these two we must look for the bond of fellowship from which springs our prayer of intercession.
For every prayer of intercession presupposes fellowshipwith them for whom we pray; a fellowship which casts us into the same distress, and from which we look for deliverance, and that in such a way that the sorrow of one burdens us, and the joy of another causes us to give thanks. Where such vital fellowship does not exist, nor the love which springs from it, or where these are temporarily inactive, there may be a formal intercession of words, but real intercession from the heart there can not be.
With reference to the intercession in the realm of nature, the
ground of this fellowship is naturally found in the fact that we are created *of one blood.*Humanity is one. The nations form an organic whole. It is a mighty trunk with leafy crown; the nations and peoples are the branches thereof, successive generations the boughs, and each of us is a fluttering leaf. Belonging together, living together upon the same root of our human nature, it is one flesh and one blood, which from Adam to the last-born child covers every skeleton and runs through every man’s veins. Hence the desire for universal philanthropy; the claim that nothing be alien to us that is human; the necessity of loving our enemy and of praying for him, for he also is of our flesh and of our bones.