Standing in the Gap
Conversations with God 4.0
Ezekiel 22:29-31 & Exodus 17:8-13
by Eric Stillman
October 8th, 2006

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Intro – Loving Others and Praying for Them

It’s been an interesting week – as you’ve heard in the announcements, three people are headed for serious procedures or have had procedures.  As I was visiting people in the hospital this week, it was interesting to see the power I had as clergy, that some people could only be visited by immediate family and myself.  It made me wish I really did have power, like the ability to say “Cancer, be gone!”  If there was a way to make their pain go away or heal them, we would do that.  But that sort of thing is beyond our power, and sometimes beyond the power of modern medicine. 

There are all sorts of things that are beyond our control – not only these illnesses, but other things like freedom from addiction, friends who make bad decisions, spouses with ingrained habits that can’t change.

When we get beyond our power to help, all we can do is pray.  Prayer is a natural way of loving another person.  It’s a way of asking God to do what we can not, what only He has the power to do.

We’ve talked about being authentic in prayer, about personal confession, and about identifying with the church and praying for the church instead of sitting in the critic’s chair and judging the church.  Now we get to the really hard stuff – praying for other people, what the Bible calls intercession.  Sometimes intercession means praying for someone who does not know Jesus to come to a relationship with Him.  Let’s be honest about why we exist – to see those who don’t know Jesus become fully devoted followers of Jesus – Jesus’ great commission, as it is called.  Sometimes it just means to pray for someone else who does know Jesus, that God would work in their lives in a way that humans can not.

The church is in the freedom business.  Our desire is to see God at work in our lives and in this world, setting people free from the sins and struggles that enslave them so that they might live in the freedom that comes from knowing God.  The freedom to be everything God created you to be.  That’s why this church exists.  And there’s really no way to get to that goal except through prayer, through asking God to work and letting him shape us until we are like Jesus.

My heart for this church is that this would be a house of prayer for all people, and that we would see God move in powerful ways, setting people free from all sorts of diseases, addictions, fears, and bringing them into the freedom that is found in Christ – free to love deeply, to live courageously and fearlessly, and to know how deeply you are loved.  And, of course, to bring others into that freedom.

But we can’t do that without God.  So let’s pray.