Stop, Drop, and Pray

6/20/2020

Job 42:10 “And the Lord turned the captivity of Job when he prayed for his friends.”

“I cannot make myself right with God, I cannot make my life perfect; I can only be right with God if I accept the Atonement of the Lord Jesus Christ as an absolute gift.” ~ Oswald Chambers

After a time of battling in my faith-walk, I had to yield. I had to come to a place where I realized that the Atonement of Christ needed to be real in my life; I had a head knowledge, but not a heart and soul connection. In my infancy, this was all my new faith could handle, processing the magnitude of such a gift of love.  As I matured, however, I knew that more was expected of me. This is what Chambers calls entering into the “ministry of the interior”, and it is what Job did when he prayed for his friends. Intercessory prayer has become a vital part of my time with God, and blesses me in ways too profound to explain in a brief blog post.

There is always an immediacy with this kind of focused petition, whether you are praying for a new request from a friend or loved one, or praying for someone to come to that place of yielding to Jesus. There is immediacy to intercession, in all things that we come to the Father with, for prayer does not have to only happen in a certain way at a prescribed time. Chambers writes, “Wherever God puts you in circumstances, pray immediately, pray that His Atonement may be realized in other’s lives as it has been in yours. Pray for your friends, now; pray for those with whom you come in contact with now.” There is nothing more powerful than praying on behalf of another in the exact moment it is needed; to stop all you are doing to lift another up to our precious Savior.